I Sometimes Heard, Too, The People
In The Lower Or Middle Gallery Quarrelling With Those Of The Upper
One.
Behind me, in the pit, sat a young fop, who, in order to
display his costly stone buckles with
The utmost brilliancy,
continually put his foot on my bench, and even sometimes upon my
coat, which I could avoid only by sparing him as much space from my
portion of the seat as would make him a footstool. In the boxes,
quite in a corner, sat several servants, who were said to be placed
there to keep the seats for the families they served till they
should arrive; they seemed to sit remarkably close and still, the
reason of which, I was told, was their apprehension of being pelted;
for if one of them dares but to look out of the box, he is
immediately saluted with a shower of orange peel from the gallery.
In Foote's "Nabob" there are sundry local and personal satires which
are entirely lost to a foreigner. The character of the Nabob was
performed by a Mr. Palmer. The jett of the character is, this
Nabob, with many affected airs and constant aims at gentility, is
still but a silly fellow, unexpectedly come into the possession of
immense riches, and therefore, of course, paid much court to by a
society of natural philosophers, Quakers, and I do not know who
besides. Being tempted to become one of their members, he is
elected, and in order to ridicule these would-be philosophers, but
real knaves, a fine flowery fustian speech is put into his mouth,
which he delivers with prodigious pomp and importance, and is
listened to by the philosophers with infinite complacency. The two
scenes of the Quakers and philosophers, who, with countenances full
of imaginary importance, were seated at a green table with their
president at their head while the secretary, with the utmost care,
was making an inventory of the ridiculous presents of the Nabob,
were truly laughable. One of the last scenes was best received: it
is that in which the Nabob's friend and school-fellow visit him, and
address him without ceremony by his Christian name; but to all their
questions of "Whether he does not recollect them? Whether he does
not remember such and such a play; or such and such a scrape into
which they had fallen in their youth?" he uniformly answers with a
look of ineffable contempt, only, "No sir!" Nothing can possibly be
more ludicrous, nor more comic.
The entertainment, "The Agreeable Surprise," is really a very
diverting farce. I observed that, in England also, they represent
school-masters in ridiculous characters on the stage, which, though
I am sorry for, I own I do not wonder at, as the pedantry of school-
masters in England, they tell me, is carried at least as far as it
is elsewhere. The same person who, in the play, performed the
school-fellow of the Nabob with a great deal of nature and original
humour, here acted the part of the school-master:
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