f— ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ee 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 THE 
 
 DRAMATIC ESSAYS 
 
 OF 
 
 Charles Lamb 
 
 EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 r 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODD, MEAD, AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1891, 
 By Dodd, Mead, and Company. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 SHntoersitg Press: 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
 
 
 2Ef)ts Selection, 
 
 FROM THE WRITINGS OF AN AUTHOR WHOM 
 WE BOTH LOVE, IS INSCRIBED TO 
 
 LAURENCE HUTTON, 
 by his friend and fellow-worker, 
 
 The Editor. 
 
 g;..
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 / 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction. By Brander Matthews ... 7 
 
 £f)c Dramatic SEssags of dearies ILamb. 
 
 My First Play 35 
 
 On Some of the Old Actors 45 
 
 The Old Actors 64 
 
 On the Acting of Munden 68 
 
 Mukden's Farewell 72 
 
 The Death of Munden 78 
 
 Autobiography of Mr. Munden 81 
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston .... 86 
 
 To the Shade of Elliston 100 
 
 Ellistoniana 105 
 
 The Religion of Actors 115 
 
 On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres 121 
 John Kemble and Godwin's Tragedy of 
 
 "Antonio" 133 
 
 Stage Illusion 141 
 
 On the Artificial Comedy of the Last 
 
 Century 148
 
 vi Contents. ■ 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare 163 
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers contempo- 
 rary with Shakspeare 197 
 
 Barbara S 231 
 
 Criticisms : — 
 
 Olympic Theatre 241 
 
 Miss Kelly at Bath 245 
 
 •The Jovial Crew' 249 
 
 'The Hypocrite' 252 
 
 New Pieces at the Lyceum 255 
 
 Notes 26
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 CHARLES LAMB AND THE THEATRE. 
 
 A MERICANS take a peculiar delight in the 
 ^"*- humour of Charles Lamb, for he is one of 
 the foremost of American humourists. On the 
 roll which is headed by Benjamin Franklin, and 
 on which the latest signatures were made by 
 Mark Twain and Mr. Bret Harte, no name 
 shines more brightly than Lamb's. By the cap- 
 tious it may be objected that he was not an 
 American at all ; but surely this should not be 
 remembered to his discredit, — it was a mere 
 accident of birth. Elia could have taken out 
 his naturalization papers at any time. It is re- 
 lated that once a worthy Scotchman, comment- 
 ing on the well-known fact that all the greatest 
 British authors had come from the far side of 
 the Tweed, and citing in proof thereof the 
 names of Burns and Byron and Scott, was met 
 by the query whether Shakspeare was a Scotch- 
 man also. Reluctantly enough it was acknow- 
 ledged that he was not, — although he had 
 parts not unworthy of that honour. So it is
 
 8 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 with Charles Lamb. He was an Englishman; 
 nay, more, a Cockney, — indeed, a Cockney 
 of the strictest sect ; but he had parts not un- 
 worthy of American adoption. He had humour, 
 high and dry, like that which England is wont 
 to import from America in the original package. 
 At times this humour has the same savor of irrev- 
 erence toward things held sacred by common- 
 place humanity. Charles Lamb never hesitated 
 to speak disrespectfully of the Equator, and he 
 was forever girding at the ordinary degrees of 
 latitude. His jests were as smooth as they 
 seemed reckless. He had a gift of impertur- 
 bable exaggeration ; his inventive mendacity 
 was beyond all praise ; he took a proper pride 
 in his ingenious fabrications, — and these are all 
 characteristics of the humour to be found freely 
 along the inlets and by the hills of New England 
 and on the prairies and in the sierras of the 
 boundless West. He had a full sense of his 
 high standing as a matter-of-lie man. More- 
 over, he had a distaste for the straight way and 
 the broad road, and he had a delight in a quiet 
 tramp along the by-path which pleased him per- 
 sonally, — a quality relished in a new country, 
 where a man may blaze out a track through the 
 woods for himself, and where academic and 
 even scholastic methods have hard work to hold
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 9 
 
 their own. Even his mercantile training, in so 
 far as it might be detected, was in his favour in 
 a land whose merchants are princes. And be- 
 hind the mask were the features of a true man, 
 shrewd, keen, and quick in his judgments ; one 
 who might make his way in the New World as 
 in the Old. There is something in the man, as 
 in the writer, which lets him keep step to a 
 Yankee tune. Wordsworth wrote, — 
 
 And you must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love. 
 
 The Americans loved Lamb, early, as they did 
 Carlyle and Praed, — to name two, as dissimilar 
 as may be, of the many British writers who have 
 found their first full appreciation across the 
 Atlantic. Charles Lamb's only acted play met 
 in America a far different fate from that which 
 befell it in England ; and I have a notion that 
 his writings were aforetime, and are to-day, 
 more widely read in these United States than 
 in Great Britain. 
 
 "Truly was our excellent friend of the genuine 
 line of Yorick," said Leigh Hunt; and although 
 the phrase is not altogether happy, it serves to 
 recall two of Lamb's chief characteristics, — 
 his humour, and his love of the stage in general 
 and of Shakspeare in particular. That Lamb
 
 io Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 was fond of the theatre admits of no dispute, 
 though he was wont to chide his mistress freely. 
 For Shakspeare he had an affection as deep as 
 it was broad. Whenever these two passions 
 crossed each other, the theatre must needs to 
 the wall, — as in the suggestive and paradoxical 
 essay ' On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, con- 
 sidered with Reference to their Fitness for 
 Stage Representation.' Yet that essay yields in 
 charm to Elia's delightful papers ' On Some of 
 the Old Actors,' ' On the Acting of Munden,' 
 and ' On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Cen- 
 tury.' This last essay it was which Macaulay 
 thought worth while to refute solemnly and at 
 length. I have an idea that if Lamb could have 
 read this posthumous refutation, he would have 
 longed to get his hands on Macaulay's bumps to 
 examine his phrenological development. 
 
 Lamb's humour has an Oriental extravagance 
 to be expected in one who signed himself ' Of 
 the India House ; ' but his phrase had always 
 a clerkly and clean-shaven precision not a little 
 deceptive. In him, as in any other humourist, 
 unusual allowance must be made for the per- 
 sonal equation. A humourist sees things as no 
 one else does. He notes a tiny truth, and he 
 likes it, and straightway he raises it to the n ,h , 
 and, lo 1 it is a paradox. He never meant seri-
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. n 
 
 ously that the Restoration Comedies are sound 
 and wholesome works, as refreshing in their 
 austere morality as the Fathers. Nor does he 
 believe that it is a sin to set Shakspeare's plays 
 on the stage, though a simple-minded reader 
 might think so. The light plays of Wycherley 
 and of Farquhar did not offend Charles Lamb, 
 and the wit delighted him. To him the come- 
 dies of Shakspeare lost somewhat of their range 
 and elevation when seen across the footlights 
 of the stage. A true lover of Shakspeare from 
 his youth up, he could see more in his mind's 
 eye than the most lavish and learned of stage- 
 managers could give him. But there are rela- 
 tively few students of Shakspeare, and the mass 
 of common humanity had no mind's eye ; it can 
 see only with the eye of the body, and if its 
 sluggish imagination is to stir at all it must be 
 moved by physical means. In the theatre alone 
 is found the sovran magic which makes the 
 familiar yet shadowy figures of Shakspeare live 
 and move and start from the printed page into 
 actual existence in the flesh. 
 
 Lamb's liking for the drama and for all things 
 pertaining to the drama was second only to his 
 love for Shakspeare. The ever-delightful ' Tales 
 from Shakspeare,' over which he toiled de- 
 spairingly, — little masterpieces which amply
 
 12 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 repaid his travail, — are scarcely more labors of 
 love than the ' Specimens of English Dramatic 
 Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare.' 
 To Lamb, more than to any other, is due the 
 revival of interest in the Elizabethan drama- 
 tists. It was the fresh discovery of these old 
 dramatic poets that gave him the impulse to 
 write 'John Woodvil.' In the modern drama 
 
 ' even the inferior contemporary farces were not 
 despised, and some of them are remembered 
 now only because Lamb saw Munden act in 
 them. Once or twice he took up the pen of the 
 regular dramatic critic to bear witness against 
 the play of the hour. Even then he is as 
 gentle almost as when he recalls the comedians 
 of an earlier day ; he was not one of those 
 fierce critics who, in Douglas Jerrold's phrase, 
 review a play ' as an east wind reviews an 
 apple-tree.' The acted drama, the actual stage 
 of the present, was always of interest to Lamb, 
 and served not seldom to suggest happy illus- 
 
 iirations for his notes on the poetic drama of 
 the past. 
 
 It is difficult for any one who has had to read 
 much of the writings of other dramatic critics to 
 speak of Charles Lamb's essays on theatrical 
 subjects without falling into the extravagance of 
 eulogy, the very midsummer madness of praise.
 
 TJmrles Lamb and the Theatre. 13 
 
 There were in his day two other lovers of the 
 theatre, able men both of them, having knowl- 
 edge of the stage and insight and imagination, — 
 Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. But what are they 
 beside Charles Lamb ? Coleridge bids us " com- 
 pare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on 
 Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round imi- 
 tations of them ; " and to Leigh Hunt such a 
 comparison would be strll less favourable. In- 
 deed, there is but one who has written about 
 the English stage at all worthy to be set beside 
 Charles Lamb, and he is the author of an 
 ' Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber.' Like 
 Boswell, Cibber was personally contemptible 
 enough ; and like Boswell, he had the unknown 
 art to make a great book, unequalled of its kind. 
 There are two grand portrait galleries of the 
 British theatre, and it is not easy to say which 
 is the more artful a painter of players, — Colley 
 Cibber or Charles Lamb. Besides the full- 
 length portraits of Betterton, Mrs. Barry, and 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle, — speaking likenesses every 
 one of them, soundly drawn and mellow in color, 
 as we see them in the ' Apology,' — may be 
 placed the group from 'Twelfth Night, 1 which 
 we find in the ' Essays of Elia,' — Mrs. Jordan 
 as Viola, Bensley as Malvolio, Dodd as Sir 
 Andrew, and Dickey Suett as the Clown. And
 
 14 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 Cibber of course was wholly without the bound- 
 less humour that has depicted for us a few of 
 the five hundred faces of Munden, and cap- 
 tured on canvas a glimpse of Elliston, " joyousest 
 of once embodied spirits. " 
 
 Although only one of Lamb's dramatic pieces 
 got itself acted at last, all of them were written 
 for the stage. He never gave in to the heresy 
 of the unactable drama. His plays were in- 
 tended to be played, as Shakspeare's were, and 
 Marlowe's and Chapman's, and those of the 
 other great men whom he loved and lived with. 
 To him, as to them, a play which could not be 
 played was no play at all. A ' Drama for the 
 Closet' is surely a patent absurdity, — bon a 
 mettre au cabinet, in Moliere's phrase. Lamb 
 was too keen-sighted in matters of literature not 
 to know that form is of the essence of art, 
 and that therefore every literary effort must con- 
 form to its purpose. He would never have 
 accepted the latter-day theory that there are two 
 kinds of drama, — that intended to be acted, and 
 that not intended to be acted. He was fond of 
 paradox, no doubt ; but it would be a paradox 
 too much for even his stomach that a string of 
 decasyllabic dialogues, lacking the relief, the 
 colour, and the movement needed by the stage, 
 should declare itself to be a drama.
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 15 
 
 Unfortunately, the serious drama of Lamb's 
 day was empty and inept ; and so he went back 
 for his model to the Elizabethans. He did not 
 consider that the change in the physical condi- 
 tions of the theatre forced a change in the form 
 of the drama. The turbulent throng which stood 
 of an afternoon in the uncovered pit of the 
 Globe Theatre to see a boy Lady Macbeth act 
 before a curtain declaring itself to be a royal 
 palace, was very different from the decorous 
 audience which sat in Drury Lane to gaze in 
 wonder at the decorations and illuminations 
 contrived by De Lutherbourg for the ' Christ- 
 mas Tale ' of David Garrick. The stage has its 
 changing evolutions, like society ; but Lamb, 
 though he might confess the change, did not feel 
 it. " Hang the age I " he cried ; " I '11 write 
 for antiquity." 
 
 Now, Shakspeare if he were alive would not 
 write for antiquity. As a practical man, he 
 would make skilful use of every modern im- 
 provement. Knowing how needful it is to 
 catch the eye of the public, he would turn to 
 advantage all later devices of scenery and stage- 
 mechanism and electric-lighting. Indeed, I 
 doubt not that were Shakspeare writing for the 
 stage nowadays there would not be wanting 
 dramatic critics to say that he was too " sensa-
 
 1 6 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 tional ! " and to intimate that he catered to the 
 taste of the gallery. Of a truth — if the digres- 
 sion may be pardoned — ' Hamlet ' is a very 
 sensational play ; it has a ghost and a duel and 
 no end of fighting, and an indiscriminate slaughter 
 at the end ; and before that consummation a 
 young lady goes mad in white muslin, and there 
 is a clown at the burying, and a fight over her 
 grave. It has something more and other than 
 these physical facts ; it has that within which 
 passeth show. But it has the show-part — the 
 mere appeal to the eye — as very few plays 
 have. And in this quality ' Macbeth ' and 
 ' Romeo and Juliet ' are but little inferior to 
 ' Hamlet.' They could, every one of them, be 
 acted in dumb show before a company of 
 miners just out from the mouth of the coal-pit, 
 and the story would be followed with interest. 
 
 This is what Theophile Gautier had in mind 
 when he said that the skeleton of every good 
 drama is a pantomime. Action, of course, is 
 only the bare bones of a play, and must be cov- 
 ered with the living flesh of poetry. There can 
 be no true life in a piece unless it has a solid 
 skeleton, — a play may even exist with but a 
 scant clothing of verbiage, as we may see in any 
 vulgar melodrama ; but the finest poetry cannot 
 give life to a drama unless the bones of its story
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. \y 
 
 are well knit and well jointed. This is what the 
 Elizabethans intuitively understood, in spite of 
 the rudeness of their stage. This is what Lamb 
 seems never to have been able to achieve. In 
 externals, ' John Woodvil ' is at times strangely 
 like a minor work of a minor fellow-dramatist of 
 Shakspeare. We do not wonder that Godwin, 
 happening unawares on the lines — 
 
 To see the sun to bed and to arise, 
 
 Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes — 
 
 came to Lamb to ask in which of the old drama- 
 tists they might be found. In internal structure, 
 however, there is nothing Elizabethan in ' John 
 Woodvil ; ' there is no backbone of action, — the 
 story is invertebrate. 
 
 " Lamb knew his own deficiencies in this re- 
 spect, though he did not recognize their extent 
 or their importance. He wrote to Mrs. Shelley, 
 in 1827, while he was engaged on ' The Pawn- 
 broker's Daughter/ that he could do the dialogue 
 readily enough^' but the damned plot, — I be- 
 lieve I must omit it altogether. The scenes 
 come one after another like geese, not mar- 
 shalled like cranes or a Hyde Park review. . . . 
 I want some Howard Payne to sketch a skeleton 
 of artfully-succeeding scenes through a whole 
 play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery- 
 
 2
 
 1 8 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 book, I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, 
 and the like trifles ; to lay in the dead colours, — 
 I 'd Titianesque 'em up ; to mark the channel in 
 a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), 
 and where tears should course, I 'd draw the 
 water down ; to say where a joke should come 
 in, or a pun be left out ; to bring my personae 
 on and off like a Beau Nash, and I 'd Franken- 
 stein them there ; to bring three together on the 
 stage at once, — they are so shy with me that I 
 can get no more than two, and there they stand 
 "until it is the time, without being the season, to 
 withdraw them." 
 
 This is a free~confession that Lamb did not 
 know the rudiments of the playwright's trade. 
 Bating a jot here and there for the exaggeration 
 of the humourist, we may accept this account of 
 his failings as fairly exact. But though he could 
 not help himself, he could give excellent advice 
 to his neighbour. William Godwin did not 
 lose heart after the untimely taking off of 
 his ' Antonio,' most humourously chronicled by 
 Lamb. He got ready another tragedy, which 
 Kemble declined ; and he sketched out a third, 
 which was submitted to Lamb for suggestions. 
 In these Lamb was fertile ; and though the seed 
 he dropped fell on stony ground, much of it was 
 worthy of a richer soil. There is a letter of his
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 19 
 
 'wherein he develops out of his friend's feeble 
 plot a strong situation, almost identical with the 
 
 second act of the ' Lucrece Borgi a ' of Victo r; . 
 
 Hugo. And in a preceding letter he had hit upon 
 a situation very like that on which turns the plot 
 of the operatic J„ La Favorita^- These two letters 
 of Lamb's should be studied by all who seek for 
 success on the stage. They are full not only of 
 that criticism of life which is the only true criti- 
 cism of literature, but of a knowledge of stage- 
 devices, and of the means whereby an audience 
 may be taken captive, very remarkable in one 
 who could not apply his precepts in his own 
 practice and for his own benefit. 
 
 Here, for instance, are a few of Lamb's dra- _ 
 matic dicta : " S,eme such way seems dramatic, Yf*' 
 V and sp eaks to thie eye— . . . These ocular scenes \ \ y 
 a f e ~ 5Q many - gr£ aT~ land mark^ __rememberable f* 
 
 ' Headlands, andTighthous es in the voyag"e! Mac-T 
 beth's witch has a good advice to a magic writer 
 what to do with his spectator : — 
 
 Show his eyes, and grieve his heart. 
 
 You must not open any of the truth to Dawley 
 by means of a letter : a letter is a feeble mes- 
 senger on the stage. Somebody, the son of his, 
 must, as a coup de main, be exasperated, and 
 obliged to tell the husband.
 
 20 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 "I am for introducing situations, sorts of 
 counterparts to situations, which have been 
 tried in other plays, — like, but not the same. 
 On this principle I recommended a friend like 
 Horatio in ' The Fair Penitent ; ' and on this 
 principle I recommend a situation like Othello 
 with relation to Desdemona's intercession to 
 Cassio. By-scenes may likewise receive hints. 
 The son may see his mother at a mask or feast, — 
 as Romeo, Juliet. The festivity of the company 
 contrasts with the strong perturbations of the 
 individual. Dawley may be told his wife's past 
 unchastity at a mask, by some witch-character, 
 — as Macbeth upon the heath, in dark sentences. 
 This may stir his brain and be forgot, but come 
 in aid of stronger proof hereafter. From this 
 what you will perhaps call whimsical way of 
 counterparting, this honest stealing and original 
 mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, remains 
 to be sucked. 
 
 "I am certain that you must mix up some 
 strong ingredients of distress to give a savour to 
 your pottage. Your hero must kill a man, or 
 do something.'" Earlier in the same letter Lamb 
 had said, " A tragic auditory wants blood " and 
 had warned Godwin not to disappoint them of 
 the tragic ending. 
 
 After all, there is nothing so very unusual in
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 21 
 
 the fact that as a critic he knew what ought to 
 be done, although as a dramatist he could not 
 do it. Charles Lamb was a genius, and William 
 Godwin was not ; but from a seat in the pit 
 'John Woodvil,' which was never acted, is 
 little or no better a play than ' Antonio,' which 
 was damned. 
 
 " I am the worst hand in the world at a plot," 
 writes Lamb to Godwin ; and we can call ' John 
 Woodvil ' to bear witness to his truth. Strictly 
 [speaking, Lamb's tragedy has no plot, although 
 it has a story. It lacks the chain of closely 
 linked incidents and situations which we are 
 wont to demand in a play. The merits of 
 
 I John Woodvil ' are poetic merely, and dra- 
 matic only by accident or in incidentals. 
 
 A word or two here as to Lamb's poetry may 
 be in place. It may be doubted whether, in 
 any strict use of the word, Lamb was a poet at 
 all ; but as I write this the memory comes back 
 of ' Hester,' and of ' The Old Familiar Faces,' 
 and of certain passages in ' John Woodvil,' and 
 it seems a harsh judgment. De Quincey, a 
 kindly critic, who credited Lamb's prose with the 
 
 II rarest felicity of finish and expression," called 
 his verse ' ' very pretty, very elegant, very tender, 
 very beautiful," but thought that he was as one to 
 whom the writing of verse "was a secondary
 
 22 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 and occasional function ; not his original and 
 natural vocation, — not an Zpyov, but a 7rapcpyoi'." 
 In short, Lamb had his poetic impulses and his 
 poetic moments, but they were not long-lived. 
 In verse, as in prose, he had always something 
 to say ; and he said it aptly, with care. His is 
 not the polished verse that reflects only the 
 empty image of its writer. Nor is he like that 
 French poet of whom Malibran used to speak, 
 and who was rich in words and poor in ideas ; 
 so the great singer described him as " trying to 
 make a vapor-bath with a single drop of water." 
 Lamb did not try to make a vapor-bath, and he 
 was never reduced to a single drop of water. 
 
