intercourse between you must be mutually pleasing and beneficial, and I am happy to bring you acquainted.' This, addressed to the man whom he had been satirizing so unsparingly, was inconceivable! The unabashed facility with which he veered, from calumny to compliment, the very moment too after he had accused the man whom he accosted of dissimulation, struck me dumb. I had perhaps seen something like it before, but nothing half so perfect in its kind. It doubly increased my stock of knowledge; it afforded a new instance of what the world is, and a new incitement to ask how it became so? The inquiry at first was painful, and half convinced me of the truth of manicheism; but deeper research taught me that the errors of man do not originate in the perversity of his nature, but of his ignorance. These however were most of them after thoughts, for Glibly did not allow us any long pause. 'Yonder, in the green boxes,' said he, 'I perceive Mrs. Fishwife, the actress. She should have played in the comedy we are come to see, but threw up her part from scruples of conscience. It was not sufficiently refined for her exquisite sensibility; it wounded her feelings, offended her morals, and outraged her modesty. Yet in the Green-room, she is never happy unless when the men are relating some lewd tale, or repeating obscene jests; at every one of which she bursts into a horse laugh, and exclaims--'Oh, you devil! But I don't hear you! I don't understand a word you say!' To heighten the jest, her armours are as public as the ladies on Harris's List.' 'But perhaps there is something violently offensive and immoral, in the part she refused?' 'Not a syllable. The writer is too dull even for a _double entendre_, as you will hear. Mere pretence. The author, who happens by some odd accident to have more honesty than wit, and could not in conscience comply with the present vicious mode of bestowing indiscriminate praise on actors, when no small mixture of blame had been merited by many of them, forbore to write a preface to his last piece; from which she had thought herself secure of a large dose of flattery. This is an offence she can never pardon.' 'I have heard,' said Migrate, 'that our actresses are become exceedingly squeamish.' 'Oh ridiculous beyond belief. I have a letter in my pocket from a young friend in a country company, the ladies of which have their sensibility strung up to so fine a tone that he cannot take the tragedy of King Lear for his benefit, because not one of them will play either Regan or Goneril. If their feelings are so exquisite in the country, where our wise laws treat players as vagabonds, what must they be when loaded with all the legal, tragic, and royal dignity of a London theatre?' This was so incredible that I expressed my doubts of the fact; but they were ill founded, for Glibly produced the letter. A moment afterward two more of his acquaintance caught his eye.