Event Comment: By Particular Desire of several Ladies of Quality. Positively the last Night. [Intended as satire on the
Reverend John Henley's Oratory (eccentric preacher, 1692-1756) and as a puff for
The Midwife or
Old Woman's Magazine, edited by
Christopher Smart and
John Newberry, 1751-53.
The Old Woman's Oratory written and produced by Smart. See the
Gentleman's Magazine, 1752, p. 43; and
Horace Walpole's letter to
Montagu 12 May 1752, as follows: It appeared the lowest buffoonery in the world, even to me who am used to my uncle Horace. There is a bad oration to ridicule, what is too like, Orator Henley; all the rest is perverted music. There is a man who plays so nimbly on the kettle drums, that he has reduced that noisy instrument to be an object of
sight; for if you don't see the tricks with his hands, it is no better than ordinary. Another play on a violin and trumpet together; another mimics a bagpipe with a
German flute, and makes it full if disagreeable. There is an admired dulcimer, a favourite saltbox and a really curious Jew's Harp. Two or three men intend to persuade you that they play on a broomstick, which is drolly brought in, carefully shrouded in a case, so as to be mistaken for a bassoon or bass viol, but they succeed in nothing but the action. The last fellow imitates farting and curtseying to a
French horn. There are twenty medley overtures, and a man who speaks a prologue and epilogue, in which he counterfeits all the actors and singers upon earth' (
The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, IX, p. 131). [See 3 Dec. 1751.