“I must own I am the more surprised to find this censure, in opposition to the whole town, in a paper which has hitherto been famous for the candour of its criticisms.

“I can by no means allow your melancholy correspondent, that the new epilogue is unnatural, because it is gay.  If I had a mind to be learned, I could tell him that the prologue and epilogue were real parts of the ancient tragedy; but every one knows, that on the British stage, they are distinct performances by themselves, pieces entirely detached from the play, and no way essential to it.

“The moment the play ends, Mrs. Oldfield is no more Andromache, but Mrs. Oldfield; and though the poet had left Andromache stone-dead upon the stage, as your ingenious correspondent phrases it, Mrs. Oldfield might still have spoke a merry epilogue.  We have an instance of this in a tragedy where there is not only a death, but a martyrdom.[A] St. Catherine was there personated by Nell Gwyn; she lies stone-dead upon the stage, but, upon those gentlemen’s offering to remove her body, whose business it is to carry off the slain in our English tragedies, she breaks out into that abrupt beginning of what was a very ludicrous, but at the same time thought a very good epilogue:—­

  “’Hold:  are you mad? you damn’d confounded dog! 
  I am to rise and speak the epilogue.’

[Footnote A:  “Tyrannic Love; or, the Royal Martyr.”  By Dryden.]

“This diverting manner was always practised by Mr. Dryden, who, if he was not the best writer of tragedies in his time, was allowed by every one to have the happiest turn for a prologue or an epilogue.  The epilogues to ‘Cleomenes,’ ‘Don Sebastian,’ the ‘Duke of Guise,’ ‘Aurengezebe,’ and ‘Love Triumphant,’ are all precedents of this nature.

“I might further justify this practice by that excellent epilogue which was spoken, a few years since, after the tragedy of ’Phaedra and Hippolitus;’[A] with a great many others, in which the authors have endeavoured to make the audience merry.  If they have not all succeeded so well as the writer of this, they have however shown that it was not for want of good will.

[Footnote A:  By Edmund Neal.]

“I must further observe, that the gaiety of it may be still the more proper, as it is at the end of a French play; since every one knows that nation, who are generally esteemed to have as polite a taste as any in Europe, always close their tragic entertainments with what they call a petite piece, which is purposely designed to raise mirth, and send away the audience well pleased.  The same person who has supported the chief character in the tragedy, very often plays the principal part in the petite piece; so that I have myself seen, at Paris, Orestes and Lubin acted the same night by the same man.

“Tragi-comedy, indeed, you have yourself, in a former speculation, found fault with very justly, because it breaks the tide of the passions, while they are yet flowing; but this is nothing at all to the present case, where they have already had their full course.