 Of ' John Woodvil,' the minor characters re- 
 veal themselves in their deeds, and they are 
 grouped skilfully to set off the hero. But the 
 hero himself is not a man of action, — he is an 
 elegant conversationalist. How Kemble must 
 have longed for the fine speeches which John 
 Woodvil pours forth ! They were full of a true 
 poetry he could well appreciate, and exactly 
 suited to his cast of thought and histrionic habit. 
 Yet he was right to reject the play, even had he 
 not had ' Antonio' as a warning. There is not 
 much to act in ' Woodvil.' The man does little 
 or nothing ; he talks and stalks, and talks again ; 
 once he seems about to get drunk, which might
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 23 
 
 enliven the story somewhat, and once he rights 
 a duel ; but as he spares his adversary's life, even 
 this pleasing incident lacks finish. The end of 
 the drama is tame beyond endurance on the stage. 
 If, however, we put down our opera-glasses, and 
 read 'John Woodvil' quietly by the fireside, 
 there is much to reward us. The character of 
 Margaret is beautifully presented and developed. 
 She is akin to Shakspeare's women both in char- 
 acter and in adventure. Even the manly disguise 
 she does is a frequent Elizabethan, and indeed 
 Shakspearian, device. The dialogue throughout 
 is full of the tricks of the older dramatists, 
 especially a frequent dropping into rhyme. 
 
 At the time Lamb wrote ' John Woodvil' he 
 was in the fresh flush of his delight in the plays 
 of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Marlowe. 
 In the joy of his discovery of these poets and of 
 their fellows, and in the heat of the imitative 
 fever this gave him consciously or unconsciously, 
 he wrote, besides the tragedy, a dramatic sketch 
 called 'The Witch.' This fills a scant three pages 
 in the collected edition of his poems, but it is 
 an extraordinary production. It might be a frag- 
 ment recovered from a lost play by the author 
 of 'The Duchess of Malfy ' or 'The White 
 Devil.' It has the secret, black, and midnight 
 atmosphere. ' The Witch ' is as Elizabethan as
 
 24 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 ' John Woodvil ' in external language, and even 
 more so in the internal feeling and thought. 
 
 Two other of Lamb's dramatic attempts may 
 be dismissed briefly before taking the one play 
 of his which did undergo the ordeal by fire, and 
 was seen by the light of the lamps. One of 
 these was 'The Wife's Trial, 1 or ' The Intrud- 
 ing Widow,' which the author declared to be a 
 dramatic poem founded on Mr. Crabbe's tale 
 of ' The Confident.' It is a story in dialogue 
 rather than a play, although certain passages in 
 it might not act ill. The other theatrical effort 
 was ' The Pawnbroker's Daughter,' a farce in 
 two acts. This was founded on his own essay 
 ' On the Inconvenience of being Hanged.' It 
 was written nearly a score of years after ' Mr. 
 H.,' and from a letter to Southey it seems as 
 though there was once some hope of its being 
 acted at the Haymarket Theatre. " 'T is an 
 extravaganza,' wrote Lamb, " and like enough 
 to follow 'Mr. H.'" 'The Pawnbroker's 
 Daughter ' is a very whimsical piece. Like 
 'Mr. H.,' it was quite the equal of the average 
 farce of the first quarter of this century. To us 
 its fault is that it is not above this average. 
 Cutlet is an amusing character, and so is Pen- 
 dulous : in each of these are to be seen strokes 
 of Lamb's genuine humour. At the fall of the
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 25 
 
 curtain comes the dramatic millennium, when 
 everybody forgives and forgets, and is happy. 
 
 The one play of Lamb's known to everybody 
 is the two-act farce called '_Mj^ Hy' acted at 
 Drury Lane Theatre, December 10, 1806, and 
 damned out of hand. " These are our failures," 
 said Mr. Brummel's valet; and ' Mr. H.' is, in 
 England, always accounted one of Lamb's fail- 
 ures, and quite the worst of them. It was acted 
 but one night. The prologue was received with 
 great favour, and Lamb, who was sitting with 
 his sister in the front row of the pit, joined in 
 the applause. The curtain fell silently at the 
 end of the first act. During the second, some 
 of the spectators began to hiss, and Lamb went 
 with the crowd, " and hissed and hooted as 
 loudly as any of his neighbours." Talfourd 
 tells us that Elliston, who played ' Mr. H.,' 
 would have tried it again, but " Lamb saw at 
 once that the case was hopeless." 
 
 The farce has not been performed since in 
 England, to my knowledge, save twice only. 
 It was given at an amateur performance in 1822, 
 by the late Charles James Mathews, when the 
 young architect who was one day to be Elliston's 
 legitimate successor as the airiest of light come- 
 dians, acted in this play, which had been damned 
 at Drury Lane, and in another, which had been
 
 26 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 damned at Covent Garden, — both of these mis- 
 fortunes being duly set forth on the play-bill 
 with characteristically impudent humour. And 
 it was given once again some sixty years later at 
 the Gaiety Theatre in London, at a single mati- 
 nee, by a little band of enthusiastic young actors 
 and actresses calling themselves "The Dramatic 
 Students." And these are the only two appear- 
 ances of 'Mr. H.' on the English stage. 
 
 The consensus of British criticism is that 
 4 Mr. H. 1 was too slight for the theatre and too 
 wire-drawn in its humour, and that its failure 
 was what might have been expected. From 
 this view an American, for reasons to be given 
 hereafter, feels called upon to dissent. No 
 doubt ' Mr. H.' is not one of the author's richest 
 works ; nor, on the other hand, is it as barren 
 and bare as its critics have declared. To my 
 mind, ' Mr. H.' is not at all a bad farce, as the 
 farces of the time go : in 1806 a popular farce 
 was not required to be as substantial and as 
 instructive as a tragedy. It has scarcely action 
 enough for two acts ; but it is no slighter in plot 
 and situation than the flimsy five-act comedies of 
 Frederick Reynolds, whose ' Dramatist ' and 
 'Notoriety' were very well received in their 
 day and are carefully forgotten in ours. It is 
 "well cut," as the French phrase it, — well
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 27 
 
 planned, well laid out. In the first act is the 
 wonder, the perplexity, the guessing, the ques- 
 tioning as to the name hidden behind this single 
 aspirate. In the second we have the unexpected 
 disclosure, the general repulse, and the happy 
 deliverance. The dialogue is actable j it is fairly 
 good stage dialogue, lending itself to the art of 
 the actor ; and while it is not in Lamb's best 
 manner, it is of far higher literary quality than can 
 be found in the faded after-pieces of that time, 
 or in the more highly coloured farces of our day. 
 The fault of the piece, the fatal fault, was the 
 keeping of the secret from the spectators. To 
 keep a secret is a misconception of true theatri- 
 cal effect, an improper method of sustaining dra- 
 matic suspense. An audience is interested not 
 in what the end may be, but in the means 
 whereby that end is to be reached. Before the 
 play was done, Lamb wrote to Manning (then 
 in China) that " the whole depends on the 
 manner in which the name is brought out." If 
 the audience that night had been slyly let into 
 t'le secret in an early scene, they would have 
 had double enjoyment in watching the futile en- 
 deavours of the dramatis persona? to divine it, 
 and they would not have been disappointed when 
 Mr. Hogsflesh let slip his full patronymic. 
 Kept in ignorance, the spectators joined the
 
 28 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 actors in speculation ; and when the word was 
 revealed they were not amused by the disgust 
 of the actors, so annoyed were they that they 
 had been puzzled by a vulgar name. 
 
 Perhaps, too, there was a certain reaction after 
 the undue expectancy raised by the prologue. 
 Lamb wrote to Wordsworth that the number of 
 friends they " had in the house . . . was aston- 
 ishing." Now, nothing is so dangerous on the 
 first night of a new play as a large number of 
 the author's friends in the audience. One is 
 greatly inclined to regret that Lamb did not 
 yield to Elliston, and let the play be acted 
 again. If it had had a second chance, the in- 
 judicious friends would have been absent, and 
 the name of the hero would have been noised 
 abroad, — and once in the possession of this 
 secret, the audience might well have laughed 
 long and heartily at the hero's misadventures. 
 
 The reason that an American hazards this 
 supposition is simply that the experiment was 
 tried in these United States, and with success. 
 Three months after ' Mr. H.' was seen at Drury 
 Lane it was brought out in New York, at the 
 Park Theatre, where it was acted for the first 
 time March 16, 1807. It seems to have made 
 no great hit and no marked failure. Mr. Ire- 
 land, whose ' Records of the New York Stage '
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 29 
 
 is the model book of its kind, — erudite, ample, 
 and exact, — finds no record of the repetition 
 of ' Mr. H.' until 1824, when it was performed 
 " by desire." In 181 2, however, it had been 
 produced by the very remarkable company then 
 gathered at the Chestnut Street Theatre of 
 Philadelphia. Mr. William B. Wood, one of 
 the managers of the theatre, acted Mr. H., and 
 in the highly interesting volume of histrionic 
 autobiography which he published in \&<,Ai 
 under the title of ' Personal Recollections of 
 the Stage,' he records the result in one brief 
 and pregnant paragraph : <; Charles Lamb's ex- 
 cellent farce of ' Mr. H.' met with extraordinary 
 success, and was played an unusual number of 
 nights." Mr. Ireland has found that Wood 
 continued to act the part for ten or a dozen 
 years. I can hope only doubtfully that some 
 tidings of the better fate that befell 'Mr. H.' 
 here beside the Hudson and the Schuylkill was 
 borne across the Atlantic to the attic near the 
 Thames where Lamb received his friends of a 
 Wednesday evening ; but I fear me greatly this 
 good news did not venture on the wintry voyage, 
 or some record of his pride at this unexpected 
 reversal of the London verdict by the higher 
 court of Philadelphia would linger in one of the 
 many letters to Manning.
 
 So Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 
 
 " And so I go creeping on," Lamb wrote to 
 Manning, " since I was lamed by that cursed 
 fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into 
 the pit, something more than a year ago. How- 
 ever, I have been free of the house ever since, 
 and the house was pretty free with me on that 
 occasion." 
 
 1 It cannot be doubted that this freedom of the 
 theatre was a precious privilege to one like 
 Lamb, who had no great store of wealth. In 
 1817 he moved to Russell Street, with Drury 
 Lane in sight from the front window, and Covent 
 Garden from the back ; and here he lived for 
 six years, almost within sound of the orchestras 
 of the two patent houses, almost within hearing 
 of the double tinkle of the bell that rolled up 
 the great green curtain. It was perhaps the 
 right of admission purchased by ' Mr. H. 1 which 
 gave him the chance to study certain of the old 
 actors about whom Elia was to discourse in days 
 to come with ample humour and exact knowl- 
 edge. To the end Elliston, who had acted Mr. 
 H., remained a prime favourite. To the end 
 the play-house was for Lamb a haven of rest ; 
 for there, as he looked across the smoky flare of 
 the footlights into the mystic recesses beyond, 
 he could forget himself, and find surcease of 
 sorrow, relief from haunting dread, and recrea-
 
 Charles Lamb and the Theatre. 31 
 
 tion after "that dry drudgery at the desk's 
 dead wood." 
 
 The hour came when Lamb was released from 
 doing his daily stent of labour ; but that hour 
 took away perhaps as much as it brought. 
 Comrades began to drop by the wayside ; on 
 the stage also the ranks of the old favourites 
 were thinning ; and even behind the curtain 
 Lamb missed " the old familiar faces." The 
 hour came when Mary Lamb, who had worked 
 with him over the ' Tales from Shakspeare,' and 
 who had sat by him in the pit at the hissing of 
 'Mr. H.,' was more and more shut out from 
 him in the darkness of a clouded mind. The 
 hour came when Coleridge, the friend to whom 
 he had tied himself in youth, was taken from 
 him. The hour came to Charles Lamb at last, 
 as it must come to all of us, when — 
 
 We speak of friends and their fortunes, 
 
 And of what they did and said, 
 Till the dead alone seem living, 
 
 And the living alone seem dead. 
 
 And at last we hardly distinguish 
 Between the ghosts and the gue9ts, 
 
 And a mist and shadow of sadness 
 Steals over our merriest jests. 
 
 Brander Matthews.
 
 THE 
 
 DRAMATIC ESSAYS 
 
 OF 
 
 Charles Lamb.
 
 THE DRAMATIC ESSAYS 
 
 OF 
 
 Charles Lamb. 
 
 MY FIRST PLAY. 
 
 A T the north end of Cross Court there yet 
 -^ stands a portal, of some architectural pre- 
 tensions, though reduced to humble use, serving 
 at present for an entrance to a printing-office. 
 This old doorway, if you are young, reader, 
 you may not know was the identical pit 
 entrance to old Drury, — Garrick's Drury, — 
 all of it that is left. I never pass it without 
 shaking some forty years from off my shoul- 
 ders, recurring to the evening when I passed 
 through it to see my first play. The afternoon 
 had been wet, and the condition of our going 
 (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain 
 should cease. With what a beating heart did I 
 watch from the window the puddles, from the 
 stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate 
 the desired cessation I I seem to remember 
 the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran 
 to announce it. 
 
 We went with orders, which my godfather 
 F. had sent us. He kept the oil-shop
 
 l6 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone 
 Buildings, in Holborn. F. was a tall, grave 
 person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions 
 above his rank. He associated in those days 
 with John Palmer the comedian, whose gait 
 and bearing he seemed to copy, — if John (which 
 is quite as likely) did not rather borrow some- 
 what of his manner from my godfather. He 
 was also known to and visited by Sheridan. 
 It was to his house in Holborn that young 
 Brinsley brought his first wife on her elope- 
 ment with him from a boarding-school at Bath, 
 — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents 
 were present (over a quadrille table) when he 
 arrived in the evening with his harmonious 
 charge. From either of these connections it 
 may be inferred that my godfather could com- 
 mand an order for the then Drury Lane Theatre 
 at pleasure, — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue 
 of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy auto- 
 graph, I have heard him say, was the sole remu- 
 neration which he had received for many years' 
 nightly illumination of the orchestra and various 
 avenues of that theatre. And he was content it 
 should be so ; the honour of Sheridan's familia- 
 rity — or supposed familiarity — was better to 
 my godfather than money. 
 
 F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen, —
 
 My First Play. 37 
 
 grandiloquent, yet courteous. His delivery of 
 the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. 
 He had two Latin words almost constantly in 
 his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an 
 oilman's lips !), which my better knowledge 
 since has enabled me to correct. In strict 
 pronunciation they should have been sounded 
 vice vend — but in those young years they 
 impressed me with more awe than they would 
 now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro — in 
 his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically 
 elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like 
 verse verse. By an imposing manner, and the 
 help of these distorted syllables, he climbed 
 (but that was little) to the highest parochial 
 honours which St. Andrew's has to bestow. 
 
 He is dead ; and thus much I thought due 
 to his memory, both for my first orders (little 
 wondrous talismans ! — slight keys, and insig- 
 nificant to outward sight, but opening to me 
 more than Arabian paradises !) and, moreover, 
 that by his testamentary beneficence I came into 
 possession of the only landed property which I 
 could ever call my own, — situate near the road- 
 way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hert- 
 fordshire. When I journeyed down to take 
 possession, and planted foot on my own ground, 
 the stately habits of the donor descended upon
 
 38 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity ?) 
 with larger paces over my allotment of three 
 quarters of an acre, with its commodious man- 
 sion in the midst, with the feeling of an English 
 freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was 
 my own. The estate has passed into more 
 prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can 
 restore it. /* r ~ s - 
 
 In those days wefe pit-Orders, — beshrew the 
 uncomfortable managexjvno abolished them ! — 
 with one of these we went. I remember the 
 waiting at the door, — not that which is left, — 
 but between that and an inner door in shelter. 
 Oh, when shall I be such an expectant again 1 
 ■ — with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable 
 play-house accompaniment in those days. As 
 near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronun- 
 ciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was : 
 4 Chase some oranges ; chase some numparels ; 
 chase a bill of the play ! ' — chase pro choose. 
 But when we got in, and I beheld the green 
 curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, 
 which was soon to be disclosed, — the breath- 
 less anticipations I endured ! I had seen some- 
 thing like it in the plate prefixed to ' Troilus and 
 Cressida,' in Rowe's Shakspeare, — the tent 
 scene with Diomede ; and a sight of that plate 
 can always bring back in a measure the feeling
 
 My First Play. 39 
 
 of that evening. The boxes at that time, full 
 of well-dressed women of quality, projected 
 over the pit ; and the pilasters reaching down 
 were adorned with a glistening substance (I 
 know not what) under glass (as it seemed), 
 resembling — a homely fancy, but I judged it 
 to be — sugar-candy ; yet to my raised imagi- 
 nation, divested of its homelier qualities, it 
 appeared a glorified candy ! The orchestra- 
 lights at length rose, those ' fair Auroras ! ' 
 Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet 
 once again ; and, incapable of the anticipation, 
 I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation 
 upon the maternal lap. It rang the second 
 time. The curtain drew up, — I was not past 
 six years old, — and the play was ' Artaxerxes ! ' 
 I had dabbled a little in the Universal His- 
 tory, — the ancient part of it, — and here was 
 the court of Persia. It was being admitted to 
 a sight of the past. I took no proper interest 
 in the action going on, for I understood not its 
 import ; but I heard the word 4 Darius,' and 1 
 was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was 
 absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, 
 palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew 
 not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, 
 and the burning idol of their devotion almost 
 converted me into a worshipper. I was awe- 
 struck, and believed those significations to be
 
 40 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 something more than elemental fires. It was 
 all enchantment and a dream ; no such pleas- 
 ure has since visited me but in dreams. Har- 
 lequin's invasion followed, — where, I remember, 
 the transformation of the magistrates into reve- 
 rend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave 
 historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own 
 head to be as sober a verity as the legend of 
 Saint Denys. 
 
 The next play to which I was taken was the 
 'Lady of the Manor,' — of which, with the excep- 
 tion of some scenery, very faint traces are left 
 in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime 
 called ' Lun's Ghost,' — a satiric touch, I appre- 
 hend, upon Rich, not long since dead; but to 
 my apprehension (too sincere for satire), Lun 
 was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud — 
 the father of a line of harlequins — transmitting 
 his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through 
 countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley 
 come from his sHent tomb in a ghastly vest of 
 white patchwork, like the apparition of a dead 
 rainbow. So harlequins (thought I) look when 
 they are dead. 
 
 My third play followed in quick succession ; 
 it was the ' Way of the World.' I think I must 
 have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for I remember 
 the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort 
 affected me like some solemn tragic passion.
 
 My First Play. 41 
 
 1 Robinson Crusoe ' followed, in which Crusoe, 
 Man Friday, and the parrot were as good and 
 authentic as in the story. The clownery and 
 pantaloonery of these pantomimes have clean 
 passed out of my head. I believe I no more 
 laughed at them than at the same age I should 
 have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque 
 Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with 
 devout meaning) that gape and grin in stone 
 around the inside of the old Round Church 
 (my church) of the Templars. 
 
 I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when 
 I was from six to seven years old. After the 
 intervention of six or seven other years (for at 
 school all play-going was inhibited) I again 
 entered the doors of a theatre. That old 
 ' Artaxerxes ' evening had never done ringing 
 in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to 
 come asjain with the same occasion. But we 
 differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, 
 than the latter does from six. In that interval 
 what had I not lost I At the first period I knew 
 nothing, understood nothing, discriminated 
 nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all, — 
 
 Was nourished, I could not tell how. 
 
 I had left the temple a devotee, and was 
 returned a rationalist. The same things were 
 there materially ; but the emblem, the reference,
 
 42 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 was gone ! The green curtain was no longer 
 a veil drawn between two worlds, the unfold- 
 ing of which was to bring back past ages, to 
 present a ' royal ghost,' but a certain quantity 
 of green baize, which was to separate the 
 audience for a given time from certain of their 
 fellow-men who were to come forward and 
 pretend those parts. The lights — the orches- 
 tra lights — came up a clumsy machinery. 
 The first ring, and the second ring, was 
 now but a trick of the prompter's bell, which 
 had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phan- 
 tom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at 
 which ministered to its warning. The actors 
 were men and women painted. I thought the 
 fault was in them ; but it was in myself, and the 
 alteration which those many centuries — of six 
 short twelvemonths — had wrought in me. 
 Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play 
 of the evening was but an indifferent comedy, 
 as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable 
 expectations, which might have interfered with 
 the genuine emotions with which I was soon 
 after enabled to enter upon the first appearance 
 to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Compari- 
 son and retrospection soon yielded to the 
 present attraction of the scene ; and the theatre 
 became to me, upon a new stock, the most 
 delightful of recreations.
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 43 
 
 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 
 
 THE casual sight of an old play-bill, which 
 ■*■ I picked up the other day, — I know not 
 by what chance it was preserved so long, — 
 tempts me to call to mind a few of the players 
 who make the principal figure in it. It presents 
 the cast of parts in the 'Twelfth Night' at the 
 old Drury Lane Theatre two and thirty years 
 ago. There is something very touching in 
 these old remembrances. They make us think 
 how we once used to read a play-bill, — not as 
 now, peradventure, singling out a favourite per- 
 former, and casting a negligent eye over the 
 rest, but spelling out every name, down to the 
 very mutes and servants of the scene ; when it 
 was a matter of no small moment to us whether 
 Whitfield or Packer took the part of Fabian ; 
 when Benson and Burton and Phillimore — 
 names of small account — had an importance 
 beyond what we can be content to attribute now 
 to the time's best actors. ' Orsino, by Mr. 
 Barrymore.' What a full, Shakspearian sound it
 
 44 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image 
 and the m_a.nn.ex.- -of -the gentle actor 1 Those 
 who~"have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the 
 last ten or fifteen years can have no adequate 
 
 \ notion of her performance of such parts as 
 Ophelia ; Helena, in ' All 's Well that Ends 
 Well ; ' and Viola, in this play. Her voice had 
 latterly acquired a coarseness which suited 
 well enough with her Nells and Hoydens ; but 
 in those days it sank, with her steady, melting 
 eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts — in 
 which her memory now chiefly lives — in her 
 youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. 
 There is no giving an account how she delivered 
 the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It 
 was no set speech that she had foreseen, so as 
 to weave it into an harmonious period, line 
 necessarily following line, to make up the 
 music, — yet I have heard it so spoken, or 
 rather read, not without its grace and beauty, — 
 but when she had declared her sister's history 
 
 ^toTTe "a ' blank, 1 and that she ' never told her 
 love,' there was a pause, as if the story had 
 ended ; and then the image of the ' worm in 
 the bud ' came up as a new suggestion, and 
 the heightened image of ' Patience ' still fol- 
 lowed after that as by some growing (and not 
 mechanical) process, thought springing up after
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 45 
 
 thought, I would almost say, as they were 
 
 watered by her tears. So in those fine lines — 
 
 Write loyal cantons of contemned love — 
 Halloo your name to the reverberate hills — 
 
 there was no preparation made in the foregoing 
 image for that which was to follow. She used 
 no rhetoric in her passion, or it was Nature's 
 own rhetoric, most legitimate then when it 
 seemed altogether without rule or law. 
 
 Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the 
 pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. 
 She was particularly excellent in her unbending 
 scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have 
 seen some Olivias — and those very sensible 
 actresses too — who in these interlocutions 
 have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and 
 to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. 
 But she used him for her sport, like what he 
 was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, 
 and then to be dismissed, and she to be the 
 Great Lady still. She touched the imperious 
 fantastic humour of the character with nicety. 
 Her fine, spacious person filled .the scene. 
 
 The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, 
 been so often misunderstood, and the general 
 merits of the actor who then played it so 
 unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon 
 if I am a little prolix upon these points.
 
 46 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Of all the actors who flourished in my time — 
 a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader — 
 Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was 
 greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, 
 the emotions consequent upon the presentment 
 of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true 
 poetical enthusiasm, — the rarest faculty among 
 players. None that I remember possessed 
 even a portion of that fine madness which he 
 threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, 
 or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at 
 the vision of the fired city. His voice had the 
 dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, of 
 the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, 
 but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and 
 the thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in 
 every movement. He seized the moment of 
 passion with greatest truth ; like a faithful clock, 
 never striking before the time, — never anticipa- 
 ting, or leading you to anticipate. _He was 
 totally destitute of trick and artifice. He 
 seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's 
 message simply, and he did it with as genuine 
 fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the 
 errands of the gods. He let the passion or the 
 sentiment do its own work without prop or 
 bolstering. He would have scorned to mounte- 
 bank it, and betrayed none of that cleverness
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 47 
 
 which is the bane of serious acting. For this 
 reason, his Iago was the only endurable one 
 which I remember to have seen. No spectator, 
 from his action, could divine more of his artifice 
 than Othello was supposed to do. His confes- 
 sions in soliloquy alone put you in possession 
 of the mystery. There were no by-intimations 
 to make the audience fancy their own discern- 
 ment so much greater than that of the Moor, — 
 who commonly stands like a great helpless 
 mark set up for mine Ancient and a quantity 
 of barren spectators to shoot their bolts at. 
 The Iago of Bensley did not go to work so 
 grossly. There was a triumphant tone about 
 the character natural to a general consciousness 
 of power, but none of that petty vanity which 
 chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any 
 little successful stroke of its knavery, — as is 
 common with your small villains and green 
 probationers in mischief. It did not clap or 
 crow before its time. It was not a man set- 
 ting his wits at a child, and winking all the 
 while at other children, who are mightily 
 pleased at being let into the secret, but a con- 
 summate villain entrapping a noble nature into 
 toils against which no discernment was avail- 
 able, where the manner was as fathomless as 
 the purpose seemed dark and without motive.
 
 48 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 The part of Malvolio in the 'Twelfth Night' was 
 performed by Bensley with a richness and a 
 dignity of which (to judge from some recent 
 castings of that character) the very tradition 
 must be worn out from the stage. No manager 
 in those days would have dreamed of giving it 
 to Mr. Baddely or Mr. Parsons ; when Ben- 
 sley was occasionally absent from the theatre, 
 John Kemble thought it no derogation to suc- 
 ceed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially 
 ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. 
 He is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, 
 consistent, and for what appears, rather of an 
 over-stretched morality. Maria describes him 
 as a sort of Puritan ; an'd he might have worn 
 his gold chain with honour in one of our old 
 Roundhead families in the service of a Lambert 
 or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and his 
 manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is 
 opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and 
 falls in the unequal contest. Still, his pride, or 
 his gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, 
 and native to the man, not mock or affected, 
 — which latter only are the fit objects to excite 
 laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, 
 but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bear- 
 ing is lofty, — a little above his station, but prob- 
 ably not much above his deserts. We see no
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 49 
 
 reason why he should not have been brave, 
 honourable, accomplished. His careless com- 
 mittal of the ring to the ground (which he was 
 commissioned to restore to Cesario) bespeaks 
 a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect 
 on all occasions is that of a gentleman and a 
 man of education. We must not confound him 
 with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. 
 He is master of the household to a great prin- 
 cess, — a dignity probably conferred upon him 
 for other respects than age or length of service. 
 Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed mad- 
 ness, declares that she ' would not have him mis- 
 carry for half of her dowry.' Does this look as 
 if the character was meant to appear little, or 
 insignificant ? Once, indeed, she accuses him 
 to his face — of what ? Of being ' sick of self- 
 love ; ' but with a gentleness and considerate- 
 ness which could not have been if she had not 
 thought that this particular infirmity shaded 
 some virtues. His rebuke to the knight and 
 his sottish revellers is sensible and spirited ; 
 and when we take into consideration the unpro- 
 tected condition of his mistress, and the strict 
 regard with which her state of real or dissem- 
 bled mourning would draw the eyes of the 
 world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might 
 feel the honour of the family in some sort in his 
 
 4
 
 50 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 keeping, — as it appears not that Olivia had any 
 more brothers or kinsmen to look to it ; for 
 Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at 
 the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was meant 
 to be represented as possessing estimable quali- 
 ties, the expression of the Duke, in his anxiety 
 to have him reconciled, almost infers : ' Pursue 
 him, and entreat him to a peace.' Even in his 
 abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of 
 greatness seems never to desert him. He 
 argues highly and well with the supposed Sir 
 Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his 
 straw. 1 There must have been some shadow 
 of worth about the man ; he must have been 
 something more than a mere vapour — a thing 
 of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and 
 Maria could have ventured sending him upon a 
 courting-errand to Olivia. There was some 
 consonancy (as he would say) in the undertak- 
 ing, or the jest would have been too bold even 
 for that house of misrule. 
 
 Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concern- 
 ing wild fowl ? 
 
 Mai. That the soul of our grandam might haply 
 inhabit a bird. 
 
 Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion ? 
 
 Mai, I think nobly of the soul, and noway approve 
 of his opinion.
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 51 
 
 Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an 
 air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and 
 moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, 
 spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of 
 pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth ; 
 there was something in it beyond the coxcomb. 
 It was big and swelling, but you could not be 
 sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see 
 it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an 
 elevation. He was magnificent from the out- 
 set ; but when the decent sobrieties of the char- 
 acter began to give way, and the poison of self- 
 love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, 
 gradually to work, you would have thought that 
 the hero of La Mancha in person stood before 
 you. How he went smiling to himself ; with 
 what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his 
 gold chain ; what a dream it was ! You were 
 infected with the illusion, and did not wish that 
 it should be removed ; you had no room for 
 laughter ! If an unseasonable reflection of mo- 
 rality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the 
 pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay 
 him open to such frenzies ; but, in truth, you 
 rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it 
 lasted, — you felt that an hour of such mistake 
 was worth an age with the eyes open. Who 
 would not wish to live but for a day in the con-
 
 52 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ceit of such a lady's love as Olivia } Why, the 
 Duke would have given his principality but for a 
 quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have 
 been so deluded. The man seemed to tread 
 upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head 
 in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. Oh, shake 
 not the castles of his pride ; endure yet for a 
 season, bright moments of confidence ; ' stand 
 still, ye watches of the element,' that Malvolio 
 may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord ! But 
 fate and retribution say no ; I hear the mis- 
 chievous titter of Maria, the witty taunts of 
 Sir Toby, the still more insupportable tri- 
 umph of the foolish knight. The counterfeit Sir 
 Topas is unmasked, and ' thus the whirligig 
 of time,' as the true Clown hath it, ' brings in 
 his revenges.' I confess that I never saw the 
 catastrophe of this character, while Bensley 
 played it, without a kind of tragic interest. 
 There was good foolery too. Few now 
 remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the 
 stage lost in him 1 Lovegrove, who came 
 nearest to the old actors, revived the character 
 some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently 
 grotesque ; but Dodd was it, as it came out of 
 Nature's hands. It might be said to remain in 
 puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of ap- 
 prehension, this actor surpassed all others. You
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 53 
 
 could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly 
 over his countenance, climbing up by little and 
 little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at 
 last to the fulness of a twilight conception, — its 
 highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his 
 intellect, as some have had the power to retard 
 their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in 
 filling than it took to cover the expansion of his 
 broad, moony face over all its quarters with ex- 
 pression. A glimmer of understanding would 
 appear in a corner of his eye, and for lack of 
 fuel go out again. A part of his forehead 
 would catch a little intelligence, and be a long 
 time in communicating it to the remainder. 
 
 I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better 
 than five and twenty years ago, that, walking in 
 the gardens of Gray's Inn (they were then far 
 finer than they are now, — the accursed Verulam 
 Buildings had not encroached upon all the east 
 side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, 
 and shouldering away one or two of the stately 
 alcoves of the terrace ; the survivor stands 
 gaping and relationless, as if it remembered its 
 brother, — they are still the best gardens of 
 any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple 
 not forgotten, have the gravest character, their 
 aspect being altogether reverend and law- 
 breathing, Bacon has left the impress of his
 
 54 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 foot upon their gravel-walks), — taking my after- 
 noon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid 
 terrace, a comely, sad personage came towards 
 me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I 
 judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. 
 He had a serious, thoughtful forehead, and 
 seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As 
 I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I 
 was passing him with that sort of sub-indicative 
 token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate 
 towards a venerable stranger, and which rather 
 denotes an inclination to greet him than any 
 positive motion of the body to that effect, — a 
 species of humility and will-worship which, I 
 observe, nine times out of ten rather puzzles 
 than pleases the person it is offered to, — when 
 the face, turning full upon me, strangely identi- 
 fied itself with that of Dodd. Upon close in- 
 spection I was not mistaken. But could this 
 sad, thoughtful countenance be the same vacant 
 face of folly which I had hailed so often under 
 circumstances of gaiety ; which I had never seen 
 without a smile, or recognized but as the usher 
 of mirth ; that looked out so formally flat in 
 Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impo- 
 tently busy in Backbite, so blankly divested of 
 all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, 
 in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 55 
 
 impertinences ? Was this the face — full of 
 thought and carefulness — that had so often di- 
 vested itself at will of every trace of either to 
 give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for 
 two or three hours at least of its furrows ? Was 
 this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which 
 I had so often despised, made mocks at, made 
 merry with ? The remembrance of the freedoms 
 which I had taken with it came upon me with 
 a reproach of insult. I could have asked it 
 pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a 
 sense of injury. There is something strange as 
 well as sad in seeing actors — your pleasant 
 fellows particularly — subjected to and suffering 
 the common lot ; their fortunes, their casual- 
 ties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, 
 their actions to be amenable to poetic justice 
 only. We can hardly connect them with more 
 awful responsibilities. The death of this fine 
 actor took place shortly after this meeting. He 
 had quitted the stage some months, and, as I 
 learned afterwards, had been in the habit of 
 resorting daily to these gardens, almost to 
 the day of his decease. In these serious 
 walks, probably, he was divesting himself of 
 many scenic and some real vanities, weaning 
 himself from the frivolities of the lesser and 
 the greater theatre, doing gentle penance for a
 
 56 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 life of no very reprehensible fooleries, taking 
 off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might 
 feel he had worn too long, and rehearsing for 
 a more solemn cast of part. Dying, he ' put 
 on the weeds of Dominic. 1 1 
 
 If few can remember Dodd, many yet living 
 will not easily forget the pleasant creature who 
 in those days enacted the part of the Clown to 
 Dodd's Sir Andrew. Richard, or rather Dicky, 
 Suett — for so in his lifetime he delighted to be 
 called, and time hath ratified the appellation — 
 lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of 
 Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and 
 tender years were dedicated. There are who do 
 yet remember him at that period, — his pipe clear 
 and harmonious. He would often speak of his 
 chorister days, when he was ' cherub Dicky.' 
 
 1 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a 
 choice collection of old English literature. I should 
 judge him to have been a man of wit I know one in- 
 stance of an impromptu which no length of study could 
 have bettered. My merry friend Jem White had seen 
 him one evening in Aguecheek, and recognizing Dodd the 
 next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to take 
 off his hat and salute him, as the identical knight of the 
 preceding evening, with a 'Save you, Sir Atidrew.' 
 Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address 
 from a stranger, with a courteous, half-rebuking wave of 
 the hand, put him off with an 'Away, Fool.'
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 57 
 
 What clipped his wings, or made it expedient 
 that he should exchange the holy for the profane 
 state ; whether he had lost his good voice (his 
 best recommendation to that office), like Sir 
 John, 'with hallooing and singing of anthems ; ' 
 or whether he was adjudged to lack something, 
 even in those early years, of the gravity indis- 
 pensable to an occupation which professeth to 
 ' commerce with the skies,' — I could never 
 rightly learn ; but we find him, after the proba- 
 tion of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a 
 secular condition and become one of us. 
 
 I think he was not altogether of that timber 
 out of which cathedral seats and sounding- 
 boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind, 
 and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, 
 then might the robe of Motley, with which he 
 invested himself with so much humility after his 
 deprivation, and which he wore so long with so 
 much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the 
 public, be accepted for a surplice, — his white 
 stole and albe. 
 
 The first-fruits of his secularization was an 
 engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at 
 which theatre he commenced, as I have been 
 told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old 
 men's characters. At the period in which 
 most of us knew him, he was no more an
 
 58 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 imitator than he was in any true sense himself 
 imitable. 
 
 He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. 
 He came in to trouble all things with a welcome 
 perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the 
 matter. He was known, like Puck, by his 
 note, Ha! Ha! Ha! sometimes deepening to 
 Ho ! Ho ! Ho ! with an irresistible accession, 
 derived, perhaps, remotely from his ecclesiasti- 
 cal education, foreign to his prototype, of O 
 La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the 
 chuckling O La ! of Dicky Suett, brought back 
 to their remembrance by the faithful transcript 
 of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The ' force 
 of nature could no further go.' He drolled 
 upon the stock of these two syllables richer than 
 the cuckoo. 
 
 Care, that troubles all the world, was for- 
 gotten in his composition. Had he had but 
 two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never 
 have supported himself upon those two spider's 
 strings which served him (in the latter part of 
 his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a 
 scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have 
 puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had 
 staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his 
 balance. But on he went, scrambling upon 
 those airy stilts of his, with Robin Goodfellow,
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 59 
 
 1 thorough brake, thorough brier,' reckless of a 
 scratched face or a torn doublet. 
 
 Shakspeare foresaw him when he framed his 
 fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett 
 stamp, — a loose and shambling gait, a slippery 
 tongue (this last the ready midwife to a without- 
 pain-delivered jest) ; in words light as air, vent- 
 ing truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes 
 tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear 
 in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. 
 
 Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be 
 more of personal favourites with the town than 
 any actors before or after. The difference, I 
 take it, was this : Jack was more beloved for 
 his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. 
 Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good- 
 natured no pretensions at all. Your whole 
 conscience stirred with Bannister's performance 
 of Walter in the ' Children in the Wood 1 ; but 
 Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says 
 of Love, too young to know what conscience "is. 
 He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before 
 him, — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, 
 but because it could not touch him, any more 
 than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered 
 from the burthen of that death ; and when Death 
 came himself — not in metaphor — to fetch 
 Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer,
 
 60 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 who k'indly watched his exit, that he received 
 the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed 
 tranquillity nor tune, with the simple exclama- 
 tion, worthy to have been recorded in his epi- 
 taph, O La! O La! Bobby 1 
 
 The elder Palmer (of stage-trading celebrity) 
 commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; but 
 there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half- 
 FalstafT which he did not quite fill out. He 
 was as much too showy as Moody (who some- 
 times took the part) was dry and sottish. In 
 sock or buskin there was an air of swagger- 
 ing gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a 
 gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. 
 His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who 
 was his shadow in everything while he lived, 
 and dwindled into less than a shadow after- 
 wards, was a gentleman with a little stronger 
 infusion of the latter ingredient; that was all. 
 It is amazing how a little of the more or less 
 makes a difference in these things. When you 
 saw Bobby in the 4 Duke's Servant,' 1 you said, 
 ' What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a 
 servant 1 ' When you saw Jack figuring in 
 Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace 
 his promotion to some lady of quality who 
 fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, 
 1 High Life Below Stairs.
 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 61 
 
 and had bouqht him a commission. Therefore 
 Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable. 
 
 Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocri- 
 tical, and insinuating, but his secondary, or 
 supplemental, voice still more decisively histri- 
 onic than his common one. It was reserved 
 for the spectator j and the dramatis persona? were 
 supposed to know nothing at all about It. The 
 lies of Young Wilding, and the sentiments in 
 Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort 
 of italics to the audience. This secret corre- 
 spondence with the company before the curtain 
 (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an 
 extremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, 
 in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve 
 or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute 
 sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of 
 interest) is not required, or would rather inter- 
 fere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, 
 you do not believe in such characters as Surface 
 — the villain of artificial comedy — even while 
 you read or see them. If you did, they would 
 shock, and not divert you. When Ben, in • Love 
 for Love,' returns from sea, the following ex- 
 quisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with 
 his father : — 
 
 Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, 
 Ben, since I saw thee.
 
 62 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Ben. Ey, ey, been. Been far enough, an that be all. — 
 Well, father, and how do all at home ? How does brother 
 Dick and brother Val ? 
 
 Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead 
 these two years. I writ you word when you were at 
 Leghorn. 
 
 Ben. Mess, that 's true ; marry, I had forgot. Dick 's 
 dead, as you say. Well, and how? — I have a many 
 questions to ask you. 
 
 Here is an instance of insensibility which in 
 real life would be revolting, or rather in real 
 life could not have co-existed with the 
 warm-hearted temperament of the character. 
 But when you read it in the spirit with which 
 such playful selections and specious combina- 
 tions rather than strict metaphrases of nature 
 should be taken, or when you saw Bannister 
 play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the 
 moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the 
 pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — but 
 a piece of satire, a creation of Congreve's 
 fancy, a dreamy combination of all the acci- 
 dents of a sailor's character, — his contempt of 
 money, his credulity to women, with that 
 necessary estrangement from home which it is 
 just within the verge of credibility to suppose 
 might produce such an hallucination as is here 
 described. We never think the worse of Ben 
 for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character.
 
 * 
 On Some of the Old Actors. 63 
 
 But when an actor comes, and instead of the 
 delightful phantom — the creature dear to half- 
 belief — which Bannister exhibited, displays 
 before our eyes a downright concretion of a 
 Wapping sailor, a jolly, warm-hearted Jack 
 Tar, and nothing else ; when, instead of in- 
 vesting it with a delicious confusedness of the 
 head, and a veering, undirected goodness of 
 purpose, he gives to it a downright daylight 
 understanding and a full consciousness of its 
 actions, thrusting forward the sensibilities of 
 the character with a pretence as if it stood upon 
 nothing else, and was to be judged by them 
 alone, — we feel the discord of the thing ; the 
 scene is disturbed ; a real man has got in among 
 the dramatis persona?, and puts them out. We 
 want the sailor turned out. We feel that his 
 true place is not behind the curtain, but in the 
 first or second gallery.
 
 64 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 THE OLD ACTORS. 
 
