Congreve, finding in him "taste joined with great learning," and
studied with some particularity the condition of the English stage.
"As to the actors," he writes, "if, after forty-five years' experience
I may be entitled to give my opinion, I dare advance that the best
actors in Italy and France come far short of those in England." And he
devotes some space to a description of a performance he witnessed at
the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, dwelling especially upon the
skill of an actor who personated an old man. "He who acted the old man
executed it to the nicest perfection which one could expect in no
player who had not forty years' experience.... I made no manner of
doubt of his being an old comedian, who, instructed by long
experience, and, at the same time, assisted by the weight of years,
had performed it so naturally. But how great was my surprise when I
learned that he was a young man of about twenty-six! I could not
believe it; but I owned that it might be possible had he only used a
trembling and broken voice, and had only an extreme weakness possessed
his body, because I conceived it possible for a young actor, by the
help of art, to imitate that debility of nature to such a pitch of
exactness; but the wrinkles of his face, his sunken eyes, and his
loose and yellow cheeks, the most certain marks of a great old age,
were incontestable proofs against what they said to me.
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