On the taste of English audiences generally, Dryden remarks, in his _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_, that, "as we who are a more sullen people come to be diverted at our plays, so the French, who are of an airy and gay temper, come hither to make themselves more serious. And this I conceive to be why comedies are more pleasing to us and tragedies to them." This appears to me as false as his assertion that rhymed plays were in their nature and fashion peculiarly English! A few years later the "polite taste" of audiences was censured freely by Edmund Curll, who was very irate that "nothing would go down but ballad-opera and Mr. Lun's buffoonery;" but this taste was attributed by him to an imperfect education. "As for breeding," that delicate gentleman remarks, "our brewers are now arrived at such a height of _finesse_ and _elegance_, that their children are sent into France for education. But for this, as a lord mayor himself said, there ought to be some grains of allowance." Cibber relates an incident illustrative of the ferocity of enamoured and rejected beaux among the audience. One of these, in the year 1717, had incurred the strongly-expressed contempt of a young actress, whom Colley does not further designate, for some insulting language addressed to her as she was seated in a box. This fellow took his revenge by outraging the lady, on the stage, and, when she appeared, he interrupted her performance "with such loud and various notes of mockery, as other young Men of honour in the same place have sometimes made themselves undauntedly merry with." This disappointed beau, however, went further, and threw at the lady "such trash as no person can be supposed to carry about him, unless to use on so particular an occasion." A champion of the insulted actress called her assailant "a fool, or a bully," whereupon the latter challenged him to Hyde Park, and proved himself craven to boot, by asking for his life. "Whether he mended it or not," says Cibber, "I have not yet heard; but his antagonist, a few years after, died in one of the principal posts of the Government." The critics were not more tender to a new play, particularly when provoked by sarcasms against their judgment in the prologue, than the above offender was to a well-conducted actress. "They come to a new play," Cibber tells us, "like hounds to a carcase, and are all in a full cry, sometimes for an hour together, before the curtain rises to throw it amongst them. Sure, those gentlemen cannot but allow that a play, condemned after a fair hearing, falls with thrice the ignominy, as when it is refused that common justice." This was a new race of critics, unknown to earlier times, and their savageness had the effect of deterring gentlemen from writing plays. "They seem to me," says Colley, "like the lion whelps in the Tower, who are so boisterously gamesome at their meals that they dash down the bowls of milk brought for their own breakfasts."