"Fitz," he writes on November 25, 1840, "has forwarded this to me that I may direct it properly, and as it is not sealed I have made free with the contents. The meaning of the writing on the wall had hitherto escaped me, I confess, but the effect of my head in the Pit has often occurred to me as something unseemly, like Scriptures out of Church; inasmuch as when I am by myself I always choose a place where I can wear my hat. I have sometimes thought of getting a wig to wear in such places of vain resort. But to say the truth, a bad play will often afford more rational entertainment for two or three hours than an average dinner party, provided a man goes to it with an understanding that such a thing can be neither better nor worse than a shadow, and with an imagination to amend it. It is strange enough, for your best modern plays and your modern acting of the best plays (except in a very few instances) are so wretched that one should think they could only bore and disgust one--meagre, vapid, false and vulgar in the highest degree. One only wonders that so many human heads and hearts can consent to sit it out, and be amused and refreshed by it. I believe it is this very problem which gives the theory an interest to me, for certainly the spectators are to me an integral part of the spectacle (do I use 'integral' right? I could never properly understand the calculus), and the most entertaining part of the action is the action of the play upon the audience. You not only see the mirror held up to Nature, but you see Nature looking at her image in it, which presents her in still another aspect. Of the nature of the multitude, their ways of thinking and feeling certainly, and partly too of their ways of acting, much may be learned in the pit of a theatre. From the effect of Bulwer's plays upon the play-going public one might have inferred the effect of his novels upon the reading public, almost as surely as you might have inferred the effect of his plays from observing the style of acting which is most popular. But besides my pleasure in contemplating the nature of the fool multitude, I am curious about the laws of art, and I observe, in that as in other things, that specimens of the want of the thing are as instructive as the specimen of the thing itself. I never understood Shakespeare's idea of Julius Caesar till I once saw George Bennett enact him; and I think I gained more light as to the meaning of many parts of Falstaff in the _Merry Wives_ from the grossest and, I think, worst piece of acting I ever saw (by Bartley) than I have gained as to _Benedick_ from C. Kemble, or _Hamlet_ from Macready. Altogether, I find that the clumsy, tawdry, motley pageant, with its little good and much bad, its touches of nature here and there, and its scene after scene of