" However, his mind was soon
at ease; to do him justice the audience soon hissed him to his heart's
content, and perhaps even in excess of that measure. Subsequently he
resolved, riot or no riot, to learn something of his part.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
EPILOGUES.
Epilogues went out of fashion with pigtails, the public having at last
decided that neither of these appendages was really necessary or
particularly ornamental; but a considerable time elapsed before this
opinion was definitively arrived at. The old English moralities or
moral plays usually concluded, as Mr. Payne Collier notes, with an
epilogue in which prayers were offered up by the actors for the king,
queen, clergy, and sometimes for the commons; the latest instance of
this practice being the epilogue to a play of 1619, "Two Wise Men and
All the Rest Fools." "It resteth now," says the "epiloguiser," "that
we render you very humble and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts
pray for the king and his family's enduring happiness, and our
country's perpetual welfare. _Si placet, plaudite._" So also the
dancer entrusted with the delivery of the epilogue to Shakespeare's
"Second Part of King Henry IV.
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