Your bucks of the pit are miracles of learning,
    Who point out faults to show their own discerning;
    And critic-like bestriding martyred sense,
    Proclaim their genius and vast consequence.

There were now critics by profession, who duly printed and published their criticisms.  The awful Churchill’s favourite seat was in the front row of the pit, next the orchestra.  “In this place he thought he could best discern the real workings of the passions in the actors, or what they substituted instead of them,” says poor Tom Davies, whose dread of the critic was extreme.  “During the run of ‘Cymbeline,’” he wrote apologetically to Garrick, his manager, “I had the misfortune to disconcert you in one scene, for which I did immediately beg your pardon; and did attribute it to my accidentally seeing Mr. Churchill in the pit; with great truth, it rendered me confused and unmindful of my business.”  Garrick had himself felt oppressed by the gloomy presence of Churchill, and learnt to read discontent in the critic’s lowering brows.  “My love to Churchill,” he writes to Colman; “his being sick of Richard was perceived about the house.”

That Churchill was a critic of formidable aspect, the portrait he limned of himself in his “Independence” amply demonstrates: 

    Vast were his bones, his muscles twisted strong,
    His face was short, but broader than ’twas long;
    His features though by nature they were large,
    Contentment had contrived to overcharge
    And bury meaning, save that we might spy
    Sense low’ring on the pent-house of his eye;
    His arms were two twin oaks, his legs so stout
    That they might bear a mansion-house about;
    Nor were they—­look but at his body there—­
    Designed by fate a much less weight to bear. 
    O’er a brown cassock which had once been black,
    Which hung in tatters on his brawny back,
    A sight most strange and awkward to behold,
    He threw a covering of blue and gold. &c. &c.

This was not the kind of man to be contemptuously regarded or indiscreetly attacked.  Foote ventured to designate him “the clumsy curate of Clapham,” but prudently suppressed a more elaborate lampoon he had prepared.  Murphy launched an ode more vehement than decent in its terms.  Churchill good-humouredly acknowledged the justice of the satire; he had said, perhaps, all he cared to say to the detriment of Murphy, and was content with this proof that his shafts had reached their mark.  Murphy confirms Davies’s account of Churchill’s seat in the theatre: 

    No more your bard shall sit
    In foremost row before the astonished pit,
    And grin dislike, and kiss the spike,
    And twist his mouth and roll his head awry,
    The arch-absurd quick glancing from his eye.