would remember having heard him mention. However ardent it may have been, it was presumably without hope of requital, for Lamb admits that he had never spoken to the lady in his life. He may have met her daily in his walks to and from the office, or have watched her week by week on her way to that Quakers' meeting he has so lovingly described elsewhere. And now, only a month before, she had died, and Lamb's true vein, unspoiled by squibs and paragraphs written to order for party journals, flows once more in its native purity and sweetness: "When maidens such as Hester die A month or more hath she been dead, To think upon the wormy bed "A springy motion in her gait, Of pride and joy no common rate I know not by what name beside She did inherit. "Her parents held the Quaker rule A waking eye, a prying mind, A heart that stirs, is hard to bind: A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind Ye could not Hester. "My sprightly neighbour, gone before To that unknown and silent shore, These charming verses are themselves a “sweet forewarning" of happier times to come. New friends were at hand, and new interests in literature were soon to bring a little cheerful relief to the monotony of the Temple lodging. We have already heard something of a play in preparation. The first intimation of Lamb's resolve to tempt dramatic fortune once again is in a letter to Wordsworth, in September, 1805. "I have done nothing," he writes, "since the beginning of last year, when I lost my newspaper job, and having had a long idleness, I must do something, or we shall get very poor. Sometimes I think of a farce, but hitherto all schemes have gone off; an idle brag or two of an evening, vapouring out of a pipe, and going off in the morning; but now I have bid farewell to my 'sweet enemy' tobacco, as you will see in the next page, I shall perhaps set nobly to work. Hang work!" He did set to work, in good heart, during the six months that followed. Mary Lamb's letters contain frequent references to the farce in progress, and before Midsummer, 1806, it was completed, and accepted by the proprietors of Drury Lane. The farce was the celebrated Mr. H. No episode of Lamb's history is better known than the production, and the summary failure, of this jeu d'esprit. That it failed is no matter for surprise, and most certainly none for regret. Though it had the advantage, in its lead ing character, of the talent of Elliston, the best light-comedian of his day, the slightness of the interest (dealing with the inconveniences befalling a gentleman who is ashamed to confess that his real name is Hogsflesh) was too patent for the best acting to contend against. Crabb Robinson, one of Lamb's more recent friends, accompanied the brother and sister to the first and only performance, and received the impression that the audience resented the vulgarity of the name, when it was at last revealed, rather than the flimsiness of the plot. But the latter is quite sufficient to account for what happened. The curtain fell amid a storm of hisses, in which Lamb is said to have taken a conspicuous share. Indeed, his genuine critical faculty must have come to his deliverance when he thus viewed his own work from the position of an outsider. He expresses no surprise at the result, after the first few utterances of natural disappointment. The mortification must have been considerable. The brother and sister had looked forward to a success. They sorely needed the money it might have brought them, and Charles' deep-seated love of all things dramatic made success in that field a much cherished hope. But he bore his failure, as he bore all his disappointments in life, with a cheerful sweetness. He writes to Hazlitt: "Mary is a little cut at the ill-success of Mr. H., which came out last night and failed. I know you'll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces." It must be admitted that Mr. H. is not much better in reading than it was found in the acting. Its humour, consisting largely of puns and other verbal pleasantries, exhibits little or nothing of Lamb's native vein, and the dialogue is too often laboriously imitated from the conventional comedy-dialogue then in vogue. But even had this been different, the lack of constructive ability already shown in John Woodvil must have made success as a writer for the stage quite beyond his reach. He was on safer ground, though not perhaps working so thoroughly con amore, in another literary enterprise of this time. In 1805 he had made the acquaintance of William Hazlitt, and Hazlitt had introduced him to William Godwin. Godwin had started, as his latest venture, a series of books for children, to which he himself contributed under the name of Edward Baldwin. Lamb, writing to his friend Manning, in May, 1806, thus describes a joint task in which he and his sister were engaged in connexion with this scheme: "She is doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakspeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six are already done by her, to wit, The Tempest, Winter's Tale, Midsummer Night, Much Ado, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline; and the Merchant of Venice is in forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth, and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It's to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you'd think." Mary herself supplements this account in a way that makes curiously vivid to us the homely realities of their joint life. She writes about the same time: "Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet. You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena, in the Midsummer Night's Dream; or rather like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it." Writing these Tales from Shakspeare was no doubt task-work to the brother and sister, but it was task-work on a congenial theme, and one for which they had special qualifications. They had, to start with, a profound and intimate acquaintance with their original, which set them at an infinite distance from the usual compilers of such books for children. They had, moreover, command of a style, Wordsworthian in its simplicity and purity, that enabled them to write down to the level of a child's understanding, without any appearance of condescension. The very homeliness of the style may easily divert attention from the rare critical faculty, the fine analysis of character, that marks the writers' treatment of the several plays. It is no wonder that the publisher in announcing a subsequent edition was able to boast that a book designed for young children had been found suitable for those of more advanced age. There is, indeed, no better introduction to the study of Shakspeare than these Tales-no better initiation into the mind of Shakespeare, and into the subtleties of his language and rhythm. For the ear of both Charles and Mary Lamb had been trained on the cadences of Elizabethan English, and they were able throughout to weave the very words of Shakspeare into their narrative without producing any effect of discrepancy between the old and the new. The Tales were published in 1807, and were a success, a second edition appearing in the following year. One result of this success was a commission from Godwin to make another version of a great classic for the benefit of children, the story of the Odyssey. Lamb was no Greek scholar, but he had been, like Keats, stirred by the rough vigor of Chapman's translation. "Chapman is divine," he said afterwards to Bernard Barton, "and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity." And the few |