In his early days there had been such things as "pit orders." "Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished them!" he exclaims.

Hazlitt greatly preferred the pit to the boxes.

Not simply because the fierceness of his democratic sentiments induced in him a scorn of the visitors to the boxes, as wrapped up in themselves, fortified against impressions, weaned from all superstitious belief in dramatic illusions, taking so little interest in all that was interesting, disinclined to discompose their cravats or their muscles, "except when some gesticulation of Mr.
Kean, or some expression of an author two hundred years old, violated the decorum of fashionable indifference." These were good reasons for his objection to the boxes.

But he preferred the pit, in truth, because he could there see and hear so very much better.

"We saw Mr.
Kean's Sir Giles Overreach on Friday night from the boxes," he writes in 1816, "and are not surprised at the incredulity as to this great actor's powers entertained by those persons who have only seen him from that elevated sphere.