whosoever’s property it may be....  I must own I cannot easily agree to the laying of a tax upon wit; but by this bill it is to be heavily taxed—­it is to be excised; for if this bill passes, it cannot be retailed in a proper way without a permit; and the Lord Chamberlain is to have the honour of being chief gauger, supervisor, commissioner, judge and jury.”  At this time, however, it is to be noted that parliamentary reporting was forbidden by both Houses.  The general public, therefore, knew little of Lord Chesterfield’s eloquent defence of the liberty of the stage.

The Act was passed in June, when the patent theatres, according to custom, were closed for the summer.  Some two months after their reopening in the autumn all dramatic representations were suspended for six weeks, in consequence of the death of Queen Caroline.  In January was presented at Covent Garden “A Nest of Plays,” as the author, one Hildebrand Jacob, described his production:  a combination of three short plays, each consisting of one act only, entitled respectively, “The Prodigal Reformed,” “Happy Constancy,” and “The Trial of Conjugal Love.”  The performance met with a very unfavourable reception.  The author attributed the ill success of his work to its being the first play licensed by the authority of the Lord Chamberlain under the new bill, many spectators having predetermined to silence, under any circumstances, “the first fruits of that Act of Parliament.”  And this seems, indeed, to have been the case.  The Abbe Le Blanc, who was present on the occasion, writes:  “The best play in the world would not have succeeded that night.  There was a disposition to damn whatever might appear.  The farce in question was damned, indeed, without the least compassion.  Nor was that all, for the actors were driven off the stage, and happy was it for the author that he did not fall into the hands of this furious assembly.”  And the Abbe proceeds to explain that the originators of this disturbance were not “schoolboys, apprentices, clerks, or mechanics,” but lawyers, “a body of gentlemen perhaps less honoured, but certainly more feared here than they are in France,” who, “from living in colleges (Inns of Court), and from conversing always with one another, mutually preserve a spirit of independency through the body, and with great ease form cabals....  At Paris the cabals of the pit are only among young fellows, whose years may excuse their folly, or persons of the meanest education and stamp; here they are the fruit of deliberation in a very grave body of people, who are not less formidable to the minister in place than to the theatrical writers.”  But the Abbe relates that on a subsequent occasion, when another new play having been announced, he had looked for further disturbance, the judicious dramatist of the night succeeded in calming the pit by administering in his prologue a double dose of incense to their vanity.  “Half-an-hour before the play was to begin the spectators gave notice of their dispositions