During his stay in the French capital in 1779, John Moore, the Glasgow physician and friend of Tobias Smollett, did not miss the opportunity to attend a few performances at the Théâtre-Françgais, and in discussing the behaviour of the pit or parterre, he drew his readers' attention to the fact that in a society where free comment on public policy was not exactly encouraged, it served as a useful, though unattributable, source of popular opinion; for, ‘by the emphatic applause they bestow on particular passages of the pieces represented at the theatre, they convey to the monarch the sentiments of the nation respecting the measures of his government’. Moore gives no precise instances, but it is clear what he is referring to, and there were plenty of other contemporary observers to testify to the growing habit, among the young men standing or sitting jammed up together in the pit, of making applications, that is to say, seizing on a line or a couplet in a well-known play and drawing attention, by shouts and clapping, to its applicability to some current crisis. The guard in the theatre was powerless to prevent an unforeseen burst of applause coming to punctuate a maxim or simple phrase spoken from the stage which was perceived by the impertinent groundlings as being highly pertinent to some matter of burning public import; and all the authorities could do subsequently by way of reprisal was to ban future performances of the play or at the very least to insist on the removal of the dangerous words.