 T DO not know a more mortifying thing than 
 ■*■ to be conscious of a foregone delight, with 
 a total oblivion of the person and manner which 
 conveyed it. In dreams I often stretch and 
 strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I 
 once saw in ' Peeping Tom.' I cannot catch a 
 feature of him. He is no more to me than 
 Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and still 
 more Dodd, were near being lost to me till I 
 was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the 
 other day at Mr. Matthews's gallery at High- 
 gate, which, with the exception of the Hogarth 
 pictures a few years since exhibited in Pall- 
 Mail, was the most delightful collection I ever 
 gained admission to. There hang the players, 
 in their single persons and in grouped scenes, 
 from the Restoration, — Bettertons, Booths, 
 Garricks, — justifying the prejudices which we 
 entertain for them ; the Bracegirdles, the 
 Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Cibber
 
 The Ohi Actors. 65 
 
 has described them ; the Woffington (a true 
 Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous ; 
 the screen-scene in Brinsley's famous comedy, 
 with Smith and Mrs. Abington, whom I have 
 not seen ; and the rest, whom, having seen, I 
 see still there. There is Henderson, unrivalled 
 in Comus, whom I saw at second-hand in the 
 elder Harley ; Harley, the rival of Holman, in 
 Horatio ; Holman, with the bright, glittering 
 teeth, in Lothario, and the deep paviour's sighs 
 in Romeo, the jolliest person (' our son is fat ') 
 of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most 
 laudable attempts (for a personable man) at 
 looking melancholy ; and Pope, the abdicated 
 monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the 
 Eighth ; and Lord Townley. There hang the 
 two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity ; Wrough- 
 ton, who in Kitely seemed to have forgotten 
 that in prouder days he had personated Alexan- 
 der ; the specious form of John Palmer, with 
 the special effrontery of Bobby ; Bensley, with 
 the trumpet tongue ; and little Quick (the 
 retired Dioclesian of Islington), with his squeak 
 like a Bart'lemevv riddle. There are fixed, 
 cold as in life, the immovable features of 
 Moody, who, afraid of o'erstepping Nature, 
 sometimes stopped short of her ; and the rest- 
 
 5
 
 66 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 less fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such 
 fears, not seldom leaped o' the other side. 
 There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton 
 and Phillimore, — names of small account in 
 those times, but which, remembered now, or 
 casually recalled by the sight of an old playbill, 
 with their associated recordations, can ' drown 
 an eye unused to flow/ There too hangs, not 
 far removed from them in death, the graceful 
 plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice 
 unstrung by age, but which in her better days 
 must have competed with the silver tones of 
 Barry himself, so enchanting in decay do I 
 remember it, — of all her lady parts, exceeding 
 herself in the ' Lady Quakeress ' (there earth 
 touched heaven) of O'Keefe, when she played 
 it to the ' merry cousin ' of Lewis ; and Mrs. 
 Mattocks, the sensiblest of viragos ; and Miss 
 Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to the verge of 
 ungentility, with Churchill's compliment still 
 burnishing upon her gay honeycomb lips. 
 There are the two Bannisters and Sedgwick, 
 and Kelly and Dignum (Diggy), and the by- 
 gone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady 
 Loverule ; and the collective majesty of the 
 whole Kemble family ; and (Shakspeare's 
 woman) Dora Jordan, who by her two antics,
 
 The Old Actors. 67 
 
 in former and in latter days, have chiefly be- 
 guiled us of our griefs, and whose portraits we 
 shall strive to recall for the sympathy of those 
 who may not have had the benefit of viewing 
 the matchless Highgate collection.
 
 68 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 
 
 IVTOT many nights ago I had come home from 
 *~* seeing this extraordinary performer in 
 Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pillow 
 his whimsical image still stuck, by me in a 
 manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to 
 divest myself of it by conjuring up the most 
 opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. 
 I raised up the gravest topics of life, private 
 misery, public calamity. All would not do ; 
 
 There the antic sat, 
 Mocking our state, — 
 
 his queer visnomy, his bewildering costume, all 
 the strange things which he had raked together, 
 his serpentine rod swagging about in his pocket, 
 Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics, 
 O'Keefe's wild farce, and his wilder commen- 
 tary, till the passion of laughter, like grief in 
 excess, relieved itself by its own weight, invit- 
 ing the sleep which in the first instance it had 
 driven away.
 
 On the Acting of Munden. 69 
 
 But I was not to escape so easily. No 
 sooner did I fall into slumbers than the same 
 image, only more perplexing, assailed me in 
 the shajpe of dreams. Not one Munden, but 
 five hundredTwere dancing before me, like the 
 faces which, whether you will or no, come 
 when you have been taking opium, — all the 
 strange combinations which this strangest of all 
 strange mortals ever shot his proper counte- 
 nance into, from the day he came commissioned 
 to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of 
 the now almost forgotten Edwin. Oh, for the 
 power of the pencil to have fixed them when I 
 awoke ! A season or two since there was ex- 
 hibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why 
 there should not be a Munden gallery. In 
 richness and variety, the latter would not fall 
 far short of the former. 
 
 There is one face of Farley, one face of 
 Knight, one (but what a one it is !) of Liston ; 
 but Munden has none that you can properly pin 
 down and call his. When you think he has 
 exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccount- 
 able warfare with your gravity, suddenly he 
 sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like 
 Hydra. He is not one, but legion; not so 
 much a comedian as a company. If his name 
 could be multiplied like his countenance, it
 
 jo Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 might fill a playbill. He, and he alone, literally 
 makes faces; applied to any other person, the 
 phrase is.a mere figure, denoting certain modi- 
 fications of the human countenance. Out of 
 some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as 
 his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them 
 out as easily. I should not be surprised to see 
 him some day put out the head of a river-horse, 
 or come forth a pewit or lapwing, some feath- 
 ered metamorphosis. 
 
 I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christo- 
 pher Curry, in old Dornton, diffuse a glow of 
 sentiment which has made the pulse of a 
 crowded theatre beat like that of one man, 
 when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing 
 good to the moral heart of a people. I have 
 seen some faint approaches to this sort of excel- 
 lence in other players. But in the grand 
 grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as 
 single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Ho- 
 garth, strange to tell, had no followers. The 
 school of Munden began and must end with 
 himself. 
 
 Can any man wonder like he does ? can any 
 man see ghosts like he does ? or fight with his 
 own shadow, ' sessa,' as he does in that 
 strangely-neglected thing, the ' Cobbler of 
 Preston,' where his alterations from the Cobbler
 
 On the Acting of Munden. yi 
 
 to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to 
 the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator 
 in as wild a ferment as if some Arabian Night 
 were being acted before him ? Who like him 
 can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a pre- 
 ternatural interest over the commonest daily 
 life objects } A table or a joint stool, in his 
 conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to 
 Cassiopeia's chair ; it is invested with con- 
 stellatory importance. You could not speak of 
 it with more deference if it were mounted into 
 the firmament. A beggar in the hands of 
 Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch 
 of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden anti- 
 quates and ennobles what it touches. His pots 
 and his ladles are as grand and primal as the 
 seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic 
 vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, 
 amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands 
 a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands 
 wondering, amid the commonplace materials of 
 life, like primeval man with the sun and stars 
 about him.
 
 72 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 MUNDEN'S FAREWELL. 
 
 / T V HE regular playgoers ought to put on 
 ■■" mourning, for the king of broad comedy is 
 dead to the drama. Alas ! Munden is no more I 
 — give sorrow vent. He may yet walk, the 
 town, pace the pavement in a seeming existence, 
 eat, drink, and nod to his friends in all the 
 affectation of life ; but Munden, the Munden, 
 Munden with the bunch of countenances, the 
 bouquet of faces, is gone forever from the 
 lamps, and as far as comedy is concerned, is as 
 dead as Garrick ! When an actor retires (we will 
 put the suicide as mildly as possible), how many 
 worthy persons perish with him 1 With Munden 
 Sir Peter Teazle must experience a shock ; Sir 
 Robert Bramble gives up the ghost ; Crack 
 ceases to breathe. Without Munden what be- 
 comes of Dozey ? Where shall we seek Jemmy 
 Jumps ? Nipperkin and a thousand of such ad- 
 mirable fooleries fall to nothing, and the depar- 
 ture, therefore, of such an actor as Munden is a 
 dramatic calamity. On the night that this ines- 

 
 Mun den's Farewell. 7$ 
 
 timable humorist took farewell of the public, 
 he also took his benefit, — a benefit in which 
 the public assuredly did not participate. The 
 play was Coleman's ' Poor Gentleman,' with 
 Tom Dibdin's farce of ' Past Ten o'Clock.' 
 Reader, we all know Munden in Sir Robert 
 Bramble and old tobacco-complexioned Dozey ; 
 we all have seen the old hearty baronet in his 
 light sky-blue coat and genteel cocked hat, and 
 we have all seen the weather-beaten old pen- 
 sioner, dear old Dozey, tacking about the stage 
 in that intense blue sea livery, drunk as heart 
 could wish, and right valorous in memory. On 
 this night Munden seemed, like the Gladiator, 
 1 to rally life's whole energies to die ; ' and as 
 we were present at this great display of his 
 powers, and as this will be the last opportunity 
 that will ever be afforded us to speak of this 
 admirable performer, we shall ' consecrate,' as 
 old John Buncle says, ' a paragraph to him.' 
 
 The house was full. Full ! — pshaw ! that 's 
 an empty word 1 The house was stuffed, 
 crammed with people, — crammed from the 
 swing-door of the pit to the back-seat in the 
 banished one shilling. A quart of audience may 
 be said (vintner-like, may it be said) to have been 
 squeezed into a pint of theatre. Every hearty 
 playgoing Londoner who remembered Munden
 
 74 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 years agone mustered up his courage and his 
 money for this benefit, and middle-aged people 
 were therefore by no means scarce. The 
 comedy chosen for the occasion is one that 
 travels a long way without a guard, — it is not 
 until the third or fourth act, we think, that Sir 
 Robert Bramble appears on the stage. When 
 he entered, his reception was earnest, noisy, 
 outrageous ; waving of hats and handkerchiefs, 
 deafening shouts, clamorous beating of sticks, — 
 all the various ways in which the heart is accus- 
 tomed to manifest its joy, — were had recourse 
 to on this occasion. Mrs. Bamfield worked 
 away with a sixpenny fan till she scudded only 
 under bare poles. Mr. Whittington wore out 
 the ferule of a new nine-and-sixpenny umbrella. 
 Gratitude did great damage on the joyful 
 occasion. 
 
 The old performer, the veteran, as he appro- 
 priately called himself in the farewell speech, 
 was plainly overcome ; he pressed his hands 
 together, he planted one solidly on his breast, 
 he bowed, he sidled, he cried. When the noise 
 subsided (which it invariably does at last), the 
 comedy proceeded, and Munden gave an ad- 
 mirable picture of the rich, eccentric, charitable 
 old bachelor baronet who goes about with 
 Humphrey Dobbin at his heels and philanthropy
 
 Mwuien's Farewell. 
 
 75 
 
 in his heart. How crustily and yet how kindly 
 he takes Humphrey's contradictions. _ r How 
 Readily he £uts himself into an attitude for ar 
 guing. How tenderly he gives a loose" to his 
 "Heart on the apprehension of Frederick's duel. 
 In truth he played Sir Robert in his very ripest 
 manner ; and it was impossible not to feel in the 
 very midst of pleasure regret that Munden 
 should then be before us for the last time. 
 
 An the farce he became richer and richer. 
 Old Dozey is a plant from Greenwich. The 
 bronzed face and neck to match, the long cur- 
 tain of a coat, the straggling white hair, the 
 propensity, the determined attachment to grog, 
 are all from Greenwich. Munden as Dozey 
 seems never to have been out of action, sun, 
 and drink. He looks (alas! he looked) fire- 
 proof. His face and throat were dried like a 
 raisin, and ETslegs walked under the rum-and- 
 water with all the indecision which that inesti- 
 mable beverage usually inspires. It is truly 
 tacking, not walking. He steers at a table, 
 and the tide of grog now and then bears him off 
 the point. On this night he seemed to us to be 
 doomed to fall in action ; and we therefore 
 looked at him, as some of the ' Victory's ' crew 
 are said to have gazed upon Nelson, with a con- 
 sciousness that his ardour and his uniform were 
 
 U
 
 y6 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 worn for the last time. In the scene where 
 Dozey describes a sea-fight, the actor never 
 was greater, and he seemed the personification 
 of an old seventy-four I His coat hung like a 
 flag at his poop. His phiz was not a whit less 
 highly coloured than one of those lustrous vis- 
 ages which generally superintend the head of a 
 ship. There was something cumbrous, inde- 
 cisive, and awful in his veerings. Once afloat, 
 -it appeared impossible for him to come to his 
 moorings ; once at anchor, it did not seem an 
 easy thing to get him under weigh. 
 
 The time, however, came for the fall of the 
 curtain and for the fall of Munden. The farce 
 of the night was finished. The farce of the 
 long forty years' play was over. He stepped 
 forward, not as Dozey, but as Munden, and we 
 heard him address us from the stage for the last 
 time. He trusted — unwisely, we think — to a 
 written paper. He read of ' heartfelt recollec- 
 tions ' and 'indelible impressions.' He stam- 
 mered and he pressed his heart, and put on his 
 spectacles, and blundered his written gratitudes, 
 and wiped his eyes, and bowed and stood, and 
 at last staggered away forever. The plan of 
 his farewell was bad, but the long life of ex- 
 cellence which really made his farewell pathetic 
 overcame all defects, and the people and Joe
 
 Mundens Farewell. 77 
 
 Munden parted like lovers. Well ! Farewell 
 to the Rich Old Heart. May thy retirement 
 be as full of repose as thy public life was full of 
 excellence. We must all have our farewell 
 benefits in our turn.
 
 yS Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 THE DEATH OF MUNDEN. 
 
 "VfOUR communication to me of the death of 
 -*- Munden made me weep. Now, sir, I am 
 not of the melting mood ; but in these serious 
 times the loss of half the world's fun is no 
 trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain 
 shall I call it ?), in the early time of my playgoing, 
 to have missed all Munden's acting. There 
 was only he and Lewis at Covent Garden, 
 while Drury Lane was exuberant with Parsons, 
 Dodd, etc., — such a comic company as, I sup- 
 pose, the stage never showed. Thence, in the 
 evening of my life, I had Munden all to myself, 
 more mellowed, richer, perhaps, than ever. I 
 cannot say what his change of faces produced 
 in me. It was not acting. He was not one of 
 my 'old actors.' It might be better. His 
 power was extravagant. I saw him one even- 
 ing in three drunken characters. Three farces 
 were played. One part was Dozey, — I forget 
 the rest ; but they were so discriminated that 
 a stranger might have seen them all, and not
 
 The Death of Munden. yg 
 
 have dreamed that he was seeing the same 
 actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased 
 my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd, 
 but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if 
 he could do anything. He was not an actor, 
 but something better, if you please. Shall I 
 instance Old Foresight in ' Love for Love,' in 
 which Parsons was at once the old man, the 
 astrologer, etc. ? Munden dropped the old man, 
 the doater, — which makes the character, — but 
 he substituted for it a moon-struck, character, a 
 perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked 
 as if he had newly come down from the planets. 
 Now, that is not what I call acting. It might 
 be better. _J^ejsVja^ma^aati)^^iie-, gou!4- im- 
 press upon an audience an idea, — the low one, 
 perhaps, of a leg of mutton and turnips ; but 
 such was the grandeur and singleness of his 
 expressions that that single expression would 
 convey to all his auditory a notion of all the 
 pleasures they had all received from all the 
 legs of mutton and turnips they had ever eaten 
 in their lives. Now, this is not acting, nor do 
 I set down Munden amongst my old actors. 
 IHe was only a wonderful man, exerting his 
 'vivid impressions through the agency of the 
 stage. In one only thing did I see him act, — 
 that is, support a character ; it was in a wretched
 
 80 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 farce called 'Johnny Gilpin,' for Dowton's 
 benefit, in which he did a Cockney. The 
 thing ran but one night ; but when I say that 
 Lubin's Log was nothing to it, I say little, — it 
 was transcendent. And here let me say of 
 actors, — envious actors, — that of Munden, Lis- 
 ton was used to speak almost with the enthusi- 
 asm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed 
 superiority to every actor on the stage, and this 
 at a time when Munden was gone by in the 
 world's estimation, that it convinced me that 
 artists (in which term I include poets, painters, 
 etc.) are not so envious as the world think. I 
 have little time, and therefore enclose a criticism 
 on Munden's Old Dozey and his general acting 
 by a gentleman who attends less to these things 
 than formerly, but whose criticism I think 
 masterly.
 
 Autobiography of Mr. Mnnden. 8 1 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN. 
 
 HARKEE, Mr. Editor, a word in your 
 ear. They tell me you are going to put 
 me in print, — in print, sir; to publish my life. 
 What is my life to you, sir ? What is it to you 
 whether I ever lived at all ? My life is a very 
 good life, sir. I am insured in the Pelican, 
 sir. I am threescore years and six, — six, 
 mark me, sir ; but I can play Polonius, which, 
 I believe, few of your corre — correspondents 
 can do, sir. I suspect tricks, sir; I smell a 
 rat ; I do, I do. You would cog the die upon 
 us; you would, you would, sir. But I will 
 forestall you, sir. You would be deriving me 
 from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to 
 you. It is no such a thing, sir. The town 
 shall know better, sir. They begin to smoke 
 your flams, sir. Mr. Liston may be born 
 where he pleases, sir ; but I will not be born at 
 Lup — Lupton Magna for anybody's pleasure, 
 sir. My son and I have looked over the great 
 map of Kent together, and we can find no such 
 
 6
 
 82 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 place as you would palm upon us, sir, — palm 
 upon us, I say. Neither Magna nor Parva, as my 
 son says; and he knows Latin, sir, — Latin. If 
 you write my life true, sir, you must set down 
 that I, Joseph Munden, comedian, came into the 
 world upon All-hallows day, Anno Domini 1759 
 — 1759; no sooner nor later, sir; and I saw 
 the first light — the first light, remember, sir — at 
 Stoke Pogis — Stoke Pogis, comitatu Bucks, 
 and not at Lup — Lup Magna, which I believe 
 to be no better than moonshine, — moonshine ; 
 do you mark me, sir? I wonder you can put 
 such flim-flams upon us, sir ; I do, I do. It 
 does not become you, sir ; I say it, — I say it. 
 And my father was an honest tradesman, sir ; 
 he dealt in malt and hops, sir ; and was a cor- 
 poration-man, sir ; and of the Church of Eng- 
 land, sir, and no Presbyterian, nor Ana — ana- 
 baptist, sir ; however you may be disposed to 
 make honest people believe to the contrary, 
 sir. Your bams are found out, sir. The town 
 will be your stale-puts no longer, sir ; and you 
 must not send us jolly fellows, sir, — we that 
 are comedians, sir, — you must not send us into 
 groves and char — charnwoods a-moping, sir. 
 Neither charns, nor charnel-houses, sir. It 
 is not our constitution, sir ; I tell it you, — 
 I tell it you. I was a droll dog from my
 
 Autobiography of Mr. Munden. 83 
 
 cradle. I came into the world tittering, and 
 the midwife tittered, and the gossips spilt their 
 caudle with tittering ; and when I was brought 
 to the font, the parson could not christen me 
 for tittering. So I was never more than half 
 baptized. And when I was little Joey, I made 
 'em all titter ; there was not a melancholy face 
 to be seen in Pogis. Pure nature, sir. I was 
 born a comedian. Old Screwup, the under- 
 taker, could tell you, sir, if he were living. 
 Why, I was obliged to be locked up every time 
 Ihere was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was — I 
 was, sir ! I used to grimace at the mutes, as 
 he called it, and put 'em out with my mops and 
 my mows, till they could n't stand at a door for 
 me. And when I was locked up, with nothing 
 but a cat in my company, I followed my bent 
 with trying to make her laugh ; and sometimes 
 she would, and sometimes she would not. 
 And my schoolmaster could make nothing of 
 me. I had only to thrust my tongue in my 
 cheek, — in my cheek, sir, — and the rod dropped 
 rom his fingers ; and so my education was 
 limited, sir. And I grew up a young fellow, 
 and it was thought convenient to enter me upon 
 some course of life that should make me serious ; 
 but it would n't do, sir. And I was articled to 
 a drysalter. My father gave forty pounds pre- 
 

 
 84 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 mium with me, sir. I can show the ident — 
 dent — dentures, sir. But I was born to be a 
 comedian, sir ; so I ran away, and listed with 
 the players, sir. And I topped my parts at Amer- 
 sham and Gerrard's Cross, and played my own 
 father to his face, in his own town of Pogis, in 
 the part of Gripe, when I was not full seventeen 
 years of age ; and he did not know me again, 
 but he knew me afterwards ; and then he 
 laughed, and I laughed, and, what is better, 
 the drysalter laughed, and gave me up my 
 articles for the joke's sake : so that I came into 
 court afterwards with clean hands — with clean 
 hands — do you see, sir ? 
 
