{5} The Letter on Itinerant Players will to some appear too harshly written, their profligacy exaggerated, and their distresses magnified; but though the respectability of a part of these people may give us a more favourable view of the whole body; though some actors be sober, and some managers prudent; still there is vice and misery left more than sufficient to justify my description. But, if I could find only one woman who (passing forty years on many stages and sustaining many principal characters) laments in her unrespected old age, that there was no workhouse to which she could legally sue for admission; if I could produce only one female, seduced upon the boards, and starved in her lodging, compelled by her poverty to sing, and by her sufferings to weep, without any prospect but misery, or any consolation but death; if I could exhibit only one youth who sought refuge from parental authority in the licentious freedom of a wandering company; yet, with three such examples, I should feel myself justified in the account I have given: --but such characters and sufferings are common, and there are few of these societies which could not show members of this description. To some, indeed, the life has its satisfactions: they never expected to be free from labour, and their present kind they think is light: they have no delicate ideas of shame, and therefore duns and hisses give them no other pain than what arises from the fear of not being trusted, joined with the apprehension that they may have nothing to subsist upon except their credit. {6} For the Alms-house itself, its Governors, and Inhabitants, I have not much to offer in favour of the subject or of the character. One of these, Sir Denys Brand, may be considered as too highly placed for an author, who seldom ventures above middle life, to delineate; and, indeed, I had some idea of reserving him for another occasion, where he might have appeared with those in his own rank: but then it is most uncertain whether he would ever appear, and he has been so many years prepared for the public, whenever opportunity might offer that I have at length given him place, and though with his inferiors, yet as a ruler over them. {7} Benbow may be thought too low and despicable to be admitted here; but he is a borough-character, and however disgusting in some respects a picture may be, it will please some, and be tolerated by many, if it can boast that one merit of being a faithful likeness. {8} The characters of the Hospital Directors were written many years since and, so far as I was capable of judging, are drawn with fidelity. I mention this circumstance that, if any reader should find a difference in the versification or expression, he will be thus enabled to account for it.