observe the knight’s reflections that I was not so well at leisure to improve myself by yours.  Nature, I found, played her part in the knight pretty well, till at the last concluding lines she entirely forsook him.  You must know, Sir, that it is always my custom, when I have been well entertained at a new tragedy, to make my retreat before the facetious epilogue enters; not but that those pieces are often very well writ, but having paid down my half-crown, and made a fair purchase of as much of the pleasing melancholy as the poet’s art can afford me, or my own nature admit of, I am willing to carry some of it home with me; and cannot endure to be at once tricked out of all, though by the wittiest dexterity in the world.  However, I kept my seat the other night, in hopes of finding my own sentiments of this matter favoured by your friend’s; when, to my great surprise, I found the knight, entering with equal pleasure into both parts, and as much satisfied with Mrs. Oldfield’s gaiety, as he had been before with Andromache’s greatness.  Whether this were no more than an effect of the knight’s peculiar humanity, pleased to find at last, that, after all the tragical doings, everything was safe and well, I do not know.  But for my own part, I must confess I was so dissatisfied, that I was sorry the poet had saved Andromache, and could heartily have wished that he had left her stone-dead upon the stage.  For you cannot imagine, Mr. Spectator, the mischief she was reserved to do me.  I found my soul, during the action, gradually worked up to the highest pitch; and felt the exalted passion which all generous minds conceive at the sight of virtue in distress.  The impression, believe me, Sir, was so strong upon me, that I am persuaded, if I had been let alone in it, I could at an extremity have ventured to defend yourself and Sir Roger against half a score of the fiercest Mohocks; but the ludicrous epilogue in the close extinguished all my ardour, and made me look upon all such noble achievements as downright silly and romantic.  What the rest of the audience felt, I cannot so well tell.  For myself I must declare, that at the end of the play I found my soul uniform, and all of a piece; but at the end of the epilogue, it was so jumbled together and divided between jest and earnest, that, if you will forgive me an extravagant fancy, I will here set it down.  I could not but fancy, if my soul had at that moment quitted my body, and descended to the poetical shades in the posture it was then in, what a strange figure it would have made among them.  They would not have known what to have made of my motley spectre, half comic and half tragic, all over resembling a ridiculous face, that, at the same time, laughs on one side, and cries on the other.  The only defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me the most unnatural tack of the comic tail to the tragic head, is this, that the minds of the audience must be refreshed, and gentlemen and ladies not sent away to their own