Not that all the homage was paid to the latter. The wits loved to assemble, after the play was done, in the dressing-rooms of the leading actors with whom they most cared to cultivate an intimacy. Much company often congregated here, generally with the purpose of assigning meetings, where further enjoyment might be pursued. Then, when it was holiday with the legislature, the house was filled with parliament-men. On one of these occasions, Pepys records, "how a gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead; but with much ado, Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat, and brought him to life again." This was an incident of the year 1667. Returning to the front of the stage, we find the ladies in the boxes subjected to the audible criticisms of "the little cockerells of the pit," as Ravenscroft calls them, with whom the more daring damsels entered into a smart contest of repartees. As the "play-house" was then the refuge of all idle young people, these wit-combats were listened to with interest, from the town fops to the rustic young squires, who came to the theatre in cordivant gloves, and were quite unconscious of poisoning the affected fine ladies with the smell of them. The poets used to assert that all the wit of the pittites was stolen from the plays which they read or saw acted. It seemed the privilege of the box-loungers to have none, or to perform other services; namely, to sit all the evening by a mistress, or to blaze from "Fop's corner," or to mark the modest women, by noting those who did not use their fans through a whole play, nor turn aside their heads, nor, by blushing, discover more guilt than modesty. Thrice happy was she who found the greatest number of slaves at the door of her box, waiting obsequiously to hand or escort her to her chair. These beaux were hard to fix, so erratic were they in their habits. They ran, as Gatty pertinently has it, "from one play-house to the other play-house; and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their perriwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend, and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again." With fair and witty strangers these gay fellows, their eyebrows and perriwigs redolent of the essence of orange and jasmine, entered into conversation, till a gentleman's name, called by a door-keeper in the passage, summoned him to impatient companions, waiting for him outside; when he left the "censure" of his appearance to critical observers, like those who ridiculed the man of mode for "his gloves drawn up to his elbows and his perriwig more exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a ball."