of establishing
himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber's bad
English?)--and finally, because I recognised the existence of the Coburg
and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries 'Faugh' with
great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet
he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a
well-bred critic. _C'est beau ca._ Now this appears to me a very crude,
unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale, and vulgar way of thinking.
It is prejudicing things in the lump, by names and places and classes,
instead of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real
qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or
delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and
making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority.
It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the
world else. To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially
vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste
or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense,
and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon
agree with my barber as differ from him; and why should I make a point
of reversing the sentence of the Whitechapel orders? Or how can it
affect my opinion of the merits of an actor at the Coburg or the Surrey
theatres, that these theatres are in or out of the Bills of Mortality?
This is an easy, short-hand way of judging, as gross as it is
mechanical. It is not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste
by consulting the map of London, or to prove your liberality by
geographical distinctions. Janus jumbles things together strangely. If
he had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at Exeter or Taunton, he
would have thought it vulgar to admire him; but when he had been stamped
in London, Janus would no doubt show his discernment and the subtlety
of his tact for the display of character and passion by not being behind
the fashion. The Miss Dennetts are 'little unformed girls,' for no other
reason than because they danced at one of the minor theatres: let them
but come out on the opera boards, and let the beauty and fashion of the
season greet them with a fairy shower of delighted applause, and they
would outshine Milanie 'with the foot of fire.' His gorge rises at the
mention of a certain quarter of the town: whatever pa