The Burkes, Edmund and Richard, are in a box with Mrs. Horneck and her younger daughter, who follows breathlessly the words with which she has for long been familiar, and at every shout of laughter that comes from the pit she is moved almost to tears. She is quite unaware of the fact that Colonel Gwyn, sitting alone in another part of the house, has his eyes fixed upon her--earnestly, affectionately. Her brother and his _fiancée_ are in a box with the Bunburys; and in the most important box in the house Mrs. Thrale sits well forward, so that all eyes may be gratified by beholding her. It does not so much matter about her husband, who once thought that the fact of his being the proprietor of a concern whose operations represented the potentialities of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice entitled him to play upon the mother of the Gunnings when she first came to London the most contemptible hoax ever recorded to the eternal discredit of a man. The Duchess of Argyll, mindful of that trick which the cleverness of her mother turned to so good account, does not condescend to notice from her box, where she sits with Lady Betty Hamilton, either the brewer or his pushing wife, though she is acquainted with old General Paoli, whom the latter is patronising between the acts. What a play! What spectators! We listen to the one year by year with the same delight that it brought to those who heard it this night for the first time; and we look with delight at the faces of the notable spectators which the brush of the little man with the ear-trumpet in Johnson's box has made immortal. Those two men in that box were the means of conferring immortality upon their century. Incomparable Johnson, who chose Boswell to be his biographer! Incomparable Reynolds, who, on innumerable canvases, handed down to the next century all the grace and distinction of his own! And all this time Oliver Goldsmith is pacing with bent head and hands nervously clasped behind him, backward and forward, the broad walk in St. James's Park. Steevens came upon him there after spending nearly two hours searching for him. “Don't speak, man, for God's sake,” cried Oliver. “'Tis not so dark but that I can see disaster imprinted on your face. You come to tell me that the comedy is ended--that the curtain was obliged to be rung down in the middle of an act. You come to tell me that my comedy of life is ended.” “Not I,” said Steevens. “I have not been at the playhouse yet. Why, man, what can be the matter with you? Why did you leave us in the lurch at the coffee house?” “I don't know what you speak of,” said Goldsmith. “But I beg of you to hasten to the playhouse and carry me the news of the play--don't fear to tell me the worst; I have been in the world of letters for nearly twenty years; I am not easily dismayed.”