The play was called the _Day of Dupes_; and wise men in the boxes were not exempt from the general fate. All were dupes together. For the authoress was a wise woman, and jingled the five hundred guineas in a purse, and kept all her own clever observation of life and manners to be used on some other occasion, and took the same view and no other of English customs and character that Reynolds, and Morton, and O'Keefe, and Colman, had done before her. So her heroes and heroines flew about the stage, and talked funny things, and swore a little, and conversed in a provincial dialect called slang, and behaved exactly as Dashall, and Miss Dazzle, and Lord Sparkle had behaved before. Oh! was not this a triumph to the great authors of former days, and did it not prove that wise men in the boxes are foolish men when judging of the stage? It did, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! but a greater triumph was at hand. The manager having read and studied the preface by the female Inchbald, which I have translated for your instruction, and having given a small sum--so they consider five hundred guineas in this land of ingots--to a reputed wit, thought he would gain much silver if he obtained a drama from a reputed blockhead. And he was right in his calculation; for he applied to an author who had written farces in five acts, where various impossible things were done, and persons talked in great jokes invented long ago by a nobleman of the name of Miller, and behaved like the clown in a pantomime, without the advantage of being dressed in his parti-coloured garments; and in a short time this author furnished the manager with a comedy called _Old Heads and Young Hearts_. Oh! he knew so much of life, this famous author; he would show what the real state of society was; and, said I to myself, I will go and judge for myself. I will see whether the books I have been studying are filled with lies. I will see how gentlemen speak, and how ladies look and act. Oho! I will put Reynolds and Morton to the proof. I will put on my European dress. I will ask the way to the theatre. I will sit in the pit. So shall I be able to send to Cho-Ling-Kyang, and to the venerated Chang-Feu, an account from my personal experience of English fashionable life. And so the first person I saw on the stage was a young gentleman greatly in debt, a studier of the law, who lives in a building called the Temple, in a room meagrely furnished, and talks about his intimacy with duchesses, exactly as Dashall and Tangent had done before. Oh! said I, this is complete proof that the great Reynolds and great Morton drew from life, and also the great author of this beautiful play. His name, not the author's name, but the young gentleman's name, is Littleton Coke, after two sages of the law called Coke and Littleton; but he makes no money by his profession, and has found all his great friends desert him when he made application to them for a loan. Their names are Lord St James and Mister Deuceace. His brother also