Is it for these ye rear this proud abode? Is it for these your superstition seeks To build a temple worthy of a god, To laud a monkey, or to worship leeks? Then be the stage, to recompense your freaks, A motley chaos, jumbling age and ranks, Where Punch, the lignum vitæ Roscius, squeaks, And Wisdom weeps, and Folly plays his pranks, And moody Madness laughs, and hugs the chain he clanks. _To the Secretary of the Managing Committee of Drury Lane Playhouse._ SIR, To the gewgaw fetters of rhyme (invented by the monks to enslave the people) I have a rooted objection. I have therefore written an address for your theatre in plain, homespun, yeoman's prose; in the doing whereof I hope I am swayed by nothing but an independent wish to open the eyes of this gulled people, to prevent a repetition of the dramatic bamboozling they have hitherto laboured under. If you like what I have done, and mean to make use of it, I don't want any such aristocratic reward as a piece of plate with two griffins sprawling upon it, or a dog and a jackass fighting for a ha'p'worth of gilt gingerbread, or any such Bartholomew Fair nonsense. All I ask is, that the door-keepers of your playhouse may take all the sets of my Register, now on hand, and force everybody who enters your door to buy one, giving afterwards a debtor and creditor account of what they have received, post-paid, and in due course remitting me the money and unsold Registers, carriage-paid. I am, &c., W. C. IN THE CHARACTER OF A HAMPSHIRE FARMER. Rabidâ qui concitus irâ Implevit pariter ternis latratibus auras Et sparsit virides spumis albentibus agros.--OVID. MOST THINKING PEOPLE,