am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and shew, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupidest slave worships the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior, and excite the servility of the dependant: whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would probably end in mortification on both sides!—There is little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble’s shout—if he loses that, and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.—But enough of this. ‘I like it,’ says Miss Branghton[49] in Evelina (meaning the Opera) ‘because it is not vulgar.’ That is, she likes it, not because there is any thing to like in it, but because other people are prevented from liking or knowing any thing about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq. laugheth to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic criticisms in the London, for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics. He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler’s Wells (‘a place he has heard of’—O Lord, Sir!)—because I notice the Miss Dennets, ‘great favourites with the Whitechapel orders’—praise Miss Valancy, ‘a bouncing Columbine at Ashley’s and them there places, as his barber informs him,’ (has he no way of establishing himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber’s bad English?)—and finally, because I recognise the existence of the Cobourg and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries ‘Faugh’ with great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a well-bred critic. _C’est beau ça._ Now this appears to me a very crude, unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale and vulgar way of thinking. It is prejudging things in the lump, by names and places and classes, instead of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority. It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the world else. To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense,