“Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those which met with it.  I am willing to put, a favorable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case;—­only ’our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense’; that was all.

“But against the manner in which the public on these occasions think fit to deliver their disapprobation I must and ever will protest.

“Sir, imagine—­but you have been present at the damning of a piece,—­those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine—­a vast theatre, like that which Drury Lane was, before it was a heap of dust and ashes, (I insult not over its fallen greatness; let it recover itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it; hic coestus artemque repono,)—­a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting sounds,—­shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling-mills, or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which Saint Anthony listened to in the wilderness.

“Oh, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to convey a favor, or to grant a suit,—­that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a Siren Catalani charms and captivates us,—­that the musical, expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and irrational, venomous snakes?

“I never shall forget the sounds on my night; I never before that time fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the ’Paradise Lost’ meets with from the critics in the pit, at the final close of his Tragedy upon the Human Race,—­though that, alas! met with too much success:—­

         “’from innumerable tongues,
  A dismal universal hiss, the sound
  Of public scorn.  Dreadful was the din
  Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
  With complicated monsters, head and tail,
  Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
  Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
  And Dipsas.’

“For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes place at what is called the damnation of a piece,—­and properly so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered.  After this none can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

“But, Sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial mistake of a poor author who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets,—­for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that,—­it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice far too severe for the offence.  A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobration.