One may go into the boxes, indeed, and criticise acting and actors with Sterne’s stop-watch, but not otherwise—“‘And between the nominative case and the verb (which, as your lordship knows, should agree together in number, person, &c.) there was a full pause of a second and two-thirds.’—‘But was the eye silent—did the look say nothing?’—‘I looked only at the stop-watch, my lord.’—‘Excellent critic!’”—If any other actor, indeed, goes to see Mr. Kean act, with a view to avoid imitation, this may be the place, or rather it is the way to run into it, for you see only his extravagances and defects, which are the most easily carried away. Mr. Mathews may translate him into an At Home even from the slips!—Distinguished actors, then, ought, I conceive, to set the example of going into the pit, were it only for their own sakes. I remember a trifling circumstance, which I worked up at the time into a confirmation of this theory of mine, engrafted on old prejudice and tradition[1]. I had got into the middle of the pit, at considerable risk of broken bones, to see Mr. Kean in one of his early parts, when I perceived two young men seated a little be-
- ↑ The trunk-maker, I grant, in the Spectator’s time, sat in the two-shilling gallery. But that was in the Spectator’s time, and not in the days of Mr. Smirke and Mr. Wyatt.
