, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a
temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul,
to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who (for the most part)
are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I could
have such a fellow whipped for overdoing termagant: it out-Herods Herod.
Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit
the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special
observance, that you overstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so
overdone, is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first
and now, was, and is, to hold as it were the mirror up to Nature; to
show Virtue her own feature; scorn her own image; and the very age and
body of the time its form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy
off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious
grieve. The censures of which one, must, in your allowance, oversway a
whole theatre of others. Oh! there be players, that I have seen play,
and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak it profanely),
that neither having the accent of Christian, Pagan, or Norman, have so
strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen
had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so
abominably. This should be reformed altogether; and let those that play
your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of
them that will of themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren
spectators to laugh too; though in the meantime, some necessary question
of the play be then to be considered; that is villanous, and shows a
most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

From my own Apartment, June 29.

It would be a very great obligation, and an assistance to my treatise
upon Punning,[360] if any one would please to inform in what class,
among the learned who play with words, to place the author of the
following letter.[361]

"Sir,

"Not long since you were pleased to give us a chimerical account of the
famous family of Staffs,[362] from whence I suppose you would insinuate,
that it is the most ancient and numerous house in all Europe. But I
positively deny that it is either; and wonder much at your audacious
proceedings in this matter, since it is well known, that our most
illustrious, most renowned, and most c