one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at
all stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to
see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was
surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears
fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we
choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so
deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what
would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever
Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped
stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back
upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to
bed.

This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday
night, I had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey;
for, its object was to compare the play on Saturday evening with
the preaching in the same Theatre on Sunday evening.

Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp
and muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I drove up
to the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on
foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy
to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having
nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at
me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me
to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at
once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation
of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed doors: which,
being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted passage within to be
seen. They were chiefly people of respectable appearance, odd and