The authorities were, of course, fully aware of the risks run in using such a specific, and its abuse was hindered in the same way as we curtail the buying of opium and other drugs, which wrongly applied prove harmful; and a man was only able to buy a ticket if he showed a paper signed by a doctor to declare him a fitting subject. Medical men were themselves allowed to buy as many tickets as they liked, and a large percentage of the audience was always composed of them, because they wished to observe the effects of the cure upon their patients. It was not without difficulty that Fabian was able to get us the needful pass, and it was only after representing to the authorities that any account of their age which omitted so beneficial a device would be very faulty, that I was granted it. Before entering the theatre Fabian told me to abandon myself freely to any impulse to laugh, as that was a condition of perfect purging: and of this I was very glad, for I have often, not only before, but since my visit to this time, felt the pain of constraint at light plays, especially if I was with relatives, or else friends with whom I did not wish to become too intimate. But what was my surprise to find, instead of the fescennine jesting I was prepared for, a play I had already seen in Manchester, a drama of the most correct sentiment by one of our notably respectable, even titled playwrights, which might call forth smiles and tears alternately, but not those crude outbursts of mirth I now heard on every side. So little was I able to enter into the spirit of the thing that after the first act Fabian took me out, whispering to me that my callous behaviour might have the worst effect upon the patients seated near me. He seemed to think my bearing had been of set purpose, and only grudgingly gave the explanation I longed for, which was that the people in these times saw a wealth of allusion lurking beneath the innocent phrases; and that what the audience so much relished and admired in our author was the simplicity with which he had hidden the ‘latent content’ under the ‘manifest.’ When I protested my belief that nothing had been more remote from the writer’s mind, Fabian looked coldly at me, as though he were sure I was trying to dupe him.