and not a modified version thereof, trimmed, altered, written up and cut down to suit the views of individual actors and actresses engaged in representing it. If he was incompetent to the task of writing a good practical play—and the events of the evening pointed to that conclusion—the manager's obvious course was to apply to a more skilful author, not to take upon himself, or to entrust to a deputy, the privilege of making alterations which, in the author's opinion, placed his work before the audience in a distorted light.
There was but one other point on which he would address the jury, and he would then conclude. Immemorial custom had conferred upon individual members of a theatrical audience the privilege of expressing their disapproval of the entertainment by hissing. He had no desire whatever to abolish this privilege: judiciously and impartially used it was a valuable privilege, and undoubtedly had the effect of making authors and actors particularly careful not to abuse the toleration which an English audience was accustomed to extend towards those who attempted to entertain them. But he submitted that, except in the case of an outrage on decency, this privilege should be exercised at the end of the performance, and not in the course of it. In the first place, it was only reasonable to ask that a jury—and an audience was in every practical sense a jury—should hear a case to the end before deciding on it. It might easily happen that a tedious scene in a first Act might be justified by particularly ingenious and interesting situations arising out of it in the third; in point of fact, one of the witnesses had admitted that he hissed a
