came by degrees to take the dramatist’s place in the theatre.  “Year after year Mr. Beverley’s powers were taxed to outdo his former outdoings.  The last scene became the first in the estimation of the management.  The most complicated machinery, the most costly materials were annually put into requisition, until their bacon was so buttered it was impossible to save it.  As to me, I was positively painted out.  Nothing was considered brilliant but the last scene.  Dutch metal was in the ascendant.”  This was some years ago.  But any change that may have occurred in the situation has hardly been for the better.  The author ousted the mute; and now the author, in his turn, is overcome by the scene-painter, the machinist, and the upholsterer.

CHAPTER XXXV.

“GOOSE.”

The bird which saved the Capitol has ruined many a play.  “Goose,” “to be goosed,” “to get the big-bird,” signifies to be hissed, says the “Slang Dictionary.”  This theatrical cant term is of ancient date.  In the induction to Marston’s comedy of “What You Will,” 1607, it is asked if the poet’s resolve shall be “struck through with the blirt of a goose breath?” Shakespeare makes no mention of goose in this sense, but he refers now and then to hissing as the playgoers’ method of indicating disapproval.  “Mistress Page, remember you your cue,” says Ford’s wife in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”  “I warrant thee,” replies Mistress Page, “if I do not act it, hiss me!” In the Roman theatres it is well known that the spectators pronounced judgment upon the efforts of the gladiators and combatants of the arena by silently turning their thumbs up or down, decreeing death in the one case and life in the other.  Hissing, however, even at this time, was the usual method of condemning the public speaker of distasteful opinions.  In one of Cicero’s letters there is record of the orator Hortensius, “who attained old age without once incurring the disgrace of being hissed.”  The prologues of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher frequently deprecate the hissing of the audience.

But theatrical censure, not content with imitating the goose, condescended to borrow from another of the inferior animals—­the cat.  Addison devoted one of his papers in “The Spectator” to a Dissertation upon Catcalls.  In order to make himself master of his subject, he professed to have purchased one of these instruments, though not without great difficulty, “being informed at two or three toy-shops that the players had lately bought them all up.”  He found that antiquaries were much divided in opinion as to the origin of the catcall.  A fellow of the Royal Society had concluded, from the simplicity of its make and the uniformity of its sound, that it was older than any of the inventions of Jubal.  “He observes very well that musical instruments took their first rise from the notes of birds and other melodious animals, ‘and what,’ says he, ’was more natural than for the first