the critics as a class apart from the ordinary
audience; not critics as we understand them exactly, attached to
journals and reviewing plays for the instruction of the public, but
men of fashion affecting judicial airs, and expressing their opinions
in clubs and coffee-houses, and authors charged with attending the
theatres in the hope of witnessing the demolition of a rival bard. The
prologue to "All for Love" opens with the lines--

What flocks of critics hover here to-day,
As vultures wait on armies for their prey,
All gaping for the carcase of a play!

And presently occurs the familiar passage--

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small,
They've had to show that they can think at all.
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
Fops may have leave to level all they can,
As pigmies would be glad to lop a man.
Half wits are fleas, so little and so light,
We scarce could know they live, but that they bite.

Another prologue begins--

They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite;
A playhouse gives them fame; and up then starts
From a mean fifth-rate wit, a man of parts.

The more important critics are described as--

A jury of the wits who still stay late,
And in their club decree the poor play's fate;
Their verdict back is to the boxes brought,
Thence all the town pronounces it their thought.

"The little Hectors of the pit" are also spoken of, and there is
mention of "Fop-corner," the prototype of "Fop's-alley" of later
years. Now, "a kind, hearty pit" is prayed for, and now, in a prologue
delivered before the University of Oxford, stress is laid upon the
advantages of "a learned pit." It may be noted, too, that the
prologues of Dryden, apart from their wit, and overlooking, if that
can possibly be managed, their distressing grossness, are invaluable
for the accurate and minute pictures they present of English life,
manners, costumes, and character in the reign of Charles II.

In right of the many quotations it has supplied to literature and
conversation, Dr. Johnson's prologue spoken by Garrick upon the
opening of Drury Lane Theatre, in 1747, may claim to be considered the
most famous production of its class. It is not, in truth, however, a
prologue as prologues are ordinarily understood, but rather an
address, written to su