ismiss an audience of a hundred and fifty pounds, from a
disturbance spirited up, by obscure people, who never gave any better
reason for it than that it was their fancy to support the idle complaint
of one rival actress against another, in their several pretensions to
the chief part in a new tragedy. But as this tumult seemed only to be
the wantonness of English liberty, I shall not presume to lay any
further censure upon it.

Now, notwithstanding this public desire of re-establishing two houses;
and though I have allowed the former actors greatly our superiors; and
the managers I am speaking of not to have been without their private
errors, yet under all these disadvantages, it is certain, the stage, for
twenty years before this time, had never been in so flourishing a
condition.

But, in what I have said, I would not be understood to be an advocate
for two play-houses; for we shall soon find that two sets of actors,
tolerated in the same place, have constantly ended in the corruption of
the theatre; of which the auxiliary entertainments, that have so
barbarously supplied the defects of weak action, have, for some years
past, been a flagrant instance; it may not, therefore, be here improper
to shew how our childish Pantomimes first came to take so gross a
possession of the stage.

I have upon several occasions, already observed, that when one company
is too hard for another, the lower in reputation has always been forced
to exhibit fine newfangled foppery, to draw the multitude after them; of
these expedients, singing and dancing had formerly been most effectual;
but, at the time I am speaking of, our English music had been so
discountenanced since the taste of Italian Operas prevailed, that it was
to no purpose to pretend to it. Dancing, therefore, was now the only
weight, in the opposite scale, and as the new theatre sometimes found
their account in it, it could not be safe for us wholly to neglect it.

Cibber's antagonistical views towards Pantomime were shared, as we
shall see, by a good many others.

Booth, however, a greater actor than Cibber, and a tragedian to boot,
took a more business-like view of the proceedings, thinking thin houses
the greatest indignity the stage could suffer. "Men of taste and
judgment (said he) must necessarily form but a small proportion of the
spectators at a theatre, and if a greater number of people were enticed
to sit out a play because a Pantomime was tacked to it, the Panto