In looking over the poetical addresses made to audiences in former days, our regret is that such abundant illustration, as they give, of life in and out of the theatre, is rendered unavailable by a licentiousness which runs through every line. From those of Aphra Behn, and her contemporaries and immediate successors, filthy missiles, as it were, were flung at morals generally, and at the audience in particular. Nevertheless, and down to a later period, the British appetite for prologue and epilogue was for many years insatiable. The public, though often insulted in both, with that sort of licence which belonged to the old jester, whose master, however, could as readily chastise as laugh at him, listened eagerly; and only with reluctance saw the time arrive when the play was considered safe enough to go on without the introduction. Even when old plays were revived, the audience expected the prologue to enjoy resuscitation also. So, when "Cato" was reproduced at Covent Garden, for Sheridan, and the play commenced without the famous introductory lines by Pope, there was a vociferous shout from the house of "prologue! prologue!" That eccentric actor, Wignell, was then on the stage as Portius, and in his fantastically pompous way had pronounced the opening passage of his part, "The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily, with clouds, brings on the day,"-- when he was interrupted by renewed vociferations for the prologue. Wignell would neither depart from his character, nor leave the house without satisfactory explanation; and accordingly, after the word "day," without changing feature or tone, he solemnly went on, with this interpolation:-- "(Ladies and gentlemen: there has not been For years a prologue spoken to this play--). The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato and of Rome." Sometimes the prologue, in preceding the piece, did so in mournful verse, "As undertaker walks before the hearse;" and in the case of tragedy, it was etiquette for the speaker to be attired in solemn black, generally a court suit. Occasionally, the prologue to an historical tragedy was a brief lecture, for the enlightenment of an ignorant audience. At all times it was held to be a better means of instruction than that followed by French writers of tragedy, through confidants,-- "Who might instruct the pit, By asking questions of the leading few, And hearing secrets, which before they knew." Few men wrote more of them than Garrick, though in that to "Virginia" he says that-- "Prologues, like compliments, are loss of time, 'Tis penning bows and making legs in rhyme. 'Tis cringing at the door, with simp'ring grin, When we should show the company within." But he subsequently wrote in the epilogue to the "Fathers," that--