mbecile compliments are indeed wholly
reprehensible, and should be suppressed as strenuously as possible.
The managers of the Theatre Royal at Dresden some few years since
forbade the performers to accept calls before the termination of an
act, as "the practice interrupted the progress of the action on the
stage," and respectfully requested the audience to abstain from such
demands in future. Would that this ordinance had obtained more general
obedience.

Writing in 1830, Mr. Parke describes the custom of encoring performers
as a prerogative that had been exercised by the public for more than a
century; and says, with some justice, that it originated more from
self-love in the audience than from gratitude to those who had
afforded them pleasure. He considered, however, that encoring had done
service upon the whole, by exciting emulation, and stimulating singers
to extraordinary exertion; and that though, in many instances, it
destroyed the illusion of the scene, it had become so fixed that, in
spite even of the burlesque of encoring Lord Grizzle's dying song in
Fielding's "Tom Thumb," it continued to prevail as much as ever. He
notes it as curious that, "in calling for a repetition, the audiences
of the French and English theatres should each have selected a word
forming no part of their respective languages--the former making use
of the Latin word, _bis_; and the latter the French word, _encore_."
Double encores, we gather from the same authority, first occurred in
England, at the Opera House, during the season of 1808, when Madame
Catalani was compelled to sing three times one of her songs in the
comic opera, "La Freschetana." As none of the great singers, her
predecessors--Mara, Banti, Grassini, and Billington--had ever received
a similar compliment, this appeared extraordinary, until the fact
oozed out that Catalani, as part of her engagement, had stipulated
for the privilege of sending into the house fifty orders on each night
of her performance. After this discovery double encores ceased for a
time at the King's Theatre; but the system reappeared at Covent
Garden, by way of compliment to Braham, each time the great tenor sang
the favourite polacca in the opera of "The Cabinet;" and subsequently
like honours were paid to Sinclair upon his return from Italy. Until
then, it would seem, Mr. Sinclair had been well satisfied with one
encore, and exceedingly anxious that smaller favour should, on no
account, be withheld