 [Here the manuscript becomes illegible for 
 two or three sheets onwards, which we presume 
 to be occasioned by the absence of Mr. Mun- 
 den, Jun., who clearly transcribed it for the 
 press thus far. The rest (with the exception of 
 the concluding paragraph, which is seemingly 
 resumed in the first handwriting) appears to 
 contain a confused account of some lawsuit 
 in which the elder Munden was engaged, with 
 a circumstantial history of the proceedings of a 
 case of breach of promise of marriage, made to 
 or by (we cannot pick out which) Jemima 
 Munden, spinster, — probably the comedian's
 
 Autobiography of Mr. Munden. 85 
 
 cousin, for it does not appear he had any 
 sister ; with a few dates, rather better pre- 
 served, of this great actor's engagements, — as 
 4 Cheltenham [spelt Cheltnam], 1776;' 'Bath, 
 i~~o;' 'London, 1789;' together with stage 
 anecdotes of Messrs. Edwin, Wilson, Lee, 
 Lewis, etc. ; over which we have strained our 
 eyes to no purpose, in the hope of presenting 
 something amusing to the public. Towards the 
 end, the manuscript brightens up a little, as we 
 said, and concludes in the following manner :] 
 
 — stood before them for six and thirty years 
 [we suspect that Mr. Munden is here speaking 
 of his final leave-taking of the stage], and to be 
 dismissed at last. But I was heart-whole to 
 the last, sir. What though a few drops did 
 course themselves down the old veteran's 
 cheeks, — who could help it, sir ? I was a giant 
 that night, sir ; and could have played fifty 
 parts, each as arduous as Dozey. My faculties 
 were never better, sir. But I was to be laid 
 upon the shelf. It did not suit the public to 
 laugh with their old servant any longer, sir. 
 [Here some moisture has blotted a sentence or 
 two.] But I can play Polonius still, sir; I can, 
 I can. Your servant, sir, 
 
 Joseph Munden.
 
 86 tssays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. 
 LISTON. 
 
 r PHE subject of our Memoir is lineally de- 
 ^ scended from Johan de L'Estonne (see 
 4 Domesday Book,' where he is so written), 
 who came in with the Conqueror, and had 
 lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. 
 His particular merits or services, Fabian, whose 
 authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, or per- 
 haps thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller 
 thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo de 
 Agmondesham, a powerful Norman baron who 
 was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the 
 fatal battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we 
 find a family of that name flourishing some cen- 
 turies later in that county. John Delliston, 
 knight, was High Sheriff for Kent, according to 
 Fabian, quinto Henrici Sexti; and we trace the 
 lineal branch flourishing downwards, — the or- 
 thography varying, according to the unsettled 
 usage of the times, from Delleston to Leston or 
 Liston, between which it seems to have alter- 
 nated, till, in the latter end of the reign of
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston. Sy 
 
 James I., it finally settled into the determinate 
 and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it 
 still retains. Aminadab Liston, the eldest male 
 representative of the family of that day, was of 
 the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of 
 Pali-Mall, has obligingly communicated to me 
 an undoubted tract of his, which bears the 
 initials only, A. L., and is entitled, ' The 
 Grinning Glass, or Actor's Mirrour ; wherein 
 the vituperative Visnomy of Vicious Players 
 for the Scene is as virtuously reflected back 
 upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has 
 viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities 
 her Votarists.' A strange title, but bearing 
 the impress of those absurdities with which 
 the title-pages of that pamphlet-spawning age 
 abounded. The work bears date 1617. It 
 preceded the ' Histriomastix' by fifteen years; 
 and as it went before it in time, so it comes not 
 far short of it in virulence. It is amusing to 
 find an ancestor of Liston's thus bespattering 
 the players at the commencement of the seven- 
 teenth century : — 
 
 ' Thinketh He ' (the actor), ' with his cos- 
 tive countenances, to wry a sorrowing soul out 
 of her anguish, or by defacing the divine de- 
 notement of destinate dignity (daignely described 
 in the face humane and no other) to reinstamp
 
 88 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel and 
 naughty approximation (not in the first inten- 
 tion) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden 
 correspondences, with flouting Apes 1 jeering 
 gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot 
 out of countenance all modest measure, as if our 
 sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs with- 
 out He wresting and crooking his members to 
 mistimed mirth (rather malice) in deformed 
 fashion, leering when he should learn, prating 
 for praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned 
 for grace), whereas in Paradice (if we can go 
 thus high for His professions) that devilish Ser- 
 pent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first 
 induing a mask like some roguish roistering 
 Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with 
 stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex 
 hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and 
 are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, 
 as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble 
 (between acts) apples, not ambiguously derived 
 from that pernicious Pippin (worse in effect than 
 the Apples of Discord), whereas sometimes the 
 hissing sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do 
 lively reintonate that snake-taking-leave, and 
 diabolical goings off, in Paradice.' 
 
 The Puritanic effervescence of the early 
 Presbyterians appears to have abated with time,
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston. 89 
 
 and the opinions of the more immediate ances- 
 tors of our subject to have subsided at length 
 into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still, a 
 tincture of the old leaven was to be expected 
 among the posterity of A. L. 
 
 Our hero was an only son of Habakkuk 
 Liston, settled as an Anabaptist minister upon 
 the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular 
 certificate appears, thus entered in the Church- 
 book at Lupton Magna : ' Johannes, films 
 Habakkuk el Rebecca? Liston, Dissentientium, 
 natus quinlo Decembri, 1780, bapti^atus sexto 
 Februarii sequentis ; Sponsoribus J. et W. Wool- 
 laston, una cum Maria Merry weather." The 
 singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming 
 to the child-rites of the Church would have 
 tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this 
 entry, had I not been obliged with the actual 
 sight of it by the favour of Mr. Minns, the in- 
 telligent and worthy parish clerk of Lupton. 
 Possibly some expectation in point of worldly 
 advantages from some of the sponsors might have 
 induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have 
 appeared, from the practice and principles of that 
 generally rigid sect. The term Dissentientium 
 was possibly intended by the orthodox clergy- 
 man as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. 
 What, or of what nature, the expectations we
 
 go Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 have hinted at may have been, we have now no 
 means of ascertaining. Of the Woollastons no 
 trace is now discoverable in the village. The 
 name of Merry weather occurs over the front of 
 a grocer's shop at the western extremity of 
 Lupton. 
 
 Of the infant Liston we find no events re- 
 corded before his fourth year, in which a severe 
 attack of the measels bid fair to have robbed the 
 rising generation of a fund of innocent enter- 
 tainment. He had it of the confluent kind, as 
 it is called ; and the child's life was for a week 
 or two despaired of. His recovery he always 
 attributes (under Heaven) to the humane inter- 
 ference of one Dr. Wilhelm Richter, a German 
 empiric, who in this extremity prescribed a 
 copious diet of sauer-kraut, which the child was 
 observed to reach at with avidity, when other 
 food repelled him ; and from this change of 
 \ diet his restoration was rapid and complete. 
 We have often heard him name the circumstance 
 with gratitude ; and it is not altogether surpris- 
 ing that a relish for this kind of aliment, so ab- 
 horrent and harsh to common English palates, 
 has accompanied him through life. When any 
 of Mr. Liston's intimates invite him to supper, 
 he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife 
 and fork, a dish of sauer-kraut.
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Listen. 9 1 
 
 At the age of nine we find our- subject under 
 the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough (his 
 father's health not permitting him, probably, to 
 instruct him himself), by whom he was inducted 
 into a competent portion of Latin and Greek, 
 with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. 
 Goodenough, in his own seventieth and Master 
 Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for the present 
 to his classical progress. 
 
 We have heard our hero, with emotions which 
 do his heart honour, describe the awful circum- 
 stances attending the decease of this worthy old 
 gentleman. It seems they had been walking 
 out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset 
 to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west 
 of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. 
 Goodenough to look down upon a chasm where 
 a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining specu- 
 lation (then projecting, but abandoned soon 
 after, as not answering the promised success, 
 by Sir Ralph Shepperton, knight and member 
 for the county). The old clergyman, leaning 
 over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness 
 (probably a mixture of both), suddenly lost his 
 footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disap- 
 peared, and was doubtless broken into a thou- 
 sand pieces. The sound of his head, etc., 
 dashing successively upon the projecting masses
 
 
 92 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child 
 that a serious sickness ensued ; and even for 
 many years after his recovery, he was not once 
 seen so much as to smile. 
 
 The joint death of both his parents, which 
 happened not many months after this disastrous 
 accident, and were probably (one or both of 
 them) accelerated by it, threw our youth upon 
 the protection of his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. 
 Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard 
 him speak but with expressions amounting al- 
 most to reverence. To the influence of her 
 early counsels and manners he has always at- 
 tributed the firmness with which, in maturer 
 years, thrown upon a way of life commonly not 
 the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, 
 he has been able to maintain a serious character, 
 untinctured with the levities incident to his pro- 
 fession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her 
 portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with 
 a cast of features strikingly resembling the sub- 
 ject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was 
 spacious and well-wooded ; the house one of 
 those venerable old mansions which are so im- 
 pressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten 
 in succeeding years. In the venerable solitudes 
 of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak 
 x and beech (this last his favourite tree) the young 

 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston. 93 
 
 Liston cultivated those contemplative habits 
 which have never entirely deserted him in after 
 years. Here he was commonly in the summer 
 months to be met with, with a book in his hand. 
 — not a play-book, — meditating. Boyle's 
 ' Reflections ' was at one time the darling 
 volume ; which, in its turn, was superseded 
 by Young's ' Night Thoughts,' which has con- 
 tinued its hold upon him through life. He 
 carries it always about him ; and it is no 
 uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the 
 refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning 
 against a side-scene, in a sort of Herbert-of- 
 Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket- 
 edition of his favourite author. 
 
 But the solitudes of Charnwood were not 
 destined always to obscure the path of our 
 young hero. The premature death of Mrs. 
 Sittingbourn, at the age of seventy, occasioned 
 by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in 
 her sleeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth 
 year nearly without resources. That the stage 
 at all should have presented itself as an eligible 
 scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he 
 should have chosen a line so foreign to what 
 appears to have been his turn of mind, may 
 require some explanation. 
 
 At Charnwood, then, we behold him, thought-
 
 94 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle averse to 
 flesh-meats and strong drink ; abstemious even 
 beyond the genius of the place, and almost in 
 spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, 
 who, though strict, was not rigid, — water was 
 his habitual drink, and his food little beyond 
 the mast and beech-nuts of his favourite groves. 
 It is a medical fact that this kind of diet, how- 
 ever favourable to the contemplative powers of 
 the primitive hermits, etc., is but ill-adapted to 
 the less robust minds and bodies of a later gen- 
 eration. Hypochondria almost constantly en- 
 sues. It was so in the case of the young 
 Liston. He was subject to sights, and had 
 visions. Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a 
 complexion naturally adust, mounted into an 
 occiput already prepared to kindle by long 
 seclusion and the fervour of strict Calvinistic 
 notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was 
 assailed by illusions similar in kind to those 
 which are related of the famous Anthony of 
 Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and 
 anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. 
 Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open, 
 the same illusions operated. The darker and 
 more profound were his cogitations, the droller 
 and more whimsical became the apparitions. 
 They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston. 95 
 
 at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with 
 such comic appendages that what at first was 
 his bane became at length his solace ; and he 
 desired no better society than that of his merry 
 phantasmata. We shall presently find in what 
 way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his 
 future destiny. 
 
 On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn we find 
 him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, 
 an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in 
 Birchin Lane, London. We lose a little 
 while here the chain of his history, — by what 
 inducements this gentleman was determined to 
 make him an inmate of his house. Probably he 
 had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sit- 
 tingbourn formerly ; but however it was, the 
 young man was here treated more like a son 
 than a clerk, though he was nominally but the 
 latter. Different avocations, the change of 
 scene, with that alternation of business and 
 recreation which in its greatest perfection is 
 to be had only in London, appear to have 
 weaned him in a short time from the hypo- 
 chondriacal affections which had beset him at 
 Charnwood. 
 
 In the three years which followed his removal 
 to Birchin Lane, we find him making more than 
 one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for
 
 g6 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Mr. Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily 
 fill our biography with the pleasant passages 
 which we have heard him relate as having 
 happened to him at Constantinople, — such as his 
 having been taken up on suspicion of a design 
 of penetrating the seraglio, etc. ; but, with the 
 deepest convincement of this gentleman's own 
 veracity, we think that some of the stories are 
 of that whimsical, and others of that romantic 
 nature, which, however diverting, would be out 
 of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims 
 not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very 
 appearance of the contrary. 
 
 We will now bring him over the seas again, 
 and suppose him in the counting-house in 
 Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the 
 returns of his factorage, and all going on so 
 smoothly that we may expect to find Mr. 
 Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 
 'Change, as it is called. But see the turns of 
 destiny ! Upon a summer's excursion into 
 Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight 
 of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called (then 
 in the Norwich company), diverted his inclina- 
 tions at once from commerce, and he became, 
 in the language of commonplace biography, 
 stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth 
 was it that our hero took this turn ; he might
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Lis ton. 97 
 
 else have been to this hour that unentertain- 
 ing character, a plodding London merchant. 
 
 We accordingly find him shortly after making 
 his dibut, as it is called, upon the Norwich 
 boards, in the season of that year, being then 
 in the twenty-second year of his age. Having 
 a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of 
 Pyrrhus, in the ' Distressed Mother,' to Sally 
 Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards 
 as Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, etc. ; but as 
 if Nature had destined him to the sock, an un- 
 avoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him 
 for tragedy. His person, at this latter period 
 of which I have been speaking, was graceful, 
 and even commanding ; his countenance set to 
 gravity: he had the power of arresting the atten- 
 tion of an audience at first sight almost beyond 
 any other tragic actor. But he could not hold 
 it. To understand this obstacle, we must go 
 -back a few years to those appalling reveries at 
 Charnwood. Those illusions, which had van- 
 ished before the dissipation of a less recluse 
 life and more free society, now in his solitary 
 tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon 
 feeling incident to tragic acting, came back 
 upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst 
 of some most pathetic passage (the parting of 
 Jaffier with his dying friend, for instance), he 
 
 7
 
 98 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 | would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent 
 horse-laughter. While the spectators were all 
 
 , sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one 
 of those grotesque faces would peep out upon 
 him, and he could not resist the impulse. A 
 timely excuse once or twice served his purpose, 
 but no audiences could be expected to bear re- 
 peatedly this violation of the continuity of feel- 
 ing. He describes them (the illusions) as so 
 many demons haunting him, and paralyzing 
 every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot 
 recite the famous soliloquy in ' Hamlet,' even in 
 private, without immoderate bursts of laugh- 
 ter. However, what he had not force of 
 reason sufficient to overcome, he had good 
 sense enough to turn into emolument, and 
 determined to make a commodity of his dis- 
 temper. He prudently exchanged the buskin 
 for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased ; 
 or, if they occurred for a short season, by their 
 very co-operation added a zest to his comic 
 vein, — some of his most catching faces being 
 (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts 
 and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata. 
 We have now drawn out our hero's existence 
 to the period when he was about to meet, for 
 the first time, the sympathies of a London audi- 
 ence. The particulars of his success since have
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Lis ton. 99 
 
 been too much before our eyes to render a 
 circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall 
 only mention that Mr. Willoughby, his resent- 
 ments having had time to subside, is at present 
 one of the fastest friends of his old renegade 
 factor ; and that, Mr. Liston's hopes of Miss 
 Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful 
 suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 181 1 he 
 married his present lady, by whom he has been 
 blessed with one son, Philip, and two daugh- 
 ters, Ann and Augustina.
 
 ioo Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 
 
 JOYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, 
 whither at length hast thou flown ? to what 
 genial region are we permitted to conjecture 
 that thou hast flitted ? 
 
 Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest 
 time was still to come with thee) upon casual 
 sands of Avernus ? or art thou enacting Rover 
 (as we would gladlier think) by wandering 
 Elysian streams ? 
 
 This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy 
 brief antics amongst us, was in truth anything 
 but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist 
 dreams of this body to be no better than a 
 county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance 
 ■vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. 
 Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to 
 cast off these gyves ; and had notice to quit, I 
 fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon 
 this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure- 
 House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices ; thy 
 Louvre, or thy Whitehall.
 
 To the Shade of Elliston. ior 
 
 What new mysterious lodgings dost thou 
 tenant now ? or when may we expect thy aerial 
 house-warming ? 
 
 Tartarus we know, and we have read of the 
 Blessed Shades ; now cannot I intelligibly fancy 
 thee in either. 
 
 Is it too much to hazard a conjecture that 
 (as the Schoolmen admitted a receptacle apart 
 for patriarchs and unchrisom babes) there may 
 exist — not far perchance from that store-house 
 of all vanities which Milton saw in visions — a 
 Limbo somewhere for Players ? and that 
 
 Up thither like aerial vapours fly 
 Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things 
 Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? 
 All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands, 
 Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, 
 Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither, — 
 / Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery."N 
 
 There, by the neighbouring moon (by some 
 not improperly supposed thy Regent Planet 
 upon earth), mayst thou not still be acting thy 
 managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee > 
 but Lessee still, and still a manager ? 
 
 In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, 
 the muse beholds thee wielding posthumous 
 empire.
 
 102 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on 
 earth) circle thee in endlessly, and still their 
 song is, Fie on sinful Phantasy ! 
 
 Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe 
 of earth, Robert William Elliston I for as yet 
 we know not thy new name in heaven. 
 
 It irks me to think that, stripped of thy regali- 
 ties, thou shouldst ferry over, a poor forked 
 shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I 
 hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy 
 wharf, with raucid voice bawling ' Sculls, 
 Sculls 1 ' to which, with waving hand and ma- 
 jestic action, thou deignest no reply other than 
 in two curt monosyllables, ' No : Oars.' 
 
 But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small 
 difference between king and cobbler, manager 
 and call-boy ; and if haply your dates of life 
 were conterminant, you are quietly taking your 
 passage, cheek by cheek (oh, ignoble levelling of 
 Death !) with the shade of some recently departed 
 candle-snuffer. 
 
 But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off 
 of histrionic robes, and private vanities ! what 
 denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferry- 
 man will admit you to set a foot within his 
 battered lighter ! 
 
 Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and trun- 
 cheon ; thy own coronation robes (for thou
 
 To the Shade of Elliston. 103 
 
 hast brought the whole property-man's wardrobe 
 with thee, enough to sink a navy) ; the judge's 
 ermine, the coxcomb's wig, the snuff-box d la 
 Foppington, — all must overboard, he positively 
 swears. And that Ancient Mariner brooks no 
 denial ; for since the tiresome monodrame of 
 the old Thracian Harper. Charon, it is to be be- 
 lieved, hath shown small taste for theatricals. 
 
 Ay, now 't is done. You are just boat- 
 weight ; pura el puta anima. 
 
 But, bless me, how little you look ! 
 
 So shall we all look, kings and kaisers, — 
 stripped for the last voyage. 
 
 But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, 
 pleasant and thrice-pleasant shade ! with my 
 parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life 
 lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public 
 or domestic. 
 
 Rhadamanthus, — who tries the lighter causes 
 below, leaving to his two brethren the heavy 
 calendars, — honest Rhadamanth, always partial 
 to players, weighing their party-coloured exis- 
 tence here upon earth, making account of the 
 few foibles that may have shaded thy real life, 
 as we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less 
 a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the 
 boards of the Drury), as but of so many echoes, 
 natural re-percussions, and results to be expected
 
 104 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 from the assumed extravagancies of thy secon- 
 dary, or mock life, nightly upon a stage, — after 
 a lenient castigation with rods lighter than of 
 those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to 
 'whip the offending Adam out of thee,' shall 
 courteously dismiss thee at the right-hand gate 
 — the o. p. side of Hades — that conducts to 
 masques and merry-makings in the Theatre 
 Royal of Proserpine. 
 
 PLAUDITO ET VALETO.
 
 Ellistoniana. 105 
 
 ELLISTONIANA. 
 
 T\ /TY acquaintance with the pleasant creature, 
 ^ whose loss we all deplore, was but slight 
 My first introduction to E., which afterwards 
 ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side 
 of intimacy, was over a counter in the Leaming- 
 ton Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a 
 branch of Ms family. E., whom nothing misbe- 
 came, — to auspicate, I suppose, the filial con- 
 cern, and set it a-going with a lustre, — was 
 serving in person two damsels fair who had 
 come into the shop ostensibly to inquire for 
 some new publication, but in reality to have a 
 sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some 
 conference. With what an air did he reach 
 down the volume, dispassionately giving his 
 opinion of the worth of the work in question, 
 and launching out into a dissertation on its com- 
 parative merits with those of certain publica- 
 tions of a similar stamp, its rivals ! his enchanted 
 customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to 
 their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a
 
 106 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So 
 Lovelace sold his gloves in King Street. I ad- 
 mired the histrionic art by which he contrived 
 to carry clean away every notion of disgrace 
 from the occupation he had so generously 
 submitted to ; and from that hour I juJged 
 him, with no after repentance, to be a person 
 with whom it would be a felicity to be more 
 acquainted. 
 
 To descant upon his merits as a comedian 
 would be superfluous. With his blended private 
 and professional habits alone I have to do, — that 
 harmonious fusion of the manners of the player 
 into those of every-day life which brought the 
 stage-boards into streets and din^ng-parlours, 
 and kept up the play when the play was ended. 
 ' I like Wrench,' a friend was saying to him, 
 one day, ' because he is the same natural, easy 
 creature on the stage that he is off.' ' My 
 case exactly/ retorted Elliston, with a charm- 
 ing forgetfulness that the converse of a pro- 
 position does not always lead to the same 
 conclusion ; ' I am the same person off the 
 stage that I am on.' The inference at first 
 sight seems identical ; but examine it a little, 
 and it confesses only that the one performer 
 was never, and the other always, acting. 
 
