e audience
will tear up the benches!" But they did nothing of the kind. They took
not the slightest notice of the omission. After that, little more was
heard of the time-honoured custom which had ruled that prologues
should, according to Garrick's description of them--

Precede the play in mournful verse,
As undertakers stalk before the hearse;
Whose doleful march may strike the harden'd mind,
And wake its feeling for the dead behind.

People, indeed, began rather to wonder why they had ever required or
been provided with a thing that was now found to be, in truth, so
entirely unnecessary.

The prologues of our stage date from the earliest period of the
British drama. They were not so much designed, as were the prologues
of the classical theatre, to enlighten the spectators touching the
subject of the forthcoming play; but were rather intended to bespeak
favour for the dramatist, and to deprecate adverse opinion.
Originally, indeed, the prologue-speaker was either the author himself
in person, or his representative. In his prologue to his farce of "The
Deuce is in Him," George Colman, after a lively fashion, points out
the distinction between the classical and the British forms of
prefatory address:

What does it mean? What can it be?
A little patience--and you'll see.
Behold, to keep your minds uncertain,
Between the scene and you this curtain!
So writers hide their plots, no doubt,
To please the more when all comes out!
Of old the Prologue told the story,
And laid the whole affair before ye;
Came forth in simple phrase to say:
"'Fore the beginning of the play
I, hapless Polydore, was found
By fishermen, or others, drowned!
Or--I, a gentleman, did wed
The lady I would never bed,
Great Agamemnon's royal daughter,
Who's coming hither to draw water."
Thus gave at once the bards of Greece
The cream and marrow of the piece;
Asking no trouble of your own
To skim the milk or crack the bone.
The poets now take different ways,
"E'en let them find it out for Bayes!"

The prologue-speaker of the Elizabethan stage entered after the
trumpets had sounded thrice, attired in a long cloak of black cloth or
velvet, occasionally assuming a wreath or garland of bays, emblematic
of authorship. In the "Accounts of the Revels in 1573-74," a charge is
made for "bays for the prologgs." Long after the cloak h