‘Before the comedy appeared, all parties were anxious that no sentence or word should be spoken, which could be liable to misrepresentation. Some few passages, therefore, are committed to the press, which never were spoken on the stage; particularly the passage, where Monrose inquires into his qualifications for being a lord. A few years ago, this would have been common-place satire; and it is a subject of no little regret, that at present local and temporary applications are so liable to be made where none are intended.’ The jealousy which was thus manifested of sentiments, either of liberty or public virtue, was perhaps as inconsiderate as it was unjust. When the tragedy of Cato was first played, at a time when party zeal ran high, the Whigs applauded all the strong passages in the play, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories were as loud in their applause as the Whigs, to shew that the satire was unfelt. But the ‘horrors’ of the French Revolution were, it seems, to become a Medusa’s shield to screen every species of existing vice or folly from the glance even of ridicule, and to render them invulnerable and incorrigible. To stickle obstinately for the abuses to which any system is liable is tacitly to identify the system with the abuse. In the characters of Susan and Jonas in this play, Mr Holcroft has been guilty of that common vice among the authors of the present day, of trusting less to the characters themselves, than to the persons who were to act them. They are well adapted to shew the powers of acting in Mrs. Jordan, and Bannister, who might probably make them amusing or interesting; but they certainly stand in need of this foreign aid to produce such an effect.