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reported that it is a dumb man who has chosen this way of uttering himself when he is transported with anything he sees or hears. Others will have it to be the play-house thunderer that exerts himself after this manner in the upper gallery when he has nothing to do upon the roof. But having made it my business to get the best information I could in a matter of this moment, I find that the trunk-maker, as he is commonly called, is a large black man, whom nobody knows. He generally leans forward on a huge oaken plant 2 with great attention to everything that passes on the stage. He is never seen to smile; but upon hearing anything that pleases him, he takes up his staff with both hands, and lays it upon the next piece of timber that stands in the way with exceeding vehemence. After which, he composes himself in his former posture, till such time as something new sets him at work."

9. The Pit.

The lower gallery held the plain and substantial citizens, and the pit the barristers, law students and young merchants of note on the Exchange. Well toward the front were the selfappointed critics, like the Templar, who were versed in plays, and whose judgment often determined the fate of a new venture. Fashionable lords and ladies, more conscious of their brilliant costumes than of the performance, hired chairs from the players and sat 1 Dark complexioned.

2 Cudgel.

3 See pages 56-57 in this volume.

on the stage. Not to be outdone in splendor, the players, whatever the performance, dressed in the latest fashions. Cato would wear a wig, and an ancient British maiden a modern head-dress. Fops in the audience, afraid they were not getting attention enough by their ogling and finery, picked quarrels and drew their swords. Sydney, in his England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, describes one such affray. "One evening, in 1720, while the celebrated actress, Mrs. Oldfield, was captivating an audience with her impersonation of the Scornful Lady, Beau Robert Fielding . . . insulted a barrister named Fulwood by pushing rudely against him. Fulwood loudly expostulating, the beau clapped his hand upon his sword. Fulwood drew his, and ran it into the body of his antagonist, who walked off exhibiting his bleeding wound to the audience in order to excite the pity of the fair sex. Greatly to his chagrin, the ladies laughed loudly at his misfortune.

10. Differences of Opinion.

The audience did not hesitate to make their opinions of the performance known, and on two important issues were apt to break up into distinct factions.

One

issue was politics. The popularity of the playwright, like that of the author and the clergyman, depended not a little on whether he was a Whig or Tory. The other issue was one of art and morals. Comedies written in the fashion which had prevailed before the days of the Spectator were scandalously immoral. A new school of playwrights, among them the authors

of that journal, was just coming into vogue. It was their purpose to clear the stage of immorality. Not all men of leisure were beaus. Many of them gave their time freely to the serious business of the state, to the encouragement of art, philosophy, science, and letters, or with more modest aims raised the tone of the society they were in by conducting themselves as honest English gentlemen. These men were ready to welcome clean and honest work. Unfortunately, the new school was not satisfied with trying to be pure in morals; it was stiff and pedantic, and wrote, not naturally, but according to arbitrary rules. The Distrest Mother,1 which Sir Roger de Coverley is made to puff, was a play of the new school. The editors of the Spectator were determined to make the author popular; his enemies coined from his name, Ambrose Phillips, the epithet namby-pamby.

11. The Coffee House.

"If you would know our manner of living," writes a man of the period,

"'tis

thus: We rise by nine, and those that frequent great men's levees find entertainment at them till eleven, or, as in Holland, go to tea-tables; about twelve the beau monde assembles in coffee or chocolate houses. If it

1 See pages 213-217, in this volume. When the play opens, Andromache, the widow of Hector, is a captive of the Greeks. To save her son Astyanax from death, she finds she must consent to marry her captor Pyrrhus. Immediately after the ceremony, Pyrrhus is slain at the instigation of Hermione, to whom he had long been betrothed. The assassin is a lover of Hermione, by name Orestes.

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be fine, we take a turn in the Park till two, when we go to dinner. It was to these coffee or chocolate houses that a stranger would turn if he wished to find out what the men of London were interested in and thoughtful about. They were the places of rendezvous for the wits, the gallants, the politicians, the poets, the merchants, the essayists of the age. The highwayman that, well-masked, had robbed you the night before as you rode into London might brush against you as you laid your penny of admission down at the bar. The great Dr. Swift, the satirist of the town, might be stalking up and down, grim and silent, between the tables. Many a poor scribbler for the booksellers, who slept all night in a garret, picked out some coffee-house as his regular place of address, and made all his appointments and received his few letters there. It was the place to see the latest fashion of the fop, to hear the brilliant conversation of men of letters, and to learn the latest news of the English armies against the French. "I first of all called in at St. James's," says one of the writers of the Spectator, "where I found the whole outward room in a buzz of politics. The speculations were but very indifferent towards the door, but grew finer as you advanced to the upper end of the room, and were so very much improved by a knot of theorists, who sat in the inner room, within the steams of the coffee-pot, that I there heard the whole Spanish monarchy disposed of, and all the line of Bourbon provided for in less than a quarter of an hour."

12. Special .CoffeeHouses.

Of the two thousand coffee-houses in London at this time, the Sir Roger de Coverley papers refer to seven. The oldest coffee-house in town was the Grecian, the resort of the Learned Club. At Will's, situated over a retail shop near Covent Garden and the theatres, the wits and the poets had congregated for many years. The great poet Dryden had gathered all his disciples there; but one of the editors of the Spectator, Joseph Addison, had set up a new literary circle at Button's, and Will's was losing some of its old reputation. It was card-playing, not wit, which was now its chief attraction. Child's, in St. Paul's churchyard, was frequented by ecclesiastics and other professional men, Jonathan's by stockjobbers, Squire's by lawyers and law students, the coffee-house in the Tilt Yard by "military and mock-military fellows who manfully pulled the noses of quiet citizens who wore not swords," the Chocolate House, also known as the Cocoa Tree, by the Tories, and St. James by the Whigs. There is a tale of this last coffee-house worth quoting because it concerns the chief editor of the Spectator, Sir Richard Steele. "Lord Forbes," says the narrator, "happened to be in company with two military gentlemen . . . in St. James's CoffeeHouse, when two or three well-dressed men, all unknown to his lordship or to his company, came into the room, and in a public, outrageous manner abused Captain Steele as the author of the Tatler.1 One of 1 A tri-weekly journal which preceded the Spectator.

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