The pit presented a more various spectacle. There were the critics armed cap-a-pee from Aristotle and Bossu; these men dined at twelve, dictated at a coffee-house till four, then called to the boy to brush their shoes, and strode to the theatre, where, till the curtain rose, they sat hushed in grim repose, and expecting their evening prey. There were the templars, spruce, pert, and loquacious; and here and there a sober citizen, doffing his steeple-crowned hat, and hiding his little band under the folds of his huge puritanic cloke, while his eyes, declined with an expression half leering, half ejaculatory, towards a masked female, muffled in a hood and scarf, testified what had seduced him into these “tents of Kedar.” There were females, too, but all in vizard masks, which, though worn as well as aunt Dinah’s in Tristram Shandy, served to conceal them from the “young bubbles” they were in quest of, and from all but the orange-women, who hailed them loudly as they passed the doors(5). In the galleries were the happy souls who waited for the fulfilment of Dryden’s promise in one of his prologues(6); no matter to them whether it were the ghost of Almanzor’s mother in her dripping shroud, or that of Laius, who, according to the stage directions, rises in his chariot, armed with the ghosts of his three murdered attendants behind him;--a joke that did not escape l’Abbe le Blanc(7), in his recipe for writing an English tragedy. Some, indeed, from time to time called out for the “burning of the Pope;” but though “Space was obedient to the boundless piece, Which oped in Mexico and closed in Greece,” it was not always possible to indulge them in this laudable amusement, as the scene of the popular plays was generally laid in Africa or Spain; Sir Robert Howard, Elkanah Settle, and John Dryden, all agreeing in their choice of Spanish and Moorish subjects for their principal plays. Among this joyous groupe were seated several women of fashion masked, enjoying in secrecy the licentiousness which they dared not openly patronise, and verifying Gay’s characteristic description, though it was written many years later, “Mobbed in the gallery Laura sits secure, And laughs at jests that turn the box demure.” Stanton gazed on all this with the look of one who “could not be moved to smile at any thing.” He turned to the stage, the play was Alexander, then acted as written by Lee, and the principal character was performed by Hart, whose god-like ardour in making love, is said almost to have compelled the audience to believe that they beheld the “son of Ammon.” (5) Vide Southern’s Oroonoko,--I mean the comic part. (6) “A charm, a song, a murder, and a ghost.” _Prologue to Œdipus._ (7) Vide Le Blanc’s Letters.