 And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's
 
 Ellistoniana. 107 
 
 private deportment. You had spirited perform- 
 ance always going on before your eyes, with 
 nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up 
 his casual abode for the night, the poorest hovel 
 which he honours by his sleeping in it becomes 
 ipso facto for that time a palace, so wherever 
 Elliston walked, sat, or stood still, there was 
 the theatre. He carried about with him his pit, 
 boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable 
 play-house at corners of streets and in the 
 market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he 
 trod the boards still ; and if his theme chanced 
 to be passionate, the green baize carpet of 
 tragedy spontaneously rose beneath his feet. 
 Now, this was hearty, and showed a love for his 
 art. So Apelles always painted, — in thought. 
 So G. D. always poetizes. I hate a lukewarm 
 artist. I have known actors — and some of 
 them of Elliston's own stamp — who shall have 
 agreeably been amusing you in the part of a 
 rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three 
 hours of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner 
 does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but 
 a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their facul- 
 ties. They emerge sour, morose persons, in- 
 tolerable to their families, servants, etc. Another 
 shall have been expanding your heart with gener- 
 ous deeds and sentiments till it even beats with
 
 io8 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 yearnings of universal sympathy ; you absolutely 
 long to go home and do some good action. 
 The play seems tedious till you can get fairly 
 out of the house and realize your laudable in- 
 tentions. At length the final bell rings, and 
 this cordial representative of all that is amiable 
 in human breasts steps forth, — a miser. Ellis- 
 ton was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger, 
 and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the 
 town with satisfaction ? Why should he not be 
 Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaction 
 among his private circles > With his temperament, 
 his animal spirits, his good-nature, his follies, 
 perchance, could he do better than identify him- 
 self with his impersonation ? Are we to like a 
 pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and 
 give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical 
 character presented to us in actual life ? or 
 what would the performer have gained by di- 
 vesting himself of the impersonation > Could 
 the man Elliston have been essentially different 
 from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect 
 to us studiously, in private circles, the airy 
 briskness, the forwardness, the 'scape-goat 
 trickeries of the prototype ? 
 
 ' But there is something not natural in this 
 everlasting acting ; we want the real man.' 
 
 Are you quite sure that it is not the man him-
 
 Ell 'is ton ia na. 109 
 
 self, whom you cannot, or will not, see under 
 some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless, 
 sit not at all inconsistently upon him ? What if it 
 is the nature of some men to be highly artificial ? 
 The fault is least reprehensible in players. 
 Cibber was his own Foppington, with almost 
 as much wit as Vanbrugh could add to it. 
 
 ' My conceit of his person ' — it is Ben 
 Jonson speaking of Lord Bacon — ' was never 
 increased towards him by his place or honours. 
 But I have and do reverence him for the 
 greatness that was only proper to himself ; in 
 that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest 
 men that had been in many ages. In his adver- 
 sity I ever prayed that Heaven would give him 
 strength ; for greatness he could not want.' 
 
 The quality here commended was scarcely 
 less conspicuous in the subject of these idle 
 reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. Those 
 who have imagined that an unexpected elevation 
 to the direction of a great London theatre af- 
 fected the consequence of Elliston, or at all 
 changed his nature, knew not the essential 
 greatness of the man whom they disparage. It 
 was my fortune to encounter him near St. 
 Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual 
 giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), 
 on the morning of his election to that high
 
 no Essays of C barks Lamb. 
 
 office. Grasping my hand with a look of sig- 
 nificance, he only uttered, ' Have you heard 
 the news ? ' Then, with another look following 
 up the blow, he subjoined, ' I am the future man- 
 ager of Drury Lane Theatre.' Breathless as 
 he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or 
 reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to 
 chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. 
 In fact, nothing could be said to it. Expressive 
 silence alone could muse his praise. This was 
 in his great style. 
 
 But was he less great (be witness, O ye powers 
 of Equanimity that supported in the ruins of 
 Carthage the consular exile, and more recently 
 transmuted, for a more illustrious exile, the 
 barren constableship of Elba into an image of 
 Imperial France) when, in melancholy after- 
 years, again, much near the same spot, I met 
 him, when that sceptre had been wrested from 
 his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to the 
 petty managership and part proprietorship of 
 the small Olympic, his Elba) He still played 
 nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts, 
 alas I allotted to him, not magnificently dis- 
 tributed by him. Waiving his great loss as 
 nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense 
 of fallen material grandeur in the more liberal 
 resentment of depreciations done to his more
 
 Ettistoniana. 1 1 1 
 
 lofty intellectual pretensions, 'Have you heard' 
 (his customary exordium) — 'have you heard,' 
 said he, ' how they treat me ? They put me in 
 comedy.' Thought I, — but his finger on his 
 lips forbade any verbal interruption, — 'Where 
 could they have put you better?' Then, after 
 a pause, — ' Where I formerly played Romeo, I 
 now play Mercutio ; ' and so again he stalked 
 away, neither staying nor caring for responses. 
 
 Oh! it was a rich scene — but Sir A 
 
 C , the best of story-tellers and surgeons, 
 
 who mends a lame narrative almost as well as 
 he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it 
 — that I was a witness to in the tarnished 
 room (that had once been green) of that same 
 little Olympic. There, after his deposition 
 from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. 
 That Olympic Hill was his ' highest heaven ; ' 
 himself ' Jove in his chair.' There he sat in 
 state, while before him, on complaint of promp- 
 ter, was brought for judgment — how shall I 
 describe her? — one of those little tawdry 
 things that flirt at the tails of choruses, a pro- 
 bationer for the town in either of its senses, 
 the pertest little drab, a dirty fringe and appen- 
 dage of the lamp's smoke, who, it seems, on 
 some disapprobation expressed by a ' highly 
 respectable ' audience had precipitately quitted
 
 1 1 2 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 her station on the boards, and withdrawn her 
 small talents in disgust. 
 
 < And how dare you,' said her manager, assum- 
 ing a censorial severity which would have 
 crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed 
 that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional 
 caprices, — I verily believe he thought her 
 standing before him, — ' how dare you, madam, 
 withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your 
 theatrical duties?' * I was hissed, sir.' 'And 
 you have the presumption to decide upon the 
 taste of the town ? ' 'I don't know that, sir, 
 but I will never stand to be hissed,' was the 
 subjoinder of young Confidence. When, gather- 
 ing up his features into one significant mass of 
 wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation, 
 in a lesson never to have been lost upon a 
 creature less forward than she who stood before 
 him, his words were these : ' They have 
 hissed me. 1 
 
 'T was the identical argument a fortiori which 
 the son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling 
 under his lance, to persuade him to take his 
 destiny with a good grace. ' I too am mortal.' 
 And it is to be believed that in both cases 
 the rhetoric missed of its application for want 
 of a proper understanding with the faculties of 
 the respective recipients.
 
 Ellistoniana. 1 1 3 
 
 ' Quite an Opera pit,' he said to me as he 
 was courteously conducting me over the benches 
 of his Surrey Theatre, — the last retreat and 
 recess of his every-day waning grandeur. 
 
 Those who knew Elliston, will know the 
 manner in which he pronounced the latter sen- 
 tence of the few words I am about to record. 
 One proud day to me he took his roast mutton 
 with us in the Temple, to which I had super- 
 added a preliminary haddock. After a rather 
 plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not 
 unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I 
 made a sort of ^jologyfor the humility of the 
 fare, observing that for my own part I never 
 ate but of one dish at dinner. ' I too never eat 
 but one thing at dinner, 1 was his reply ; then, 
 after a pause, — ' reckoning fish as nothing.' 
 The manner was all. It was as if by one per- 
 emptory sentence he had decreed the annihila- 
 tion of all the savoury esculents which the 
 pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours 
 forth upon poor humans from her watery 
 bosom. This was greatness, tempered with 
 considerate tenderness to the feelings of his 
 scanty but welcoming entertainer. 
 
 Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William 
 
 Elliston ! and not lessened in thy death, if report 
 
 speak truly, which says that thou didst direct 
 
 8
 
 1 14 Esssays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 that thy mortal remains should repose under no 
 inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical 
 was thy bringing up I and beautiful was the 
 feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the 
 man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest 
 exercise of imagination, to the days when, un- 
 dreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou 
 wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under 
 the roofs builded by the munificent and pious 
 Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. 
 In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, 
 they shall celebrate thy praise.
 
 The Religion of Actors. 1 1 5 
 
 THE RELIGION OF ACTORS. 
 
 'THE world has hitherto so little troubled its 
 ■*■ head upon the points of doctrine held by 
 a community which contributes in other ways 
 so largely to its amusement, that, before the 
 late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it 
 scarce condescended to look into the practice 
 of any individual player, much less to inquire 
 into the hidden and abscondite springs of his 
 actions. Indeed, it is with some violence to 
 the imagination that we conceive of an actor 
 as belonging to the relations of private life, so 
 closely do we identify these persons in our 
 mind with the characters which they assume 
 upon the stage. How oddly does it sound 
 when we are told that the late Miss Pope, for 
 instance, — that is to say, in our notion of her 
 Mrs. Candour, — was a good daughter, an 
 affectionate sister, and exemplary in all the 
 parts of domestic life ! With still greater diffi- 
 culty can we carry our notions to church, and 
 conceive of Liston kneeling upon a hassock, or
 
 n6 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Munden uttering a pious ejaculation, — " making 
 mouths at the invisible event." But the times 
 are fast improving ; and if the process of 
 sanctity begun under the happy auspices of 
 the present licenser go on to its completion, 
 it ^will be as necessary for a comedian to give 
 an account of his faith as of his conduct. 
 Fawcett must study the five points, and Dicky 
 Suett, if he were alive, would have to rub up 
 his catechism. Already the effects of it begin 
 to appear. A celebrated performer has thought 
 fit to oblige the world with a confession of his 
 
 faith, or Br 's Religio Dramatici. This 
 
 gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from 
 his person the obloquy of Judaism, with a for- 
 wardness of a new convert in trying to prove 
 too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved 
 too little. A simple declaration of his Chris- 
 tianity was sufficient ; but, strange to say, his 
 apology has not a word about it. We are left 
 to gather it from some expressions which imply 
 that he is a Protestant ; but we did not wish 
 to inquire into the niceties of his orthodoxy. 
 To his friends of the old persuasion the distinc- 
 tion was impertinent ; for what cares Rabbi 
 Ben Kimchi for the differences which have 
 split our novelty ? To the great body of 
 Christians that holds the Pope's supremacy
 
 The Religion of Actors. 117 
 
 — that is to say, to the major part of the 
 Christian world — his religion will appear as 
 much to seek as ever. But perhaps he con- 
 ceived that all Christians are Protestants, as 
 children and the common people call all, that 
 are not animals, Christians. The mistake was 
 not very considerable in so young a proselyte, 
 or he might think the general (as logicians 
 speak) involved in the particular. All Protes- 
 tants are Christians ; but I am a Protestant ; 
 ergo, etc. : as if a marmoset, contending to be 
 a man, overleaping that term as too generic 
 and vulgar, should at once roundly proclaim 
 himself to be a gentleman. The argument 
 would be, as we say, exabundanti. From 
 whichever course this excessus in terminis pro- 
 ceeded, we can do no less than congratulate 
 the general state of Christendom upon the 
 accession of so extraordinary a convert. Who 
 was the happy instrument of the conversion, 
 we are yet to learn : it comes nearest to the 
 attempt of the late pious Dr. Watts to Chris- 
 tianize the Psalms of the Old Testament. 
 Something of the old Hebrew racinesss is lost 
 in the transfusion, but much of its asperity is 
 softened and pared down in the adaptation. 
 
 The appearance of so singular a treatise at 
 this conjuncture has set us upon an inquiry
 
 1 1 8 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 into the present state of religion upon the stage 
 generally. By the favour of the Churchward- 
 ens of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Paul's, 
 Covent Garden, who have very readily, and 
 with great kindness, assisted our pursuit, we 
 are enabled to lay before the public the follow- 
 ing particulars. Strictly speaking, neither of 
 the two great bodies is collectively a religious 
 institution. We expected to find a chaplain 
 among them, as at St Stephen's and other 
 court establishments ; and were the more sur- 
 prised at the omission, as the last Mr. Ben- 
 gough at the one house, and Mr. Powell at 
 the other, from a gravity of speech and demea- 
 nour, and the habit of wearing black at their 
 first appearances in the beginning of the fifth 
 or the conclusion of the fourth act, so eminently 
 pointed out their qualifications for such office. 
 These corporations, then, being not properly 
 congregational, we must seek the solution of 
 our question in the tastes, attainments, acciden- 
 tal breeding, and education of the individual 
 members of them. As we were prepared to 
 expect, a majority at both houses adhere to the 
 religion of the Church Established, — only that 
 at one of them a strong leaven of Roman 
 Catholicism is suspected ; which, considering 
 the notorious education of the manager at a
 
 The Religion of Actors. 119 
 
 foreign seminary, is not so much to be wondered 
 at. Some have gone so far as to report that 
 
 Mr. T y, in particular, belongs to an order 
 
 lately restored on the Continent. We can con- 
 tradict this ; that gentleman is a member of the 
 Kirk, of Scotland, and his name is to be found, 
 much to his honour, in the list of seceders from 
 the congregation of Mr. Fletcher. While the 
 generality, as we have said, are content to jog 
 on in the safe trammels of national orthodoxy, 
 symptoms of a sectarian spirit have broken out 
 in quarters where we should least have looked 
 for it. Some of the ladies at both houses are 
 
 deep in controverted points. Miss F e, 
 
 we are credibly informed, is a Sub- and Madame 
 
 V a Supra- Lapsarian. Mr. Pope is the 
 
 last of the exploded sect of the Ranters. Mr. 
 Sinclair has joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, 
 Sen., after being long a Jumper, has lately 
 fallen into some whimsical theories respecting 
 the fall of man, which he understands, not of 
 an allegorical, but a real tumble, — by which the 
 whole body of humanity became, as it were, 
 lame to the performance of good works. Pride 
 he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck ; 
 irresolution, the nerves shaken ; an inclination 
 to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints ; 
 spiritual deadness, a paralysis ; want of charity,
 
 120 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 a contraction in the fingers ; despising of gov- 
 ernment, a broken head ; the plaster, a sermon ; 
 the lint to bind it up, the text ; the probers, the 
 preachers ; a pair of crutches, the old and new 
 law ; a bandage, religious obligation, — a fanciful 
 mode of illustration, derived from the accidents 
 and habits of his past calling spiritualised, rather 
 than from any accurate acquaintance with the 
 Hebrew text, in which report speaks him but a 
 raw scholar. Mr. Elliston, from all we can 
 learn, has his religion yet to choose ; though 
 some think him a Muggletonian.
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 121 
 
 ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT 
 THE THEATRES. 
 
 WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED 
 AUTHORS. 
 
 IV/TR. REFLECTOR,— I am one of those 
 -*- VJ - 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 The- 
 atre, — I was found guilty of constructing an 
 afterpiece, and was damned. 
 
 Against the decision of the public in such in- 
 stances 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 condemned 
 because I could write. 
 
 Not but it did appear to some of us that the 
 measures of the popular tribunal at that period 
 savoured a little of harshness and of the summum
 
 122 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 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 favourable 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 dis- 
 approbation, 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, —
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 123 
 
 hie cccslus arlcmquc rcpono), — a theatre 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 fulling-mills, or that 
 wilder combination of devilish sounds which 
 Saint Anthony listened to in the wilderness. 
 
 Oh I Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity that the 
 sweet human voice, which was given man to 
 speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of 
 love in, to express compliance, to convey a 
 favour, or to grant a suit, — that voice which in 
 a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a Siren 
 Catalani charms and captivates us, — that the 
 musical, expressive human voice should be con- 
 verted 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 111, in the ' Paradise 
 Lost ' meeets 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
 
 124 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 With complicated monsters, head and tail, 
 Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire, 
 Cerastes horn'd, 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 hono-
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 125 
 
 rable 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 pub- 
 licly 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 outrage- 
 ous 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 tur- 
 pitude 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
 
 126 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 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 sense- 
 less and indefensible. Nor do we find that the 
 Roman audiences deprived themselves, by this 
 lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which au- 
 diences in all ages have thought themselves 
 bound to maintain over such as have been can- 
 didates 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, which sweetens most 
 other injuries ; for the public never writes it-
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 127 
 
 self. Not but something very like it took place 
 at the time of the O. P. differences. The pla- 
 cards which were nightly exhibited were, prop- 
 erly speaking, the composition of the public. 
 The public wrote them, the public applauded 
 them ; and precious morceaux of wit and elo- 
 quence they were, — except some few of a 
 better quality, which it is well known were fur- 
 nished by professed dramatic writers. After 
 this specimen of what the public can do for it- 
 self, 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 com- 
 position, 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
 
 128 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 allied to the foregoing. Some naturalists have 
 doubted whether they are not the same. 
 
 The Rattlesnake. — These are your obstrep- 
 erous talking critics, — the impertinent guides 
 of the pit, — who 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 some- 
 thing 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 Whipsnake. — This is he that lashes the 
 poor author the next day in the newspapers. 
 
 The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Lin- 
 naeus. — 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
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 129 
 
 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 in- 
 strument gave him 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 
 honour 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 anniversary of our respective nights, and 
 make ourselves merry at the expense of the 
 public. The chief tenets which distinguish our 
 society, and which every man among us is 
 bound to hold for gospel, are — 
 
 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 ; 
 
 9
 
 130 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 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 sub- 
 mission to children till we are obliged to prac- 
 tise it in earnest. That authors are and ought 
 to be considered the masters and preceptors of 
 the public, and not vice versd. That it was so 
 in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musseus, 
 and would be so again, if it were not that writers 
 prove traitors to themselves. That, in particu- 
 lar, 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 
 1 Candid Auditors,' as having given rise to a
 
 Hissing at the Theatres. 131 
 
 false notion in those to whom they were ap- 
 plied, as if they conferred upon them some 
 right, which ihey 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 suf- 
 fered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat — a sup- 
 posed unhealthy animal — to Aisculapius, on our 
 feast-nights we cut up a goose — an animal typi- 
 cal of the popular voice — to the deities of Can- 
 dour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member 
 of the society once proposed that we should re- 
 vive 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 then gone out, will never entitle its 
 author to a seat among us. An exception to 
 our usual readiness in conferring this privilege 
 is in the case of a writer who, having been once 
 condemned, writes again, and becomes candi- 
 date for a second martyrdom. Simple damna- 
 tion we hold to be a merit ; but to be twice
 
 132 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we 
 utterly reject and blackball without a hearing : 
 
 The common damned shun his society. 
 
 Hoping that your publication of our Regula- 
 tions may be a means of inviting some more 
 members into our society, I conclude this long 
 letter. 
 
 1 am, sir, yours, 
 
 Semel-Damnatus.
 
 Tragedy of 'Antonio.' 133 
 
 JOHN KEMBLE AND GODWIN'S 
 TRAGEDY OF 'ANTONIO.' 1 
 
 'THE story of his swallowing opium pills to 
 ■*■ keep him lively upon the first night of a 
 certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece 
 of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffer- 
 ing author. But, indeed, John had the art of 
 diffusing a complacent, equable dulness (which 
 you knew not where to quarrel with) over a 
 piece which he did not like, beyond any of his 
 contemporaries. John Kemble had made up 
 his mind early that all the good tragedies which 
 could be written had been written, and he 
 resented any new attempt. His shelves were 
 full. The old standards were scope enough 
 for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute, 
 and ' fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.' 
 He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and 
 did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir 
 
 1 This essay originally made part of that on the 
 ' Artificial Comedy of Last Century,' as it was first 
 printed in the ' London Magazine ' for 1822. Lamb after- 
 wards omitted it.
 
 134 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Edward Mortimer or any casual speculator that 
 offered. 
 
 I remember, too acutely for my peace, the 
 deadly extinguisher which he put upon my 
 friend G.'s 'Antonio.' G., satiate with visions 
 of political justice (possibly not to be realized 
 in our time), or willing to let the sceptical 
 'worldlings see that his anticipations of the 
 future did not preclude a warm sympathy for 
 men as they are and have been, wrote a tra- 
 gedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, 
 Spanish ; the plot simple without being naked, 
 the incidents uncommon without being over- 
 strained. Antonio, who gives the name to the 
 piece, is a sensitive young Castilian who in a 
 fit of his country honour immolates his sister. 
 
 But I must not anticipate the catastrophe. 
 The play, reader, is extant in choice English, 
 and you will employ a spare half-crown not 
 injudiciously in the quest of it. 
 
