Note 31 — THEATRICAL RECOLLECTIONS.

Nothing could be more truly disgusting than the circumstance of the most ruffianly parts of the London population, under the general appellation of a “British audience,” assuming to themselves the feelings of virtue, delicacy, decorum, morals, and modesty—for the sole purpose of driving into exile one of the first performers that ever trod the stage of England!—and that for an offence which (though abstractedly unjustifiable) a great number of the gentry, not a few of the nobility, and even members of the holy church militant, are constantly committing and daily detected in: which commission and detection by no means seem to have diminished their popularity, or caused their reception to be less cordial among saints, methodists, legal authorities, and justices of the quorum.

The virtuous sentence of transportation passed against Mr. Kean by the mob of London certainly began a new series of British morality; and the laudable societies for the “suppression of vice” may shortly be eased of a great proportion of their labours by more active moralists, (the frequenters of the upper gallery) culled from High-street St. Giles’s, the Israelites of Rag-fair, and the Houses of Correction. Hogarth has, in his print of “Evening,” immortalised the happy state of the horned citizens at his period.