"Unhappily it was not the actress alone that inspired these friends of the stage with interest: they likewise made pretensions to the young and lively girl. They gave me to understand, in terms distinct enough, that my duty was, not only to excite emotion in them, but to share it with them personally. This, unluckily, was not my business: I wished to elevate their minds; but, to what they called their hearts, I had not the slightest claim. Yet now men of all ranks, ages, and characters, by turns afflicted me with their addresses; and it did seem hard that I could not, like an honest young woman, shut my door, and spare myself such a quantity of labor.
"The men appeared, for most part, much the same as I had been accustomed to about my aunt; and here again I should have felt disgusted with them, had not their peculiarities and insipidities amused me. As I was compelled to see them, in the theatre, in open places, in my house, I formed the project of spying out their follies; and my brother helped me with alacrity to execute it. And if you reflect, that up from the whisking shopman and the conceited merchant's son, to the polished, calculating man of the world, the bold soldier, and the impetuous prince, all in succession passed in review before me, each in his way endeavoring to found his small romance, you will pardon me if I conceived that I had gained some acquaintance with my nation.
"The fantastically dizened student; the awkward, humbly proud man of letters; the sleek-fed, gouty canon; the solemn, heedful man of office; the heavy country-baron; the smirking, vapid courtier; the young, erring parson; the cool as well as the quick and sharply speculating merchant,--all these I have seen in motion; and I swear to you, that there were few among them fitted to inspire me even with a sentiment of toleration: on the contrary, I felt it altogether irksome to collect, with tedium and annoyance, the suffrages of fools; to pocket those applauses in detail, which in their accumulated state had so delighted me, which in the gross I had appropriated with such pleasure.
"If I expected a rational compliment upon my acting, if I hoped that they would praise an author whom I valued, they were sure to make one empty observation on the back of another, and to name some vapid play in which they wished to see me act. If I listened in their company, to hear if some noble, brilliant, witty thought had met with a response among them, and would re-appear from some of them in proper season, it was rare that I could catch an echo of it. An error that had happened, a mispronunciation, a provincialism of some actor, such were the weighty points by which they held fast, beyond which they could not pass. I knew not, in the end, to what hand I should turn: themselves they thought too clever to be entertained; and me they imagined they were well entertaining, if they romped and made noise enough about me. I began very cordially to despise them all: I felt as if the whole nation had, on purpose, deputed these people to debase it in my eyes. They appeared to me so clownish, so ill-bred, so wretchedly instructed, so void of pleasing qualities, so tasteless, I frequently exclaimed, "No German can buckle his shoes, till he has learned to do it of some foreign nation!"