 The conception was bold, and the denouement, 
 the time and place in which the hero of it 
 existed considered, not much out of keeping ; 
 yet it must be confessed that it required a deli- 
 cacy of handling, both from the author and the 
 performer, so as not much to shock the preju- 
 dices of a modern English audience. G., in 
 my opinion, has done his part. John, who was
 
 Tragedy of 'Antonio.' 135 
 
 in familiar habits with the philosopher, had 
 undertaken to play Antonio. Great expecta- 
 tions were formed. A philosopher's first play 
 was a new era. The night arrived. I was 
 favoured with a seat in an advantageous box, 
 between the author and his friend M. G. sat 
 cheerful and confident. In his friend M.'s 
 looks, who had perused the manuscript, I read 
 some terror. Antonio, in the person of John 
 Philip Kemble, at length appeared, starched 
 out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and 
 in most irreproachable mustachios. John always 
 dressed most provokingly correct on these 
 occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and 
 silent. It went off, as G. assured M., exactly 
 as the opening act of a piece — the protasis — 
 should do. The cue of the spectators was to 
 be mute. The characters were but in their in- 
 troduction. The passions and the incidents 
 would be developed hereafter. Applause hith- 
 erto would be impertinent. Silent attention 
 was the effect all-desirable. Poor M. acqui- 
 esced, but in his honest, friendly face I could 
 discern a working which told how much more 
 acceptable the plaudit of a single hand (however 
 misplaced) would have been than all this reason- 
 ing. The second act (as in duty bound) rose 
 a little in interest ; but still John kept his
 
 136 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 forces under, — in policy, as G. would have it, — 
 and the audience were most complacently atten- 
 tive. The protasis, in fact, was scarcely un- 
 folded. The interest would warm in the next 
 act, against which a special incident was pro- 
 vided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a 
 friendly perspiration, — 'tis M.'s way of showing 
 his zeal ; ' from every pore of him a perfume 
 falls.' I honour it above Alexander's. He had 
 once or twice during this act joined his palms 
 in a feeble endeavour to elicit a sound ; they 
 emitted a solitary noise without an echo : there 
 was no deep to answer to his deep. G. repeat- 
 edly begged him to be quiet. The third act at 
 length brought on the scene which was to warm 
 the piece progressively to the final flaming forth 
 of the catastrophe. A philosophic calm settled 
 upon the clear brow of G. as it approached. 
 The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held 
 forth upon the stage, and there was a promise 
 of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this 
 extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, 
 seemed disposed to make a ring ; when suddenly 
 Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the 
 tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman 
 (who, by the way, should have had his sister), 
 balks his humour, and the pit's reasonable ex- 
 pectation at the same time, with some speeches
 
 Tragedy of 'Antonio.' 137 
 
 out of the new philosophy against duelling. 
 The audience were here fairly caught ; their 
 courage was up and on the alert ; a few blows, 
 
 ding-dong, as R s, the dramatist, afterwards 
 
 expressed it to me, might have done the busi- 
 ness, — when their most exquisite moral sense 
 was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying 
 negation of their own pleasure. They could 
 not applaud for disappointment ; they would not 
 condemn for morality's sake. The interest 
 stood stone-still, and John's manner was not at 
 all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas 
 time, and the atmosphere furnished some pre- 
 text for asthmatic affections. One began to 
 cough ; his neighbour sympathized with him, 
 till a cough became epidemical. But when, 
 from being half-artificial in the pit, the cough 
 got frightfully naturalized among the fictitious 
 persons of the drama, and Antonio himself 
 (albeit it was not set down in the stage direc- 
 tions) seemed more intent upon relieving his 
 own lungs than the distresses of the author and 
 his friends, then G. ' first knew fear,' and, 
 mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not 
 been aware that Mr. Kemble laboured under 
 a cold, and that the performance might pos- 
 sibly have been postponed with advantage for 
 some nights further, — still keeping the same
 
 138 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 serene countenance, while M. sweated like a 
 bull. 
 
 It would be invidious to pursue the fates of 
 this ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot 
 thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the 
 dialogue was more passionate and stirring, and 
 the progress of the sentiment point more and 
 more clearly to the arduous development which 
 impended. In vain the action was accelerated, 
 while the acting stood still. From the begin- 
 ning John had taken his stand, — had wound 
 himself up to an even tenure of stately decla- 
 mation, from which no exigence of dialogue or 
 person could make him swerve for an instant. 
 To dream of his rising with the scene (the 
 common trick of tragedians) was preposterous ; 
 for from the onset he had planted himself, as 
 upon a terrace, on an eminence vastly above 
 the audience, and he kept that sublime level 
 to the end. He looked from his throne of 
 elevated sentiment upon the under-world of 
 spectators with a most sovereign and becoming 
 contempt. There was excellent pathos deliv- 
 ered out to them : an they would receive it, 
 so ; an they would not receive it, so. There 
 was no offence against decorum in all this ; 
 nothing to condemn, to damn ; not an irreverent 
 symptom of a sound was to be heard. The pro-
 
 Tragedy of 'Antonio' 139 
 
 cession of verbiage stalked on through four 
 and five acts, no one venturing to predict what 
 would come of it, when, towards the winding up 
 of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that 
 seemed to stagger Elvira herself, — for she had 
 been coolly arguing the point of honour with 
 him, — suddenly whips out a poniard and stabs 
 his sister to the heart. The effect was as if a 
 murder had been committed in cold blood. 
 The whole house rose up in clamorous indigna- 
 tion, demanding justice. The feeling rose far 
 above hisses. I believe at that instant, if they 
 could have got him, they would have torn the 
 unfortunate author to pieces. Not that the act 
 itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion 
 different from what they themselves would have 
 applauded upon another occasion in a Brutus 
 or an Appius ; but for want of attending to An- 
 tonio's words, which palpably led to the expec- 
 tation of no less dire an event, instead of 
 being seduced by his manner, which seemed to 
 promise a sleep of a less alarming nature than 
 it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they found 
 themselves betrayed into an accompliceship of 
 murder, a perfect misprision of parricide, while 
 they dreamed of nothing less. 
 
 M., I believe, was the only person who 
 suffered acutely from the failure ; for G. thence-
 
 140 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 forward, with a serenity unattainable but by 
 the true philosophy, abandoning a precarious 
 popularity, retired into his fasthold of specula- 
 tion, — the drama in which the world was to be 
 his tiring-room, and remote posterity his ap- 
 plauding spectators at once and actors.
 
 Stage Illusion. 141 
 
 STAGE ILLUSION. 
 
 A PLAY is said to be well or ill acted, in 
 ^"*- proportion to the scenical illusion pro- 
 duced. Whether such illusion can in any case 
 be perfect, is not the question. The nearest 
 approach to it, we are told, is when the actor 
 appears wholly unconscious of the presence of 
 spectators. In tragedy — in all which is to 
 affect the feelings — this undivided attention to 
 his stage business seems indispensable. Yet it 
 is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our 
 cleverest tragedians ; and while these references 
 to an audience, in the shape of rant or senti- 
 ment, are not too frequent or palpable, a suffi- 
 cient quantity of illusion for the purposes of 
 dramatic interest may be said to be produced 
 in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may 
 be inquired whether, in certain characters in 
 comedy, especially those which are a little 
 extravagant, or which involve some notion re- 
 pugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of 
 the highest skill in the comedian when, without
 
 142 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps 
 up a tacit understanding with them, and makes 
 them, unconsciously to themselves, a party in 
 the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the 
 mode of doing this ; but we speak only of the 
 great artists in the profession. 
 
 The most mortifying infirmity in human 
 nature to feel in ourselves or to contemplate 
 in another is perhaps cowardice. To see a 
 coward done to the life upon a stage would 
 produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of 
 us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could 
 anything be more agreeable, more pleasant ? 
 We loved the rogues. How was this effected 
 but by the exquisite art of the actor in a per- 
 petual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, 
 even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he 
 was not half such a coward as we took him for? 
 We saw all the common symptoms of the malady 
 upon him, — ■ the quivering lip, the cowering 
 knees, the teeth chattering, — and could have 
 sworn ' that man was frightened.' But we for- 
 got all the while — or kept it almost a secret to 
 ourselves — that he never once lost his self- 
 possession ; that he let out, by a thousand droll 
 looks and gestures, — meant at us, and not at 
 all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the 
 scene, — that his confidence in his own resources
 
 Stage Illusion. 143 
 
 had never once deserted him. Was this a 
 genuine picture of a coward, or not rather a 
 likeness which the clever artist contrived to 
 palm upon us instead of an original, while we 
 secretly connived at the delusion for the pur- 
 pose of greater pleasure than a more genuine 
 counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, 
 and utter self-desertion which we know to be 
 concomitants of cowardice in real life could 
 have given us ? 
 
 Why are misers so hateful in the world and 
 so endurable on the stage, but because the 
 skilful actor, by a sort of subreference, rather 
 than direct appeal to us, disarms the character 
 of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to 
 engage our compassion for the insecure tenure 
 by which he holds his money-bags and parch- 
 ments ? By this subtle vent half of the hate- 
 fulness of the character — the self-closeness 
 with which in real life it coils itself up from the 
 sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser 
 becomes sympathetic ; i. e., is no genuine miser. 
 Here again a diverting likeness is substituted 
 for a very disagreeable reality. 
 
 Spleen, irritability, the pitiable infirmities of 
 old men, which produce only pain to behold in 
 the realities, counterfeited upon a stage divert 
 not altogether for the comic appendages to
 
 144 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 them, but in part from an inner conviction that 
 they are being acted before us ; that a likeness 
 only is going on, and not the thing itself. They 
 please by being done under the life, or beside 
 it, not to the life. When Gattie acts an old 
 man, is he angry indeed ? or only a pleasant 
 counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recog- 
 nize, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense 
 of a reality ? 
 
 Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may 
 be too natural. It was the case with a late 
 actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true 
 than the manner of Mr. Emery ; this told ex- 
 cellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic 
 cast. But when he carried the same rigid ex- 
 clusiveness of attention to the stage business, 
 and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything 
 .before the curtain into his comedy, it produced 
 a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of 
 keeping with the rest of the dramatis persona?. 
 There was as little link between him and them 
 as betwixt himself and the audience. He was 
 a third estate, — dry, repulsive, and unsocial to 
 all. Individually considered, his execution was 
 masterly. But comedy is not this unbending 
 thing, — for this reason, that the same degree of 
 credibility is not required of it as to serious 
 scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded
 
 Stage Illusion. 145 
 
 to the two things may be illustrated by the dif- 
 ferent sort of truth which we expect when a 
 man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If 
 we suspect the former of falsehood in any one 
 tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse 
 to flow at a suspected imposition. But the 
 teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. 
 We are content with less than absolute truth. 
 'T is the same with dramatic illusion. We con- 
 fess we love in comedy to see an audience 
 naturalized behind the scenes, — taken into the 
 interest of the drama, welcomed as bystanders, 
 however. There is something ungracious in a 
 comic actor holding himself aloof from all par- 
 ' ticipation or concern with those who are come 
 to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the 
 dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it ; 
 but an old fool in farce may think he sees some- 
 thing, and by conscious words and looks ex- 
 press it, as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box, 
 and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, 
 an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the seri- 
 ous passions of the scene, we approve of the 
 contempt with which he is treated. But when 
 the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece 
 purely meant to give delight and raise mirth 
 out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studi- 
 ous man with taking up his leisure, or making 
 
 10 
 
 //
 
 146 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 his house his home, the same sort of contempt 
 expressed (however natural) would destroy the 
 balance of delight in the spectators. To make 
 the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the 
 annoyed man must a little desert nature ; he 
 must, in short, be thinking of the audience, 
 and express only so much dissatisfaction and 
 peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of 
 comedy. In other words, his perplexity must 
 seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with 
 the sober, set face of a man in earnest, and 
 more especially if he deliver his expostulations 
 in a tone which in the world must necessarily 
 provoke a duel, his real-life manner will destroy 
 the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of 
 the other character (which to render it comic 
 demands an antagonist comicality on the part of 
 the character opposed to it), and convert what 
 was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a 
 downright piece of impertinence indeed, which 
 would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir 
 pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any worthy 
 person. A very judicious actor (in most of his 
 parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this 
 sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce 
 of ' Free and Easy. 1 
 
 Many instances would be tedious ; these may 
 suffice to show that comic acting at least does
 
 Stage Illusion. 147 
 
 not always demand from the performer that 
 strict abstraction from all reference to an audi- 
 ence which is exacted of it, but that in some 
 cases a sort of compromise may take place, and 
 all the purposes of dramatic delight be at- 
 tained by a judicious understanding, not too 
 openly announced, between the ladies and gen- 
 tlemen on both sides of the curtain.
 
 148 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF 
 THE LAST CENTURY. 
 
 HP HE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of man- 
 A ners, is quite extinct on our stage. Con- 
 greve and Farquhar show their heads once in 
 seven years only, to be exploded and put down 
 instantly ; the times cannot bear them. Is it 
 for a few wild speeches, an occasional license 
 of dialogue ? I think not altogether. The 
 business of their dramatic characters will not 
 stand the moral test. We screw everything up 
 to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, 
 the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in 
 the same way as the alarming indications of 
 profligacy in a son or ward in real life should 
 startle a parent or guardian. We have no such 
 middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We 
 see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks 
 of two hours' duration, and of no after con- 
 sequence, with the severe eyes which inspect 
 real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. 
 We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not re- 
 ducible in life to the point of strict morality),
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 149 
 
 and take it all for truth. We substitute a real 
 for a dramatic person, and judge him accord- 
 ingly. We try him in our courts, from which 
 there is no appeal to the dramatis persona?, his 
 peers. We have been spoiled with, not sen- 
 timental comedy, but a tyrant far more per- 
 nicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to 
 it, — the exclusive and all-devouring drama of 
 common life, where the moral point is every- 
 thing, where, instead of the fictitious, half- 
 believed personages of the stage (the phantoms 
 of oid comedy), we recognize ourselves, our 
 brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, ene- 
 mies, — the same as in life, — with an interest 
 in what is going on so hearty and substantial 
 that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its 
 deepest and most vital results, to compromise 
 or slumber for a moment. What is there trans- 
 acting, by no modification is made to affect us 
 in any other manner than the same events or 
 characters would do in our relationships of life. 
 We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre 
 with us. We do not go thither, like our ances- 
 tors, to escape from the pressure of reality so 
 much as to confirm our experience of it, — to 
 make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. 
 We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as 
 it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to de-
 
 150 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 scend twice to the shades. All that neutral 
 ground of character which stood between vice 
 and virtue, or which in fact was indifferent to 
 neither, where neither properly was called in 
 question, that happy breathing-place from the 
 burthen of a perpetual moral questioning, — the 
 sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry 
 — is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious 
 to the interests of society. The privileges of 
 the place are taken away by law. We dare 
 not dally with images, or names, of wrong. 
 We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We 
 dread infection from the scenic representation 
 of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our 
 anxiety that our morality should not take cold, 
 we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of 
 precaution against the breeze and sunshine. 
 
 1 confess for myself that (with no great de- 
 linquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season 
 to take an airing beyond the diocese of the 
 strict conscience, — not to live always in the 
 precincts of the law courts, but now and then, 
 for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world 
 with no meddling restrictions, to get into re- 
 cesses whither the hunter cannot follow me, — 
 
 Secret shades 
 Of woody Ida's inmost grove, 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove.
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 151 
 
 I come back to my cage and my restraint the 
 fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my 
 shackles more contentedly for having respired 
 the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not 
 know how it is with others, but I feel the better 
 always for the perusal of one of Congreve's — 
 nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's ? 
 — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; 
 and I could never connect those sports of a 
 witty fancy in any shape with any result to be 
 drawn from them to imitation in real life. They 
 are a world of themselves almost as much as 
 fairyland. Take one of their characters, male 
 or female (with few exceptions they are alike), 
 and place it in a modern play, and my vir- 
 tuous indignation shall rise against the profli- 
 gate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit 
 could desire, because in a modern play I am to 
 judge of the right and the wrong. The standard 
 of police is the measure of political justice. 
 The atmosphere will blight it ; it cannot live 
 here. It has got into a moral world, where it 
 has no business, from which it must needs fall 
 headlong, — as dizzy and incapable of making a 
 stand as a Swedeuborgian bad spirit that has 
 wandered unawares into the sphere of one of 
 his Good Men or Angels. But in its own 
 world do we feel the creature is so very bad ?
 
 152 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants 
 and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, 
 do not offend my moral sense ; in fact, they do 
 not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in 
 their proper element. They break through no 
 laws or conscientious restraints ; they know 
 of none. They have got out of Christendom 
 into the land — what shall I call it ? — of cuck- 
 oldry, — the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure 
 is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It 
 is altogether a speculative scene of things, which 
 has no reference whatever to the world that is. 
 No good person can be justly offended as a 
 spectator, because no good person suffers on 
 the stage. Judged morally, every character in 
 these plays — the few exceptions only are mis- 
 takes — is alike essentially vain and worthless. 
 The great art of Congreve is especially shown 
 in this, that he has entirely excluded from his 
 scenes, — some little generosities in the part of 
 Angelica perhaps excepted, — not only anything 
 like a faultless character, but any pretensions to 
 goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether 
 he did this designedly or instinctively, the 
 effect is as happy as the design (if design) was 
 bold. I used to wonder at the strange power 
 which his ' Way of the World ' in particular pos- 
 sesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 153 
 
 of characters for whom you absolutely care 
 nothing, — for you neither hate nor love his 
 personages, — and I think it is owing to this 
 very indifference for any that you endure the 
 whole. He has spread a privation of moral 
 light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name 
 of palpable darkness, over his creations ; and 
 his shadows flit before you without distinction 
 or preference. Had he introduced a good 
 character, a single gush of moral feeling, a re- 
 vulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual 
 duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only 
 lighted to the discovery of deformities which 
 now are none, because we think them none. 
 
 Translated into real life, the characters of his 
 and his friend Wycherley's dramas are profli- 
 gates and strumpets ; the business of their 
 brief existence the undivided pursuit of lawless 
 gallantry. No other spring of action or pos- 
 sible motive of conduct is recognized, — princi- 
 ples which, universally acted upon, must reduce 
 this frame of things to a chaos. But we do 
 them wrong in so translating them. No such 
 effects are produced, in their world. When we 
 are among them, we are amongst a chaotic 
 people. We are not to judge them by our 
 usages. No reverend institutions are insulted 
 by their proceedings, for they have none
 
 154 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 among them. No peace of families is violated, 
 for no family ties exist among them. No 
 purity of the marriage bed is stained, for none 
 is supposed to have a being. No deep affec- 
 tions are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are 
 snapped asunder, for affection's depth and 
 wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. 
 There is neither right nor wrong, gratitude or 
 its opposite, claim or duty, paternity or sonship. 
 Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is 
 she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon 
 or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha, or who 
 is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's 
 children ? 
 
 The whole is a passing pageant, where we 
 should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life 
 or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice. 
 But, like Don Quixote, we take part against 
 the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We 
 dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out 
 of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a 
 little transitory ease excluded. We have not the 
 courage to imagine a state of things for which 
 there is neither reward nor punishment. We 
 cling to the painful necessities of shame and 
 blame. We would indict our very dreams. 
 
 Amidst the mortifying circumstances attend- 
 ant upon growing old, it is something to have
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 1 5 5 
 
 seen the ' School for Scandal ' in its glory. This 
 comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, 
 but gathered some allays of the sentimental 
 comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible 
 that it should be now acted, though it continues, 
 at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. 
 Its hero, when Palmer played it, at least, was 
 Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay 
 boldness, the graceful, solemn plausibility, the 
 measured step, the insinuating voice, — to ex- 
 press it in a word, the downright acted villainy 
 of the part, so different from the pressure of 
 conscious, actual wickedness, the hypocritical 
 assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so 
 deservedly a favourite in that character, I must 
 needs conclude the present generation of play- 
 goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. 
 I freely confess that he divided the palm with 
 me with his better brother, — that, in fact, I liked 
 him quite as well. Not but there are passages, 
 — like that, for instance, where Joseph is made 
 to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incon- 
 gruities, which Sheridan was forced upon by the 
 attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental 
 comedy, either of which must destroy the other ; 
 but over these obstructions Jack's manner 
 floated him so lightly that a refusal from him 
 no more shocked you than the easy compliance
 
 156 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure, — 
 you got over the paltry question as quickly as 
 you could, to get back into the regions of pure 
 comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The 
 highly artificial manner of Palmer in this char- 
 acter counteracted every disagreeable impression 
 which you might have received from the con- 
 trast, supposing them real, between the two 
 brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with 
 the same faith with which you believed in 
 Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the 
 former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. 
 The comedy, I have said, is incongruous, — a 
 mixture of Congreve with sentimental incom- 
 patibilities ; the gaiety upon the whole is buoy- 
 ant, but it required the consummate art of 
 Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. 
 
