Mr. Isaac Bickerstaffe has laid it down as a rule that it is the duty of every person in a theatrical audience to show his "attention, understanding, and virtue." To the insuperable difficulty of the task may, perhaps, be attributed the carelessness of audiences on this point. How is a man, for instance, to demonstrate his virtue in the public assembly? Steele answers the query--by showing a regard for it when exhibited on the stage. "I would undertake," he says, "to find out all the persons of sense and breeding by the effect of a single sentence, and to distinguish a gentleman as much by his laugh as his bow. When we see the footman and his lord diverted by the same jest, it very much turns to the diminution of the one or the honour of the other. But," he adds, "though a man's quality may appear in his understanding and taste, the regard to virtue ought to be the same in all ranks and conditions of men, however they make a profession of it under the names of honour, religion, or morality." Steele was gratified by an audience who sympathised with the distress of an honest but unlucky pair of lovers. He thinks that the Roman audience which broke into an ecstasy of applause at the abnegation of self displayed in the friendship of Pylades and Orestes, showed qualities which justly made of the Roman people the leaders of mankind. As if appreciation of the semblance of good were the same thing as the exercise of it. The same people applauded as lustily when they saw the life-blood spilt of the vanquished gladiator. Again, he discovers a surpassing excellence in an Athenian audience,--famed of old for applauding the virtues which the Lacedemonians practised. That audience was roused to the utmost fury by the speech of a man who professed to value wealth far above good name, family, or natural affection. The uproar was so great that the author was compelled to come forward and ask the forbearance of the house till the last act of the piece, in which he promised that this wretched fellow would be brought to condign punishment. Mr. Bickerstaffe very much questions whether modern audiences would be moved to such a laudable horror. It would be very undesirable that they should: or that a person should swing out of the house in disgust, as Socrates did when he attended the first representation of a tragedy by his friend Euripides,--and was excited to anger by a remark of Hippolitus, to the effect that he had "taken an oath with his tongue but not with his heart." The maxim was indefensible, but the action of the play required it; and Socrates had been truer to his friend had he remained till the _dénouement_, and not have hurried away while that friend's play was being applauded.