That is, she likes it, not because there is anything to like in it, but because other people are prevented from liking or knowing anything about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq. laugheth to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic criticisms in the London, for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore make an example of him in terrorem to all such hypercritics. He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler’s Wells (“a place he has heard of”—O Lord, Sir!)—because I notice the Miss Dennetts, “great favourites with the Whitechapel orders”—praise Miss Valancy, “a bouncing Columbine at Ashley’s and them there places, as his barber informs him” (has he no way of establishing himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber’s bad English?)—and finally, because I recognised the existence of the Cobourg and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries “Faugh” with great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a well-bred critic. C'est beau ça. Now this appears to me a very crude, unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale, and vulgar way of thinking. It is prejudging things in the lump, by names and places and classes,
