The middle gallery is taken up by
the middling sort of people, as citizens, their wives and daughters, and
other jilts. The boxes are filled with lords and ladies, who give money
to see their follies exposed by fellows as wicked as themselves. And the
pit, which lively represents the pit of hell, is crammed with those
insignificant animals called beaux, whose character nothing but wonder
and shame can compose; for a modern beau, you must know, is a pretty,
neat, fantastic outside of a man, a well-digested bundle of costly
vanities, and you may call him a volume of methodical errata bound in a
gilt cover. He's a curiously wrought cabinet full of shells and other
trumpery, which were much better quite empty than so emptily filled.
He's a man's skin full of profaneness, a paradise full of weeds, a
heaven full of devils, a Satan's bedchamber hung with arras of God's own
making. He can be thought no better than a Promethean man; at best but a
lump of animated dust kneaded into human shape, and if he has only such
a thing as a soul it seems to be patched up with more vices than are
patches in a poor Spaniard's coat. His general employment is to scorn
all business, but the study of the modes and vices of the times, and you
may look upon him as upon the painted sign of a man hung up in the air,
only to be tossed to and fro with every wind of temptation and vanity.
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