THIRD GENTLEMAN.  Oh friends, all’s lost!  Eurydice is damned.

    SECOND GENTLEMAN.  Ha! damned!  A few short moments past I came
    From the pit door and heard a loud applause.

    THIRD GENTLEMAN.  ’Tis true at first the pit seemed greatly pleased,
    And loud applauses through the benches rang;
    But as the plot began to open more
    (A shallow plot) the claps less frequent grew,
    Till by degrees a gentle hiss arose;
    This by a catcall from the gallery
    Was quickly seconded:  then followed claps;
    And ’twixt long claps and hisses did succeed
    A stern contention; victory being dubious. 
    So hangs the conscience, doubtful to determine
    When honesty pleads here, and there a bribe.

* * * * *

But it was mighty pleasant to behold
When the damnation of the farce was sure,
How all those friends who had begun the claps
With greatest vigour strove who first should hiss
And show disapprobation.

Surely no dramatist ever jested more over his own discomfiture.  In publishing “Eurydice” he described it as “a farce, as it was d—­d at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.”  This was a following of Ben Jonson’s example, who, publishing his “New Inn,” makes mention of it as a comedy “never acted, but most negligently played by some of the king’s servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others the king’s subjects, 1629; and now, at last, set at liberty to the readers, his majesty’s servants and subjects, to be judged of, 1631.”

There is something pathetic in the way Southerne, the veteran dramatist, in 1726, bore the condemnation of his comedy of “Money the Mistress,” at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre.  The audience hissed unmercifully.  Rich, the manager, asked the old man, as he stood in the wings, “if he heard what they were doing?” “No, sir,” said Southerne calmly, “I’m very deaf.”  On the first representation of “She Stoops to Conquer,” a solitary hiss was heard during the fifth act at the improbability of Mrs. Hardcastle, in her own garden, supposing herself forty miles off on Crackskull Common.  “What’s that?” cried Goldsmith, not a little alarmed at the sound.  “Psha! doctor,” replied Colman, “don’t be afraid of a squib when we have been sitting these two hours on a barrel of gunpowder.”  Goldsmith is said never to have forgiven Colman his ill-timed pleasantry.  The hiss seems to have been really a solitary and exceptional one.  It was ascribed by one journal to Cumberland, by another to Hugh Kelly, and by a third, in a parody on “Ossian,” to Macpherson, who was known to be hostilely inclined towards Johnson and all his friends.  The disapprobation excited by the capital scene of the bailiffs in Goldsmith’s earlier comedy, “The Good-natured Man,” had been of a more general and alarming kind, however, and was only appeased by the omission of this portion