Betterton cared little if his audience was select, provided it also was judicious; Booth, however, loved a full house, though he could play his best to a solitary, but competent, individual in the pit. He confessed that he considered profit after fame, and thought that large audiences tended to the increase of both. The intercourse between audience and actor was, in his time, more intimate and familiar than it is now. Thus we see Booth entering a coffee-house in Bow Street, one morning after he had played Varanes, on the preceding night. The gentlemen present, all playgoers, as naturally as they were coffee-house frequenters, cluster round him, and acknowledge the pleasure they had enjoyed in witnessing him act. These pleasant morning critics only venture to blame him for allowing such unmeaning stuff as the pantomime of "Perseus and Andromeda" to follow the classical tragedy and mar its impression. But the ballet-pantomime draws great houses, and is therefore a less indignity in Booth's eye, than half empty benches. It was not the business of managers, he said, to be wise to empty boxes. "There were many more spectators," he said, "than men of taste and judgment; and if by the artifice of a pantomime they could entice a greater number to partake of a good play than could be drawn without it, he could not see any great harm in it; and that, as those pieces were performed after the play, they were no interruption to it." In short, he held pantomimes to be rank nonsense, which might be rendered useful, after the fashion of his explanation.