your agreement; you had the evidence of your senses prima facie: you can have no more now. What have they decided? Why truly that the meanest scribbler in your house is to give laws to me. But, as I said, letting alone that see-saw, your own judgment, you have done a thing totally against your interest; for these poor creatures, whose trash certainly never shall stand a part of the piece, losing the merit of having made these alterations—which by this time they have vaunted to all their friends—will become enemies both to the piece and me: so, for your caprice, I am obliged to wage war with a set of poor reptiles, who have not offended me, and whom I have no more inclination to tread upon than any other worms, which, searching for food, are unlucky enough to come under my feet. In short, bad as it is, for this last time, I will overlook this strange conduct, since you talk of losses which certainly I do not wish you to sustain; but I insist that every word shall be expunged which I may not justly claim as my own.'
This was at length agreed

to, and a morning for the first rehearsal was appointed.

The day came, the words were read, during which some of the actors, as they were instructed, yawned at particular passages. These were afterwards to be objected against by the manager, which Charles well knowing, anticipated, by taking him aside, and telling him that he saw what he was aiming at, but it would not do, for that every passage at which the performers had so ill acted the part of yawners, should remain without the smallest alteration. He said, however implicitly the manager might pin his faith upon the sleeve of such opinions, he would not wish a better omen of success than an actors entertaining an indifferent opinion of a dramatic entertainment; for that, in general, they were men of very slender intellects and mean education, who had no opportunity of making worldly observation but at the porter house, or in the green room, who had now in tragedy destroyed what was meant for a representation of greatness, by stalking like puppets, and braying like asses, and who had no idea of comedy otherwise than by grinning like apes and chattering like parrots. Besides, in the present case, poor devils, it was a repetition of the same miserable farce which had so recently been performed by the authors. They were bid to feel

as the others were. He wondered therefore that the manager would attempt at treating him so