Betterton's time the older sort of people talked of Hart's being his
superior, just as we do of Betterton's being superior to those now."
So in the old-world tract, called "Historia Histrionica"--a dialogue
upon the condition of the early stage, first published in
1699--Trueman, the veteran Cavalier playgoer, in reply to Lovewit, who
had decided that the actors of his time were far inferior to Hart,
Mohun, Burt, Lacy, Clun, and Shatterel, ventures to observe: "If my
fancy and memory are not partial (for men of age are apt to be
over-indulgent to the thoughts of their youthful days), I dare assure
you that the actors I have seen before the war--Lowin, Taylor,
Pollard, and some others--were almost as far beyond Hart and his
company as those were beyond these now in being." In truth, age brings
with it to the playhouse recollections, regrets, and palled appetite;
middle life is too much prone to criticism, too little inclined to
enthusiasm, for the securing of unmixed satisfaction; but youth is
endowed with the faculty of admiring exceedingly, with hopefulness,
and a keen sense of enjoyment, and, above all, with very complete
power of self-deception. It is the youthful playgoers who are ever the
best friends of the players.

As a rule, a boy will do anything, or almost anything, to go to a
theatre. His delight in the drama is extreme--it possesses and absorbs
him completely. Mr. Pepys has left on record Tom Killigrew's "way of
getting to see plays when he was a boy." "He would go to the 'Red
Bull' (at the upper end of St. John Street, Clerkenwell), and when the
man cried to the boys--'Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see
the play for nothing?' then would he go in and be a devil upon the
stage, and so get to see plays." In one of his most delightful papers,
Charles Lamb has described his first visit to a theatre. He "was not
past six years old, and the play was 'Artaxerxes!' I had dabbled a