Plays being then performed at four o’clock, allowed ample time for the evening drive, and the midnight assignation, when the parties met by torchlight, masked, in St. James’s park, and verified the title of Wycherly’s play, Love in a Wood. The boxes, as Stanton looked round him, were filled with females, whose naked shoulders and bosoms, well testified in the paintings of Lely, and the pages of Grammont, might save modern puritanism many a vituperative groan and affected reminiscence. They had all taken the precaution to send some male relative, on the first night of a new play, to report whether it was fit for persons of “honour and reputation” to appear at; but in spite of this precaution, at certain passages (which occurred about every second sentence) they were compelled to spread out their fans, or play with the still cherished love-lock, which Prynne himself had not been able to write down.
The men in the boxes were composed of two distinct classes, the “men of wit and pleasure about town,” distinguished by their Flanders lace cravats, soiled with snuff, their diamond rings, the pretended gift of a royal mistress (n’importe whether the Duchess of Portsmouth or Nell Gwynne); their uncombed wigs, whose curls descended to their waists, and the loud and careless tone in which they abused Dryden, Lee, and Otway, and quoted Sedley and Rochester;—the other class were the lovers, the gentle “squires of dames,” equally conspicuous for their white fringed gloves, their obsequious bows, and their commencing every sentence addressed to a lady, with the profane exclamation of “Oh Jesu!”2 or the softer, but equally unmeaning one of “I beseech you, Madam,” or, “Madam, I burn.”3 One circumstance sufficiently extraordinary marked the manners of the day; females had not then found their proper level in life; they were alternately adored as goddesses, and assailed as prostitutes; and the man who, this moment, addressed his mistress in language borrowed from Orondates worshipping Cassandra, in the next accosted her with ribaldry that might put to the blush the piazzas of Covent Garden.4
The pit presented a more various spectacle. There were the critics armed cap-a-pie from Aristotle and Bossu; these men dined at twelve, dictated at a coffeehouse till four, then called to the boy to brush their shoes, and strode to the theatre, where, till the curtain rose, they sat hushed in grim repose, and expecting their evening prey. There were the templars, spruce, pert, and loquacious; and here and there a sober citizen, doffing his steeple-crowned hat, and hiding his little band under the folds of his huge puritanic cloak, while his eyes, declined with an expression half leering, half ejaculatory, towards a masked female, muffled in a hood and scarf, testified what had seduced him into these “tents of Kedar.” There were females, too, but all in vizard masks, which, though worn as well as aunt Dinah’s in Tristram Shandy, served to conceal them from the “young bubbles” they were in quest of, and from all but the orange-women, who hailed them loudly as they passed the doors.5 In the galleries were the happy souls who waited for the fulfilment of Dryden’s promise in one of his prologues;6 no matter to them whether it were the ghost of Almanzor’s mother in her dripping shroud, or that of Laius, who, according to the stage directions, rises in his chariot, armed with the ghosts of his three murdered attendants behind him;—a joke that did not escape l’Abbe le Blanc,7 in his recipe for writing an English tragedy. Some, indeed, from time to time called out for the “burning of the Pope;” but though
“Space was obedient to the boundless piece,
Which oped in Mexico and closed in Greece,”
it was not always possible to indulge them in this laudable amusement, as the scene of the popular plays was generally laid in Africa or Spain; Sir Robert Howard, Elkanah Settle, and John Dryden, all agreeing in their choice of Spanish and Moorish subjects for their principal plays. Among this joyous group were seated several women of fashion masked, enjoying in secrecy the licentiousness which they dared not openly patronise, and verifying Gay’s characteristic description, though it was written many years later,
“Mobbed in the gallery Laura sits secure,
And laughs at jests that turn the box demure.”
Stanton gazed on all this with the look of one who “could not be moved to smile at anything.” He turned to the stage, the play was Alexander, then acted as written by Lee, and the principal character was performed by Hart, whose godlike ardour in making love, is said almost to have compelled the audience to believe that they beheld the “son of Ammon.”
There were absurdities enough to offend a classical, or even a rational spectator. There were Grecian heroes with roses in their shoes, feathers in their hats, and
