sight was there! the very fiddlers in the orchestra, ‘albeit, unused to the melting mood,’ blubbered like hungry children crying for their bread and butter; and when the bell rang for music between the acts, the tears ran from the bassoon players’ eyes in such plentiful showers, that they choked the finger stops; and making a spout of the instrument, poured in such torrents on the first fiddler’s book, that, not seeing the overture was in two sharps, the leader of the band actually played in one flat. But the sobs and sighs of the groaning audience, and the noise of corks drawn from the smelling-bottles, prevented the mistake between flats and sharps being discovered. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! forty-six went into fits! and ninety-five had strong hysterics! The world will scarcely credit the truth, when they are told, that fourteen children, five old women, one hundred tailors, and six common-councilmen, were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, the slips, and the boxes, to increase the briny pond in the pit; the water was three feet deep; and the people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position up to their ankles in tears! An Act of Parliament against her playing any more will certainly pass.” As this effusion appeared almost immediately after the famous actress’s first appearance, we are hardly wrong in considering it as half an advertisement. It must certainly have helped to draw good houses during the rest of her stay. Lovers of the gentle craft maybe interested to know that what was perhaps the earliest advertisement of Izaak Walton’s famous little book “The Compleat Angler” was published in one of Wharton’s Almanacs. It is on the back of the dedication-leaf to “Hemeroscopeion: Anni Æra Christianæ, 1654.” Hemeroscopeion was William Lilly, and the almanac appeared in 1653, the year in which Walton’s book was printed. The advertisement says:-- There is published a Booke of Eighteen-pence price, called _The Compleat Angler_, Or, _The Contemplative man’s Recreation_: being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing. Not unworthy the perusall. Sold by _Richard Marriot_ in S. _Dunstan’s_ Church-yard, _Fleetstreet_.