story is a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich, all the ladies dying for him, all bursting to know who he is; but he goes by no other name than Mr. H.: a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you an idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you, that, after much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out, Hogsflesh,' all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change their name for him: that's the idea: how flat it is here! but how whimsical in the farce! And only think how hard upon me it is, that the ship is despatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after;- but all China will ring of it by-and-by."

Would that Lamb's joyous and exultant anticipations of "Mr. H."'s success had proved true! But, instead of being greeted with the applause of pit and gallery, which would have stood Elia instead of "the unheard voice of posterity," the piece was hissed and hooted from the stage.

In a letter to Manning, written early in 1808, he thus, half humorously, half pathetically, describes the reception the town gave "Mr. H.”: —

"So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury-Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'T was like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise

smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them."

If his farce had been-what "Gentleman Lewis," who was present on the night of its performance, said, if he had had it, he would have made it, by a few judicious curtailments - "the most popular little thing that had been brought out for some time," Lamb would not have written the following article.

"ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE

THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT
OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS.

"MR. REFLECTOR, -I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces suffered at Drury-Lane Theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned.

"Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal. The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then the public. Like him, I was con

demned because I could write.

"Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savored a little of harshness and of the summum jus. The

public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the 'Vindictive Man,' and some pieces of that nature, and it retained through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said: Sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.

"Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put a favorable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case; only our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense'; that was all.

"But against the manner in which the public on these occasions think fit to deliver their disapprobation I must and ever will protest.

"Sir, imagine - but you have been present at the damning of a piece, those who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine a vast theatre, like that which Drury Lane was, before it was a heap of dust and ashes, (I insult not over its fallen greatness; let it recover itself when it can for me, let it lift up its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it; hic castus artemque repono,)—a the atre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting sounds, shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fullingmills, or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which Saint Anthony listened to in the wilderness.

man voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese, and irrational, venomous snakes?

"I never shall forget the sounds on my night; I never before that time fully felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the Paradise Lost' meets with from the critics in the pit, at the final close of his Tragedy upon the Human Race, though that, alas! met with too much success:

'from innumerable tongues,

A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming

now

With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbæna dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear,
And Dipsas.'

"For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes place at what is called the damnation of a piece, - and properly so called; for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first piece was that so suffered. After this none can doubt the propriety of the appellation.

"But, Sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering denunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial mistake of a poor author who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets, for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that, -it does, I own, seem to me a species of retributive justice far too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobration.

"Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their

skulls to the audience, and seem to invite a pelting.

"Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them that they should never write again?

Seriously, Messieurs the Public, this outrageous way which you have got of expressing your displeasures is too much for the occasion. When I was deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what 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 public never writes itself. Not but something very like it took place at the time of the O.-P. differences. The placards which were nightly exhibited were, properly speaking, the composition of the public. The public wrote them, the public applauded them, and precious morceaux of wit and eloquence they were, -except some few, of a better quality, which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic writers. After this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should be a little slow in condemning what others do for it.

--

"As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra, which calls itself the public, into the component parts of which it is complicated, head and tail,' and seeing how many varieties of the snake kind it can afford.

"First, there is the Common English Snake. This is that part of the auditory who are always the majority at damnations, but who, having no critical venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear others hiss, and then join in for company.

"The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.

will not give a plain man leave to enjoy an evening's entertainment, but, with their frothy jargon and incessant finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him in his own defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with these. When this creature springs his rattle, you would think, from the noise it makes, there was something in it; but you have only to examine the instrument from which the noise proceeds, and you will find it typical of a critic's tongue, a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most contemptible part of the creature's body.

"The Whip-Snake. This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the newspapers.

"The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnæus. Under this head may be classed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly are not) who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like Obstinate in John Bunyan, positively thrust their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a word of what is coming, though perhaps the very next act may be composed in a style as different as possible, and be written quite to their own tastes. These Adders refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence.

"I should weary you, and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are creatures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt pits and low grounds.

"I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a club to which I have the honor to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our lives what is called damned. We meet on the anniversaries of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense

"That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we think fit.

"That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, obtuse to everything but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and not vice versa. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musæus, and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That, in particular, in the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be; for, though along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music, it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice.

"That the terms 'Courteous Reader' and Candid Auditors,' as having given rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they conferred upon them some right, which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded.

"These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to Esculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candor and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish.

"The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have been fairly damned. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that has but languished its night or two, and

WHEN God's curse forsook my country, it fell on me. I had been young and heroic; I had fought well; what portion of the clock-work of Fate had been allotted me I had utterly performed. Twelve years ago I became a man and strove for my country's freedom; now she has attained her heights without me, and I - what am I? A shapeless hulk, that stays in the shadow, and that hates the world and the people of the world, and verily the God above the world!

not have died when swords swept their lightnings about me, when the glorious thunders of battle rolled around and sulphurous blasts enveloped, when the air was full of the bray of bugle and beat of drum, of shout and shriek, exultation and agony? Why not have gone with the crowd of souls reeking with daring and desire ? Why, oh, why thus left alone to wither? Why still hangs that sun above me, yet wrapt and veiled and utterly obscured in thick, murk mists of sorrow and despair?

Peace!-let me tell you my story. Since Father Anselmo-like all youth, whether under cowl, cap, or crown— was a Liberal at heart, I had not wanted counsel; but when I had told him all my yearnings and aspirations, had bared to him the throbbings of my very thought, and he had replied in that one blessed word, I hastened away. There were none to whom I should say farewell; I