The scene comes before one with all the vividness that many able pens have imparted to a description of its details. We see the enormous figure of Dr. Johnson leaning far out of the box nearest the stage, with a hand behind his ear, so as to lose no word spoken on the stage; and as phrase after phrase, sparkling with wit, quivering with humour and vivified with numbers of allusions to the events of the hour, is spoken, he seems to shake the theatre with his laughter. Reynolds is in the opposite corner, his ear-trumpet resting on the ledge of the box, his face smiling thoughtfully; and between these two notable figures Miss Reynolds is seated bolt upright, and looking rather frightened as the people in the pit look up now and again at the box. Baretti is in the next box with Angelica Kauffman, Dr. Burney and little Miss Fanny Burney, destined in a year or two to become for a time the most notable woman in England. On the other side of the house Lord Clare occupies a box with his charming tom-boy daughter, who is convulsed with laughter as she hears reference made in the dialogue to the trick which she once played upon the wig of her dear friend the author. General Oglethorpe, who is beside her, holds up his finger in mock reproof, and Lord Camden, standing behind his chair, looks as if he regretted having lost the opportunity of continuing his acquaintance with an author whom every one is so highly honouring at the moment. Cumberland and his friends are in a lower box, “looking glum,” as one witness asserts, though a good many years later Cumberland boasted of having contributed in so marked a way to the applause as to call forth the resentment of the pit. In the next box Hugh Kelly, whose most noted success at Drury Lane a few years previously eclipsed Goldsmith's “Good-Natured Man” at “the other house,” sits by the side of Macpherson, the rhapsodist who invented “Ossian.” He glares at Dr. Johnson, who had no hesitation in calling him an impostor.