‘The unrelenting opposition, which the productions of the author of the present comedy have experienced for several years, is well known to those who pay attention to our public amusements. It is not for him to pronounce how far this opposition has been merited by inability. Since the appearance of the Road to Ruin, his comedy of the Deserted Daughter only has escaped: and that, as he imagines, because it was not known on the first night of its performance, by whom it was written. Love’s Frailties, The Man of Ten Thousand, and Knave or Not, have sustained increasing marks of hostility: so that the efforts made to afford rational amusement to the public, emolument to the author, and improvement to morals, have been rendered feeble, and almost ineffectual. In the last instance, one mistake appears to have pervaded the majority of the spectators. It was imagined that the author himself was as unqualified a libeller of mankind as Monrose: in which character the writer’s individual sentiments were supposed to have been incorporated. Those who have read his other works cannot surely attribute to him any such indiscriminate misanthropy. The accusation that has been most generally made against him is, that he thinks men capable of gradations of virtue, which others affirm they can never attain. Persons, who have made the human mind their study, have discovered that guilty men exert the whole force of their faculties to justify their own course of action to themselves. To this principle the writer was strictly attentive in pourtraying the character of Monrose. His design was to draw a man of genius, misled by his passions, reasoning on his actions, systematising them, condemning them in principle, but justifying them in practice, and heating his imagination by contemplating the crimes of others; that he might still retain that respect for himself, of which the strongest minds, even in the last stages of vice, are so tenacious. How far that spirit of faction, commotion, and anarchy, of which the author has long been, and is still, so vehemently accused, is to be traced in the present comedy, may now be seen. Sincerely desirous of giving no offence, the passages which were most disapproved, or to speak more accurately, reprobated, on the first night, have since been omitted in representation; but they are printed between inverted commas, that the cool judgment may decide whether the author could have been so insane as actually to intend to inflame the spectators, and increase a spirit of enmity between men of different sentiments: whom could he reconcile, he would account it the most heart-consoling action of his life.