Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/192

176 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES railing, and his discourse ribaldry ; " this amiable and honourable personage, ridiculing Fastidious Brisk's affectation of intimacy with lords, says : — " There's ne'er a one of these but might lie a week on the rack, ere they could bring forth his name ; and yet he pours them out as familiarly as if he had seen them stand by the fire in the presence, or ta'en tobacco with them over the stage, in the lords' room." Whereon Gifford, who has left any one else very little to do in the way of annotation : " The lords' rooms answered to the present stage-boxes. The price of admission to them appears to have been originally a shilling. Thus Decker : ' At a new play you take up the twelve-penny room, next the stage, because the lords and you may seem to be hail-fellow, well met.'— ' Gull's Hornbook, 1609.'" With Act iii. we enter the middle aisle of St. Paul's, the Mediterraneo, as Brisk terms it, then, as is well known, the common resort of persons of all professions, reputable and disreputable, and the scene of all kinds of business transactions. Here Carlo Buffone reads a bill, being one of the various baits for gulls set up by our noble friend the Cavalier Shift, otherwise Apple-John, otherwise Signor Whiffe, who justifies this last name by saying : " I have been taking an ounce of tobacco hard by here, with a gentleman, and I am come to spit private in St Paul's ; " and who modestly avows afterwards : " It pleases the world, as I am her excellent tobacconist, to give me the style of Signor Whiffe." Thus runs the delectable advertisement : — " If this city, or the suburbs of the same, do afford any young gentleman of the first, second, or third head, more or less, whose