The dramatists whom he "adapted," declined to be involved in his reverses. After his "Joanna," an adaptation from Kotzebue, had been damned, the German author took care to record in the public papers that the passages hissed by the English public were not his, but additions made by Cumberland. Sir Fretful found consolation. "If I did not succeed," says this frequently damned author, "in entertaining the audience, I continued to amuse myself.... I never disgraced my colours by abandoning _legitimate comedy_, to whose service I am sworn, and in whose defence I have kept the field for nearly half a century--till at last I have survived all true national taste, and lived to see buffoonery, spectacle, and puerility so effectually triumph, that now to be repulsed from the stage is to be recommended to the closet; and to be applauded by the theatre is little less than a passport to the puppet-show." This spirit of self-satisfaction, and depreciation of the public taste, was nothing new. The author or adapter of "Richard II." (Nahum Tate), finding his piece prohibited by authority, published it with a self-congratulatory preface; but he had already done more in the epilogue; mindful of past reverses, and anticipatory of present condemnation, he made Mrs. Cook say:-- "And ere of you, my sparks, my leave I take, For your unkindness past these prayers I make-- Into such dulness may your poets tire, Till they shall write such plays as you admire!" This was thoroughly in the old spirit of Flecknoe; but of samples of the spirit of "damn-ed authors," having given enough, let us pass among the audiences of the last half of the eighteenth century, whose "censure," in the old signification of the term, was challenged by the playwrights. FOOTNOTES: [1] Vol. ii., pp. 398-406. [2] "One of the most capital poems in the English language" is what Gray is reported to have said. [3] Produced 8th May 1777. [Illustration: MR. KING IN "RULE A WIFE."] CHAPTER II. THE AUDIENCES OF THE LAST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.