The mode however still held on at the theatre. The latter was never more licentious than now, and the ladies never so much loved to resort thither. Our great grandmothers however, when young, were extremely modest: many of them were afraid of venturing to a new play till their lovers assured them they might do so without offence to their exquisite delicacy. The bolder spirits, still modest but impatient, went in masks,—not unwilling to listen to savoury uncleanness, but so modest that they could not bear any one to see that they did _not_ blush at it. “Such incidents as these,” says the ‘Spectator,’ “make some ladies wholly absent themselves from the playhouse; and others never miss the first night of a new play, lest it should prove too luscious to admit of their going with any countenance to the second;”—a most exquisite reason. It was good enough however to authorize vizards; and the theatre became something like what Nat Lee in his ‘Nero’ describes Mount Ida to have been,— “Where the gods meet and dance in masquerade!” But Mount Ida had something divine about it, which our stage in the days of vizards certainly had not. As Joe Haines said to his masked audience, in the concluding lines of the prologue to the very play just named— “All tragedies, egad! to me sound oddly; I can no more be serious than you godly.” The fashion, after it had been indifferently well worn by the ladies, of course fell to their maids, and Abigail wore the vizard which Lady Betty dropped. In Malcolm’s ‘London’ (eighteenth century) a writer is quoted, whose communication shows whither the masks had fallen in 1731. It is in a letter on “Boxing Day,” and in it occurs the following passage:—“My friend next carried me to the upper end of Piccadilly, where, one pair of stairs over a stable, we found near a hundred people of both sexes (_some masked_, others not), a great part of which were dancing to the music of two sorry fiddles. It is impossible to describe this medley of mortals fully; however, I will do it as well as I can. There were footmen, servant-maids, butchers, apprentices, oyster and orange women, and sharpers, which appeared to be the best of the company. This horrid place seemed to be a complete nursery for the gallows. My friend informed me it was called ‘a threepenny hop;’ and while we were talking, to my great satisfaction, by order of the Westminster justices, _to their immortal honour_, entered the constables and their assistants, who carried off all the company that was left; and had not our friend been known to them, we might have paid dear for our curiosity.”