It was now confidently reported, that the days of Jeremy Collier had returned: that the theatres were to be shut up, his majesty's servants to receive their arrears of scarlet cloth, for regimentals to serve him in the capacity of foot-soldiers: that the slayers of Syntax, who had stuffed their mouths with melo-drames, and other pernicious compounds, were to turn hewers of wood, and that your worship would license no pantomimes, except those exhibited in the Blackfriars and Tottenham-court roads. This intelligence rather pleased than alarmed me. I believed it only to a certain extent, conceiving the fact to be, that my respected patron was sick of silk banners and Peruvian suns, exhausting more gold than they engendered, and that a ray of true taste was hereafter to dawn upon the dramatic horizon. "The theatre," exclaimed I, "is the school of morality; and morality and religion are inseparable." Without stopping to prove my syllogism, I seized my commentary, and with a head and a great-coat pocket full of my immortal labours, called once more in Portland-place. You received me with civility, desired me to take a seat, and treated me with a cup of chocolate, declining to take any yourself, on account of a nausea at your stomach, which I ascribed to a certain sentimental pill you had lately swallowed, rolled up in the shape of a comedy, and for which I undertook to prescribe. You requested me with eagerness to do so, and I drew my manuscript from my pocket, thinking the golden moment at hand. I conjured you to consider, that in dramatic entertainments the love of show was like the love of money, and increased by indulgences, beyond the power of a manager to gratify: I proved by mathematical demonstration, that small theatres wanted nothing but good dialogue to support them: I entreated you to send your gorgeous trumpery to rag-fair, and to diminish your overgrown Drury, which no man could now think of entering unaccompanied by a telescope and an ear-trumpet. All the persuasions of a Tully, all the energy of a Waithman, were enlisted into my harangue; which finished by exhorting your worship to step back half a century in your dramatic career, to a period when theatrical property was somewhat more than a mouthful of moonshine;--when Shakspeare was, indeed as he should be, and when nothing was talked of in this great metropolis, save the great Goliath of Stratford, on the banks of the Avon, and little David, of the Adelphic terrace, on the banks of the Thames.