before it was a heap of dust
and ashes, (I insult not over its fallen greatness; let it recover
itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once
more, and take in poor authors to write for it; _hic coestus artemque
repono_,)--a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting
sounds,--shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise
of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling-mills,
or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which Saint Anthony
listened to in the wilderness.

"Oh, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which
was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in,
to express compliance, to convey a favor, or to grant a suit,--that
voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a Siren Catalani
charms and captivates us,--that the musical, expressive human voice
should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and
irrational, venomous snakes?

"I never shall forget the sounds on _my night_; I never before that time
fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the 'Paradise
Lost' meets with from the critics in the _pit_, at the final close of
his Tragedy upon the Human Race,--though that, alas! met with too much
success:--

"'from innumerable tongues,
A dismal universal _hiss_, the sound
Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din
Of _hissing_ through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
And Dipsas.'

"For _hall_ substitute _theatre_, and you have the very image of what
takes place at what is called the _damnation_ of a piece,--and properly
so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was
derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none
can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

"But, Sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling,
heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial
mistake of a poor author who thought to please us in the act of filling
his pockets,--for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than
that,--it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice far
too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs)
meets with no severer exprobration.

"Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed
that there s