“Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit.  This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, and seem to invite a pelting.

“Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them that they should never write again?

“Seriously, Messieurs the Public, this outrageous way which you have got of expressing your displeasures is too much for the occasion.  When I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what crime of great moral turpitude I had committed:  for every man about me seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the strongest possible manner to stigmatize with infamy.

“The Romans, it Is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler method of marking their disapprobation of an author’s work.  They were a humane and equitable nation.  They left the furca and the patibulum, the axe and the rods, to great offenders:  for these minor and (if I may so term them) extra-moral offences the bent thumb was considered as a sufficient sign of disapprobation,—­vertere pollicem; as the pressed thumb, premere pollicem, was a mark of approving.

“And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence.  For, as the action of writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the retroversion or bending back of that joint did not unaptly point to the opposite of that action, implying that it was the will of the audience that the author should write no more: a much more significant, as well as more humane, way of expressing-that desire, than our custom of hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible.  Nor do we find that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for their applause.  On the contrary, by this method they seem to have had the author, as we should express it, completely under finger and thumb.

“The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries:  for the public never writes itself.  Not but something very like it took place at the time of the O.-P. differences.  The placards which were nightly exhibited were, properly speaking, the composition of the public.  The public wrote them, the public applauded them, and precious morceaux of wit and eloquence they were,—­except some few, of a better quality, which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers.  After this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should be a little slow in condemning what others do for it.