certainly equal to his own, might as easily do the whole process himself. But the pressure of pecuniary difficulty was great, and a fortnight later he is telling Coleridge that the experiment shall at least be tried. "As to the translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please. If they go down, I will try more. In fact, if I got, or could but get, fifty pounds a year only, in addition to what I have, I should live in affluence." By dint of hard work, much against the grain, he contrived during the year that followed to make double the hoped-for sum; but humour and fancy produced to order could not but fail sooner or later. It came to an end some time in 1803. "The best and the worst to me," he writes to Manning in this year (Lamb rarely dates a letter), “is that I have given up two guineas a week at the Post, and regained my health and spirits, which were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsatisfied. Ludisti satis, tempus abire est. I must cut closer, that's all."

While writing for the newspapers, he had not allowed worthier ambitions to cool. He was still thinking of success in very different fields. As early as the year 1799 he had submitted to Coleridge and Southey a five-act drama in blank verse, with the title of Pride's Cure, afterwards changed to John Woodvil. His two friends had urgently dissuaded him from publishing, and though he followed this advice, he had not abandoned the hope of seeing it one day upon the stage, and at Christmas of that year had sent it to John Kemble, then manager of Drury Lane. Nearly a year later, having heard nothing in the mean time. from the theatre on the subject, he applied to Kemble to know his fate. The answer was returned that the manuscript was lost, and Lamb had to furnish a second copy.

Later, Kemble went so far as to grant the author a personal interview, but the final result was that the play was declined as unsuitable.

That Lamb should ever have dreamed of any other result may well surprise even those who have some experience of the attitude of a young author to his first drama. John Woodvil has no quality that could have made its success on the stage possible. It shows no trace of constructive skill, and the character-drawing is of the crudest. By a strange perverseness of choice, Lamb laid the scene of his drama, written in a language for the most part closely imitated from certain Elizabethan models, in the period of the Restoration, and with a strange carelessness introduced side by side with the imagery and rhythm of Fletcher and Massinger a diction often ludicrously incongruous. Perhaps the most striking feature of the play, regarded as a serious effort, is the entire want of keeping in the dialogue. Certain passages have been often quoted, such as that on which Lamb evidently prided himself most, describing the amusements of the exiled baronet and his son in the forest of Sherwood:

"To see the sun to bed, and to arise

Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,

Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.

Go eddying round, and small birds, how they fare,
When mother autumn fills their beaks with corn
Filched from the careless Amalthea's horn."

They serve to show how closely Lamb's fancy and his ear were attuned to the music of Shakspeare and Shak

speare's contemporaries; but the illusion is suddenly broken by scraps of dialogue sounding the depths of bathos:

"Servant.-Gentlemen, the fireworks are ready.

First Gent.-What be they?

Lovell. The work of London artists, which our host has provided in honour of this day."

Or by such an image as that with which the play concludes, of the penitent John Woodvil, kneeling on the "hassock" in the "family - pew" of St. Mary Ottery, in the "sweet shire of Devon."

Lamb was not deterred by his failure with the managers from publishing his drama. It appeared in a small duodecimo in 1802; and when, sixteen years later, he included it in the first collected edition of his writings, dedicated to Coleridge, he was still able to look with a parent's tenderness upon this child of his early fancy. "When I wrote John Woodvil," he says, "Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a first love, and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge?" This expresses, in fact, the real significance of the achievement. Though it is impossible seriously to weigh the merits of John Woodvil as a drama, it is yet of interest as the result of the studies of a young man of fine taste and independent judgment in a field of English literature which had lain long unexplored. Within a few years Charles Lamb was to contribute, by more effective methods, to the revived study of the Elizabethan drama, but in the mean time he was doing something, even in John Woodvil, to overthrow the despotic conventionalities of eighteenth-century "poetic diction," and to reaccustom the ear to the very different harmonies of an older time.

*

John Woodvil was noticed in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1803. Lamb might have been at that early date too insignificant, personally, to be worth the powder and shot of Jeffrey and his friends, but he was already known as the associate of Coleridge and Southey, and it was this circumstance—as the concluding words of the review rather unguardedly admit-that marked his little volume for the slaughter. He had been already held up to ridicule in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin, as sharing the revolutionary sympathies of Coleridge and Southey. It is certainly curious that Lamb, who never "meddled with politics," home or foreign, any more than the Anti-Jacobin's knife-grinder himself, should have his name embalmed in that periodical as a leading champion of French Socialism:

"Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co.,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepeaux."

There was abundant opportunity in Lamb's play for the use of that scourge which the Edinburgh Review may be Isaid to have first invented as a critical instrument. Plot and characters, and large portions of the dialogue, lent themselves excellently to the purposes of critical banter, and it was easy to show that Lamb had few qualifications for the task he had undertaken. As he himself observed in his essay on Hogarth: "It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and to pass over in silence what they do." It was open to the reviewer to note, as even Lamb's friend Southey noted, the "exquisite silliness of the story," but it did not enter into his plan to detect, as Southey had done, the "exquisite beauty" of much of the poetry. The reason why it is worth while to dwell for a moment on this forgotten re

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view (not, by the way, by Jeffrey, although Lamb's friends. seem generally to have attributed it to the editor's own hand) is that it shows how much Lamb was in advance of his reviewer in familiarity with our older literature. The review is a piece of pleasantry, of which it would be absurd to complain, but it is the pleasantry of an ignorant man. The writer affects to regard the play as a specimen of the primeval drama. "We have still among us,” he says, men of the age of Thespis," and declares that "the tragedy of Mr. Lamb may indeed be fairly considered as supplying the first of those lost links which connect the improvements of Eschylus with the commencement of the art." Talfourd expresses wonder that a young critic should "seize on a little eighteen-penny book, simply printed, without any preface: make elaborate merriment of its outline, and, giving no hint of its containing one profound thought or happy expression, leave the reader of the review at a loss to suggest a motive for noticing such vapid absurdities." But there is really little cause for such wonder. The one feature of importance in the little drama is that it here and there imitates with much skill the imagery and the rhythm of a family of dramatists whom the world had been content entirely to forget for nearly two centuries. There is no reason to suppose that Lamb's reviewer had any acquaintance with these dramatists. The interest of the review consists in the evidence it affords of a general ignorance, even among educated men, which Lamb was to do more than any man of his time to dispel. The passage about the sports in the forest, which set William Godwin (who met with it somewhere as an extract) searching through Beaumont and Fletcher to find, probably conveyed no idea whatever, to the Edinburgh Reviewer, save that which he honestly confessed, that here was