t, polished, witty; and although not in a dramatic form, more
dramatic and lively than any professed play-writer since one called
Sherry, from his fondness for drinking wine. 'Midst the applause of all
the rest of the world, and the hatred and jealousy of her ninety-five
competitors, she was presented with the money; and the manager, on looking
through a hole in the curtain on the first night of the performance, saw
the whole house crowded from the floor to the roof, and thought he had
never so wisely laid out five hundred guineas in his life. "Oho!" said
wise men to each other in the boxes, "we shall see ourselves as we are--no
farcical exaggeration, no vulgar grievances; the woman is an observing
woman, and has mixed in great society; moreover, it is the best play out
of nearly a hundred; let us wait, it will be as good as the _School for
Scandal_." And they stamped loud with their feet. The play was called the
_Day of Dupes_; and wise men in the boxes were not exempt from the general
fate. All were dupes together. For the authoress was a wise woman, and
jingled the five hundred guineas in a purse, and kept all her own clever
observation of life and manners to be used on some other occasion, and
took the same view and no other of English customs and character that
Reynolds, and Morton, and O'Keefe, and Colman, had done before her. So her
heroes and heroines flew about the stage, and talked funny things, and
swore a little, and conversed in a provincial dialect called slang, and
behaved exactly as Dashall, and Miss Dazzle, and Lord Sparkle had behaved
before. Oh! was not this a triumph to the great authors of former days,
and did it not prove that wise men in the boxes are foolish men when
judging of the stage? It did, O Cho-Ling-Kyang! but a greater triumph was
at hand. The manager having read and studied the preface by the female
Inchbald, which I have translated for your instruction, and having given a
small sum--so they consider five hundred guineas in this land of
ingots--to a reputed wit, thought he would gain much silver if he obtained
a drama from a reputed blockhead. And he was right in his calculation; for
he applied to an author who had written farces in five acts, where various
impossible things were done, and persons talked in great jokes invented
long ago by a nobleman of the name of Miller, and behaved like the clown
in a pantomime, without the advantage of being dressed in his
parti-coloured garments; and