lovers do perplexity and rapture.  Instead of saying, ‘I shall die for you,’ I profess I should be glad to lead my life with you:  you are as beautiful, as witty, as prudent, and as good-humoured, as any woman breathing; but I must confess to you, I regard all these excellences as you will please to direct them, for my happiness or misery.  With me, madam, the only lasting motive to love is the hope of its becoming mutual.  I beg of you to let Mrs. Lucy send me word when I may attend you.  I promise you, I’ll talk of nothing but indifferent things; though at the same time I know not how I shall approach you in the tender moment of first seeing you, after this declaration, of,

“Madam,

“Your most obedient,

“And most faithful

“Humble Servant, &c.”

Will’s Coffee-house, June 29.

Having taken a resolution when plays are acted next winter by an entire good company, to publish observations from time to time on the performance of the actors, I think it but just to give an abstract of the law of action, for the help of the less learned part of the audience, that they may rationally enjoy so refined and instructive a pleasure as a just representation of human life.  The great errors in playing are admirably well exposed in Hamlet’s direction to the actors[359] who are to play in his supposed tragedy; by which we shall form our future judgments on their behaviour, and for that reason you have the discourse as follows: 

“Speak the speech as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lieve the town-crier had spoke my lines:  nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus; but use all gently:  for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, 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),