this proof that his shafts had reached
their mark. Murphy confirms Davies's account of Churchill's seat in
the theatre:

No more your bard shall sit
In foremost row before the astonished pit,
And grin dislike, and kiss the spike,
And twist his mouth and roll his head awry,
The arch-absurd quick glancing from his eye.

Charles Lamb was a faithful patron of the pit. In his early days there
had been such things as "pit orders." "Beshrew the uncomfortable
manager who abolished them!" he exclaims. Hazlitt greatly preferred
the pit to the boxes. Not simply because the fierceness of his
democratic sentiments induced in him a scorn of the visitors to the
boxes, as wrapped up in themselves, fortified against impressions,
weaned from all superstitious belief in dramatic illusions, taking so
little interest in all that was interesting, disinclined to discompose
their cravats or their muscles, "except when some gesticulation of Mr.
Kean, or some expression of an author two hundred years old, violated
the decorum of fashionable indifference." These were good reasons for
his objection to the boxes. But he preferred the pit, in truth,
because he could there see and hear so very much better. "We saw Mr.
Kean's Sir Giles Overreach on Friday night from the boxes," he writes
in 1816, "and are not surprised at the incredulity as to this great
actor's powers entertained by those persons who have only seen him
from that elevated sphere. We do not hesitate to say that those who
have only seen him at that distance have not seen him at all. The
expression of his face is quite lost, and only the harsh and grating
tones of his voice produce their full effect on the ear. The same
recurring sounds, by dint of repetition, fasten on the attention,
while the varieties and finer modulations are lost in their passage
over the pit. All you discover is an abstraction of his defects, both
of person, voice, and manner. He appears to be a little man in a great
passion," &c.

But the pit was not famous merely as the resort of critics. The
"groundlings" had given place to people of fashion and social
distinction. Mr. Leigh Hunt notes that the pit even of Charles II.'s
time, although now and then the scene of violent scuffles and brawls,
due in great part to the general wearing of swords, was wont to
contain as good company as the pit of the Opera House five-and-twenty
years ago. A reference to Pepys's "Diary" justifies this opinion.
"