In his Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning, Goldsmith had given offense to David Garrick, at that time the autocrat of the Drama, and was doomed to experience its effect. A clamor had been raised against Garrick for exercising a despotism over the stage, and bringing forward nothing but old plays to the exclusion of original productions. Walpole joined in this charge. "Garrick," said he, "is treating the town as it deserves and likes to be treated; with scenes, fireworks, and _his own writings_. A good new play I never expect to see more; nor have seen since the Provoked Husband, which came out when I was at school." Goldsmith, who was extremely fond of the theater, and felt the evils of this system, inveighed in his treatise against the wrongs experienced by authors at the hands of managers. "Our poet's performance," said he, "must undergo a process truly chemical before it is presented to the public. It must be tried in the manager's fire; strained through a licenser, suffer from repeated corrections, till it may be a mere _caput mortuum_ when it arrives before the public." Again. "Getting a play on even in three or four years is a privilege reserved only for the happy few who have the arts of courting the manager as well as the muse; who have adulation to please his vanity, powerful patrons to support their merit, or money to indemnify disappointment. Our Saxon ancestors had but one name for a wit and a witch. I will not dispute the propriety of uniting those characters then; but the man who under present discouragements ventures to write for the stage, whatever claim he may have to the appellation of a wit, at least has no right to be called a conjurer." But a passage which perhaps touched more sensibly than all the rest on the sensibilities of Garrick was the following. "I have no particular spleen against the fellow who sweeps the stage with the besom, or the hero who brushes it with his train. It were a matter of indifference to me whether our heroines are in keeping, or our candle snuffers burn their fingers, did not such make a great part of public care and polite conversation. Our actors assume all that state off the stage which they do on it; and, to use an expression borrowed from the green room, every one is _up_ in his part. I am sorry to say it, they seem to forget their real characters."