of Miss Molly. 'Ay, ay, you may think
my sister as handsome as you please, but if you were to see
her legs!' If I have made so many crowded theatres laugh, and
in the right place, too, for above forty years together, am I
to make up the number of your dunces, because I have not the
equal talent of making them cry too? Make it your own case. Is
what you have excelled in at all the worse for your having so
dismally dabbled in the farce of _Three Hours after Marriage_?
What mighty reason will the world have to laugh at my weakness
in tragedy, more than at yours in comedy?"

I will preserve one anecdote of that felicity of temper--that
undisturbed good-humour which never abandoned Cibber in his
most distressful moments. When he brought out, in 1724, his
_Caesar in Egypt_, at a great expense, and "a beggarly account
of empty boxes" was the result, it raised some altercations
between the poet and his brother managers, the bard still
struggling for another and another night. At length he closed
the quarrel with a pun, which confessed the misfortune, with
his own good-humour. In a periodical publication of the times
I find the circumstance recorded in this neat epigram:--

_On the Sixth Night of CIBBER'S "Caesar in Egypt."_

When the pack'd audience from their posts retired,
And Julius in a general hiss expired;
Sage Booth to Cibber cried, "Compute our gains!
These dogs of Egypt, and their dowdy queans,
But ill requite these habits and these scenes,
To rob Corneille for such a motley piece:
His geese were swans; but zounds! thy swans are geese!"
Rubbing his firm invulnerable brow,
The bard replied--"The critics must allow
'Twas ne'er in _Caesar's destiny_ TO RUN!"
Wilks bow'd, and bless'd the gay pacific pun.

[222] A wicked wag of a lord had enticed Pope into a tavern, and laid
a love-plot against his health. Cibber describes his resolute
interference by snatching "our little Homer by the heels. This
was done for the honour of our nation. Homer would have been
too serious a sacrifice to our evening's amusement." He has
metamorphosed our Apollo into a "Tom-tit;" but the Ovidian
warmth, however ludicrous