crime of great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me
seemed to feel the offence as personal to himself, as something which
public interest and private feelings alike called upon him in the
strongest possible manner to stigmatize with infamy.

"The Romans, it Is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler
method of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a
humane and equitable nation. They left the _furca_ and the _patibulum_,
the axe and the rods, to great offenders: for these minor and (if I may
so term them) extra-moral offences _the bent thumb_ was considered as a
sufficient sign of disapprobation,--_vertere pollicem_; as _the pressed
thumb, premere pollicem_, was a mark of approving.

"And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method,
a correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence. For, as
the action of writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the
retroversion or bending back of that joint did not unaptly point to the
opposite of that action, implying that it was the will of the audience
that the author should _write no more:_ a much more significant, as
well as more humane, way of expressing-that desire, than our custom of
hissing, which is altogether senseless and indefensible. Nor do we find
that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this lenity, of any
tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have thought
themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for their
applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to have had the
author, as we should express it, completely _under finger and thumb_.

"The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public
are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility
of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries: for the