I find here for me the following letter:[171]
"Finding your advice and censure to have a good effect, I desire your admonition to our vicar and schoolmaster, who in his preaching to his auditors, stretches his jaws so wide, that instead of instructing youth, it rather frightens them: likewise in reading prayers, he has such a careless loll, that people are justly offended at his irreverent posture; besides the extraordinary charge they are put to in sending their children to dance, to bring them off of those ill gestures. Another evil faculty he has, in making the bowling-green his daily residence, instead of his church, where his curate reads prayers every day. If the weather is fair, his time is spent in visiting; if cold or wet, in bed, or at least at home, though within a hundred yards of the church. These, out of many such irregular practices, I write for his reclamation: but two or three things more before I conclude; to wit, that generally when his curate preaches in the afternoon, he sleeps sitting in the desk on a hassock. With all this, he is so extremely proud, that he will go but once to the sick, except they return his visit."
I was going on in reading my letter, when I was interrupted by Mr. Greenhat, who has been this evening at the play of "Hamlet." "Mr. Bickerstaff," said he, "had you been to-night at the play-house, you had seen the force of action in perfection: your admired Mr. Betterton[172] behaved himself so well, that, though now about seventy, he acted youth; and by the prevalent power of proper manner, gesture and voice, appeared through the whole drama a young man of great expectation, vivacity, and enterprise. The soliloquy, where he began the celebrated sentence of, 'To be, or not to be;' the expostulation where he explains with his mother in her closet; the noble ardour, after seeing his father's ghost, and his generous distress for the death of Ophelia, are each of them circumstances which dwell strongly upon the minds of the audience, and would certainly affect their behaviour on any parallel occasions in their own lives. Pray, Mr. Bickerstaff, let us have virtue thus represented on the stage with its proper ornaments, or let these ornaments be added to her in places more sacred. As for my part," said he, "I carried my cousin Jerry, this little boy, with me, and shall always love the child for his partiality in all that concerned the fortune of Hamlet. This is entering youth into the affections and passions of manhood beforehand, and as it were antedating the effects we hope from a long and liberal education."