 A player with Jack's talents, if we had one 
 now, would not dare to do the part in the same 
 manner. He would instinctively avoid every 
 turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to 
 make the character fascinating. He must take 
 his cue from his spectators, who would expect a 
 bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to 
 each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses 
 are contrasted in the prints, which, I am sorry 
 to say, have disappeared from the windows of 
 my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 157 
 
 Churchyard memory, — an exhibition as vener- 
 able as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval, 
 — of the bad and good man at the hour of death ; 
 where the ghastly apprehensions of the former 
 (and truly the grim phantom with his reality 
 of a toasting-fork is not to be despised) so 
 finely contrast with the meek, complacent kissing 
 of the rod, taking it in like honey and butter, 
 with which the latter submits to the scythe of 
 the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet 
 with the apprehensive finger of a popular young 
 ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, 
 would not covet to meet half-way the stroke 
 of such a delicate mower ? John Palmer was 
 twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was 
 playing to you all the while that he was playing 
 upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first 
 intimation of a sentiment before it was on his 
 lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and 
 you were to suppose that his fictitious co- 
 flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all 
 of it. What was it to you if that half reality, 
 the husband, was overreached by the puppetry, 
 or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was 
 persuaded it was dying of a plethory ? The 
 fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not 
 concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from 
 the stage in good time, that he did not live to
 
 158 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 this our age of seriousness. The pleasant old 
 Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His 
 manner would scarce have passed current in our 
 day. We must love or hate, acquit or condemn, 
 censure or pity, exert our detestable coxcombry 
 of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph 
 Surface, to go down now, must be a downright 
 revolting villain, — no compromise ; his first 
 appearance must shock and give horror ; his 
 specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable fac- 
 ulties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty 
 greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic 
 harm even) could come or was meant to come of 
 them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. 
 Charles (the real canting person of the scene, — 
 for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legiti- 
 mate ends ; but his brother's professions of a 
 good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) 
 must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance 
 one disagreeable reality with another, Sir Peter 
 Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a 
 fretful old bachelor bridegroom whose teasings 
 (while King acted it) were evidently as much 
 played off at you as they were meant to con- 
 cern anybody on the stage, he must be a real 
 person, capable in law of sustaining an injury, — 
 a person towards whom duties are to be ac- 
 knowledged, the genuine crim. con. antagonist
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 159 
 
 of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize 
 him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate 
 match must have the downright pungency of 
 life, must (or should) make you, not mirthful, 
 but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament 
 would move you in a neighbour or old friend. 
 
 The delicious scenes which give the play its 
 name and zest must affect you in the same 
 serious manner as if you heard the reputation of 
 a dear female friend attacked in your real 
 presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin, those 
 poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of 
 your mirth, must be ripened by this hot-bed 
 process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas, 
 and Mrs. Candour — oh, frightful ! — become a 
 hooded serpent. Oh, who that remembers Par- 
 sons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the 
 ' School for Scandal ' — in those two characters, 
 and charming, natural Miss Pope, the perfect 
 gentlewoman, as distinguished from the fine lady 
 of comedy, in this latter part, would forego the 
 true scenic delight, the escape from life, the ob- 
 livion of consequences, the holiday barring out 
 of the pedant Reflection, those Saturnalia of two 
 or three brief hours well won from the world, 
 to sit instead at one of our modern plays, to 
 have his coward conscience (that, forsooth, must 
 not be left for a moment) stimulated with per-
 
 160 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 petual appeals, dulled rather, and blunted, as a 
 faculty without repose must be, and his moral 
 vanity pampered with images of notional justice, 
 notional beneficence, lives saved without the 
 spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that 
 cost the author nothing ? 
 
 No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely 
 cast in all its parts as this manager's corned/. 
 Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington 
 in Lady Teazle, and Smith, the original Charles, 
 had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the 
 characters, with very slight exceptions, re- 
 mained. I remember it was then the fashion to 
 cry down John Kemble, who took the part of 
 Charles after Smith ; but I thought very un- 
 justly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and 
 took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. 
 He brought with him no sombre recollections 
 of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of 
 having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. 
 He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to 
 atone for. His failure in these parts was a 
 passport to success in one of so opposite a 
 tendency. But as far as I could judge, the 
 weighty sense of Kemble made up for more 
 personal incapacity than he had to answer for. 
 His harshest tones in this part came steeped 
 and dulcified in good humour. He made his
 
 Artificial Comedy of Last Century. 161 
 
 defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, 
 as he managed it, only served to convey the 
 points of his dialogue with more precision ; it 
 seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. 
 Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I 
 remember minutely how he delivered each in 
 succession, and cannot by any effort imagine 
 how any of them could be altered for the better. 
 No man could deliver brilliant dialogue — the 
 dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — be- 
 cause none understood it half so well as John 
 Kemble. His Valentine, in ' Love for Love,' 
 was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged 
 sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. 
 He would slumber over the level parts of an 
 heroic character. His Macbeth has been 
 known to nod. But he always seemed to me to 
 be particularly alive to pointed and witty dia- 
 logue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have 
 not been touched by any since him; the playful, 
 court-bred spirit in which he condescended to 
 the players in Hamlet, the sportive relief which 
 he threw into the darker shades of Richard, dis- 
 appeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, 
 his torpors ; but they were the halting-stones 
 and resting-place of his tragedy, — politic sav- 
 ings and fetches of the breath, husbandry of the 
 lungs, where Nature pointed him to be an 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 economist, rather, I think, than errors of the 
 judgment. They were, at worst, less painful 
 than the eternal tormenting, unappeasable vigi- 
 lance, the ' lidless dragon eyes,' of present 
 fashionable tragedy.
 
 On the Tragedies of Shahspeare. 163 
 
 ON THE TRAGEDIES OF 
 SHAKSPEARE, 
 
 CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS 
 FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION. 
 
 TAKING a turn the other day in the Abbey, 
 I was struck with the affected attitude of 
 a figure which I do not remember to have seen 
 before, and which upon examination proved to 
 be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Gar- 
 rick. Though I would not go so far with some 
 good Catholics abroad as to shut players alto- 
 gether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I 
 was not a little scandalized at the introduction 
 of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set 
 apart to remind us of the saddest realities. 
 Going nearer, I found inscribed under this 
 harlequin figure the following lines : — 
 
 To paint fair Nature, by divine command, 
 Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, 
 A Shakspeare rose ; then, to expand his fame 
 Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
 
 164 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, 
 The Actor's genius made them breathe anew ; 
 Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay, 
 Immortal Garrick called them back to-day. 
 And till Eternity with power sublime 
 Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, 
 Shakspeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine, 
 And earth irradiate with a beam divine. 
 
 It would be an insult to my readers' under- 
 standings to attempt anything like a criticism on 
 this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. 
 But the reflection it led me into was a kind of 
 wonder how, from the days of the actor here 
 celebrated to our own, it should have been the 
 fashion to compliment every performer in his 
 turn that has had the luck to please the town in 
 any of the great characters of Shakspeare, with a 
 notion of possessing a mind congenial with the 
 poet's; how people should come thus unac- 
 countably to confound the power of originating 
 poetical images and conceptions with the faculty 
 of being able to read or recite the same when 
 put into words ; l or what connection that abso- 
 
 1 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only 
 in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gen- 
 tleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause 
 is therefore a great poet and philosopher, nor do we find 
 that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have 
 recited the 'Paradise Lost' better than any man in England 
 in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspeare. 165 
 
 lute mastery over the heart and soul of man, 
 which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with 
 those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a 
 player by observing a few general effects, which 
 some common passion, as grief, anger, etc., 
 usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can 
 easily compass. To know the internal work- 
 ings and movements of a great mind, of an 
 Othello or a Hamlet, for instance ; the when and 
 the why and. the how far they should be moved ; 
 to what pitch a passion is becoming ; to give 
 the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the 
 moment when the drawing in or the slacking is 
 most graceful, — seems to demand a reach of in- 
 tellect of a vastly different extent from that 
 which is employed upon the bare imitation of 
 the signs of these passions in the countenance 
 or gesture, which signs are usually observed to 
 be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort 
 of minds, and which signs can, after all, but in- 
 dicate some passion, as I said before, anger, 
 or grief generally. But of the motives and 
 grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from 
 the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of 
 these the actor can give no more idea by his 
 face or gesture than the eye (without a meta- 
 
 some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his inti- 
 mate friends, set upon a level with Milton.
 
 1 66 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 phor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible 
 sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature 
 of the impressions which we take in at the eye 
 and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow 
 apprehension oftentimes of the understanding 
 in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the 
 playwriter in the consideration which we pay to 
 the actor, but even to identify in our minds in 
 a perverse manner, the actor with the character 
 which he represents. It is difficult for a fre- 
 quent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of 
 Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. 
 We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in 
 reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this con- 
 fusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, 
 who, not possessing the advantage of reading, 
 are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player 
 for all the pleasure which they can receive from 
 the drama, and to whom the very idea of what 
 an author is cannot be made comprehensible 
 without some pain and perplexity of mind. The 
 error is one from which persons otherwise not 
 meanly lettered, find it almost impossible to 
 extricate themselves. 
 
 Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget 
 the very high degree of satisfaction which I 
 received some years back from seeing for the 
 first time a tragedy of Shakspeare performed,
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspeare. iGy 
 
 in which these two great performers sustained 
 the principal parts. It seemed to embody and 
 realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed 
 no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all 
 our life afterwards for this juvenile pleasure, 
 this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is 
 past, we find to our cost that, instead of realiz- 
 ing an idea, we have only materialized and 
 brought down a fine vision to the standard of 
 flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in 
 quest of an unattainable substance. 
 
 How cruelly this operates upon the mind, 
 to have its free conceptions thus cramped and 
 pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing 
 actuality, may be judged from that delightful 
 sensation of freshness with which we turn to 
 those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped 
 being performed, and to those passages in the 
 acting plays of the same writer which have 
 happily been left out in the performance. How 
 far the very custom of hearing anything spouted, 
 withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be 
 seen in those speeches from ' Henry the Fifth,' 
 etc., which are current in the mouths of school- 
 boys from their being to be found in ' Enfield 
 Speakers ' and such kind of books. I confess 
 myself utterly unable to appreciate that cele- 
 brated soliloquy in' Hamlet,' beginning 'To be,
 
 1 68 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 or not to be,' or to tell whether it be good, bad, or 
 indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed 
 about by declamatory boys and men, and torn 
 so inhumanly from its living place and principle 
 of continuity in the play, till it is become to me 
 a perfect dead member. 
 
 It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help 
 being of opinion that the plays of Shakspeare are 
 less calculated for performance on a stage than 
 those of almost any other dramatist whatever. 
 Their distinguished excellence is a reason that 
 they should be so ; there is so much in them 
 which comes not under the province of acting, 
 with which eye and tone and gesture have 
 nothing to do. 
 
 The glory of the scenic art is to personate 
 passion and the turns of passion ; and the more 
 coarse and palpable the passion is, the more 
 hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators 
 the performer obviously possesses. For this 
 reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two per- 
 sons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then 
 in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it 
 again, have always been the most popular upon 
 our stage. And the reason is plain, because the 
 spectators are here most palpably appealed to, — 
 they are the proper judges in this war of words; 
 they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 169 
 
 round such ' intellectual prize-fighters.' Talk- 
 ing is the direct object of the imitation here. 
 But in the best dramas, and in Shakspeare above 
 all, how obvious it is that the form of speaking, 
 whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only 
 a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for 
 putting the reader or spectator into possession 
 of that knowledge of the inner structure and 
 workings of mind in a character, which he 
 could otherwise never have arrived at in that 
 form of composition by any gift short of intuition. 
 We do here as we do with novels written in the 
 epistolary form. How many improprieties, per- 
 fect solecisms, in letter-writing do we put up 
 with in ' Clarissa' and other books for the sake 
 of the delight which that form upon the whole 
 
 gives us ! 
 
 But the practice of stage representation re- 
 duces everything to a controversy of elocution. 
 Every character, from the boisterous blasphem- 
 ings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of 
 womanhood, must play the orator. The love- 
 dialogues of ' Romeo and Juliet,' those silver- 
 sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night ; the 
 more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial 
 colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus 
 with their married wives ; all those delicacies 
 which are so delightful in the reading, as when
 
 170 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 we read of those youthful dalliances in 
 Paradise, — 
 
 As beseemed 
 Fair couple linked in happy nuptial league, 
 Alone, — 
 
 by the inherent fault of stage representation, 
 how are these things sullied and turned from 
 their very nature by being exposed to a large 
 assembly ; when such speeches as Imogen 
 addresses to her lord come drawling out of the 
 mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, 
 though nominally addressed to the personated 
 Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the specta- 
 tors, who are to judge of her endearments and 
 her returns of love. 
 
 The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by 
 which, since the days of Betterton, a succes- 
 sion of popular performers have had the greatest 
 ambition to distinguish themselves. The length 
 of the part may be one of their reasons. But 
 for the character itself, we find it in a play, 
 and therefore we judge it a fit subject of dra- 
 matic representation. The play itself abounds 
 in maxims and reflections beyond any other, 
 and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle 
 for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet 
 himself, — what does he suffer meanwhile by 
 being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspeare. 171 
 
 to give lectures to the crowd ! Why, nine 
 parts in ten of what Hamlet does are transac- 
 tions between himself and his moral sense ; they 
 are the effusions of his solitary musings, which 
 he retires to holes and corners and the most 
 sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth, — 
 or rather, they are the silent meditations with 
 which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for 
 the sake of the reader, who must else remain igno- 
 rant of what is passing there. These profound 
 sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring rumina- 
 tions, which the tongue scarce dares utter to 
 deaf walls and chambers, how can they be 
 represented by a gesticulating actor who comes 
 and mouths them out before an audience, mak- 
 ing four hundred people his confidants at once ? 
 I say not that it is the fault of the actor so to 
 do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he 
 must accompany them with his eye, he must 
 insinuate them into his auditory by some trick 
 of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must 
 be thinking all the while of his appearance, 
 because he knows that all the while the spec- 
 tators are judging of it. And this is the way 
 to represent the shy, negligent, retiring 
 Hamlet ! 
 
 It is true that there is no other mode of con- 
 veying a vast quantity of thought and feeling to
 
 172 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 a great portion of the audience, who otherwise 
 would never learn it for themselves by reading, 
 and the intellectual acquisition gained this way 
 may, for aught I know, be inestimable ; but I 
 am not arguing that t Hamlet I should not be 
 acted, but how much ' Hamlet 1 is made another 
 thing by being acted. I have heard much of 
 the wonders which Garrick performed in this 
 part ; but as I never saw him, I must have leave 
 to doubt whether the representation of such a 
 character came within the province of his art. 
 Those who tell me of him, speak of his eye, of 
 the magic of his eye, and of his commanding 
 voice, — physical properties vastly desirable in 
 an actor, and without which he can never insin- 
 uate meaning into an auditory. But what have 
 they to do with Hamlet > What have they to do 
 with intellect ? In fact, the things aimed at in 
 theatrical representation are to arrest the spec- 
 tator's eye upon the form and the gesture, and 
 so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is 
 spoken. It is not what the character is, but how 
 he looks ; not what he says, but how he speaks 
 it. I see no reason to think that if the play of 
 ' Hamlet ' were written over again by some such 
 writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process 
 of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry 
 of it, all the divine features of Shakspeare, his
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 173 
 
 stupendous intellect, and only taking care to 
 give us enough of passionate dialogue, which 
 Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish, — 
 I see not how the effect could be much differ- 
 ent upon an audience, nor how the actor has it 
 in his power to represent Shakspeare to us 
 differently from his representation of Banks or 
 Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful accom- 
 plished prince, and must be gracefully person- 
 ated ; he might be puzzled in his mind, 
 wavering in his conduct, seemingly cruel to 
 Ophelia ; he might see a ghost, and start at it, 
 and address it kindly when he found it to be 
 his father, — all this in the poorest and most 
 homely language of the servilest creeper after 
 nature that ever consulted the palate of an au- 
 dience, without troubling Shakspeare for the 
 matter ; and I see not but there would be room 
 for all the power which an actor has to display 
 itself. All the passions and changes of passion 
 might remain, for those are much less difficult 
 to write or act than is thought, — it is a trick 
 easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a 
 note or two in the voice, a whisper, with a sig- 
 nificant foreboding look to announce its ap- 
 proach ; and so contagious the counterfeit 
 appearance of any emotion is, that let the words 
 be what they will, the look and tone shall
 
 174 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 carry it off and make it pass for deep skill 
 in the passions. 
 
 It is common for people to talk of Shak- 
 speare's plays being 50 natural that everybody 
 can understand him. They are natural indeed, 
 they are grounded deep in nature, — so deep that 
 the depth of them lies out of the reach of most 
 of us. You shall hear the same persons say 
 that 'George Barnwell' is very natural, and 
 ' Othello ' is very natural, that they are both very 
 deep ; and to them they are the same kind of 
 thing. At the one they sit and shed tears 
 because a good sort of young man is tempted 
 by a naughty woman to commit a trifling pecca- 
 dillo, the murder of an uncle or so, 1 that is all, 
 
 1 If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the 
 managers, I would entreat and beg of them, in the name 
 of both the galleries, that this insult upon the morality 
 of the common people of London should cease to be 
 eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are the 
 'prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead 
 of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with 
 a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell? Why a/ the end 
 of their vistas are we to place the gallows? Were I an 
 uncle, I should not much like a nephew of mine to have 
 such an example placed before his eyes. It is really 
 making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done 
 upon such slight motives ; it is attributing too much to 
 such characters as Millwood ; it is putting things into the 
 heads of good young men which they would never other-
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspwre. 175 
 
 and so comes to an untimely end, which is 50 
 moping; and at the other, because a blacka- 
 moor in a fit of jealousy kills his innocent white 
 wife, — and the odds are that ninety-nine out of 
 a hundred would willingly behold the same 
 catastrophe happen to both the heroes, and 
 have thought the rope more due to Othello than 
 to Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello's 
 mind, the inward construction marvellously laid 
 open, with all its strengths and weaknesses, its 
 heroic confidences and its human misgivings, 
 its agonies of hate springing from the depths of 
 love, they see no more than the spectators at 
 a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece 
 to look through the man's telescope in Leices- 
 ter Fields, see into the inward plot and topo- 
 graphy of the moon. Some dim thing or other 
 they see, — they see an actor personating a 
 passion, of grief or anger, for instance, and 
 they recognize it as a copy of the usual external 
 effects of such passions, or at least as being true 
 to Wat symbol of the emotion which passes cur- 
 rent at the theatre for it ; for it is often no more 
 than that. But of the grounds of the passion, its 
 correspondence to a great or heroic nature, 
 
 wise have dreamed of. Uncles that think anything of 
 their lives should fairly petition the Chamberlain 
 against it.
 
 176 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 which is the only worthy object of tragedy ; 
 that common auditors know anything of this, or 
 can have any such notions dinned into them 
 by the mere strength of an actor's lungs, — 
 that apprehensions foreign to them should be 
 thus infused into them by storm, I can 
 neither believe, nor understand how it can be 
 possible. 
 
 We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observa- 
 tion of life, when we should feel that not from 
 a petty inquisition into those cheap and every- 
 day characters which surrounded him, as they 
 surround us, but from his own mind, which was, 
 to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 
 ' sphere of humanity,' he fetched those images 
 of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one 
 of us, recognizing a part, think we comprehend 
 in our natures the whole, and oftentimes mis- 
 take the powers which he positively creates in 
 us for nothing more than indigenous faculties 
 of our own minds, which only waited the appli- 
 cation of corresponding virtues in him to return 
 a full and clear echo of the same. 
 
 To return to Hamlet. Among the distin- 
 guishing features of that wonderful character, 
 one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that 
 soreness of mind which makes him treat the 
 intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 177 
 
 asperity which he puts on in his interviews with 
 Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind 
 (if they be not mixed in the latter case with a 
 profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia 
 by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her 
 mind for the breaking off of that loving inter- 
 course, which can no longer find a place amidst 
 business so serious as that which he has to do) 
 are parts of his character, which, to reconcile 
 with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient 
 consideration of his situation is no more than 
 necessary ; they are what we forgive afterwards, 
 and explain by the whole of his character, but 
 at the time they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet 
 such is the actor's necessity of giving strong 
 blows to the audience that I have never seen 
 a player in this character who did not exagger- 
 ate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous 
 features, — these temporary deformities in the 
 character. They make him express a vulgar 
 scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his 
 gentility, and which no explanation can render 
 palatable ; they make him show contempt and 
 curl up the nose at Ophelia's father, — con- 
 tempt in its very grossest and most hateful 
 form ; but they get applause by it : it is natural, 
 people say, — that is, the words are scornful, 
 
 and the actor expresses scorn, and that they 
 
 12
 
 178 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 can judge of ; but why so much scorn, and of 
 that sort, they never think of asking. 
 
 So to Ophelia. All the Hamlets that I have 
 ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had 
 committed some great crime, and the audience 
 are highly pleased, because the words of the 
 part are satirical, and they are enforced by the 
 strongest expression of satirical indignation of 
 which the face and voice are capable. But 
 then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on 
 such brutal appearances to a lady whom he 
 loved so dearly, is never thought on. The 
 truth is, that in all such deep affections as had 
 subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia, there 
 is a stock of supererogatory love (if I may ven- 
 ture to use the expression), which in any great 
 grief of heart, especially where that which 
 preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, 
 confers a kind of indulgence upon the grieved 
 party to express itself, even to its heart's dear- 
 est object, in the language of a temporary 
 alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a distrac- 
 tion purely, and so it always makes itself to be 
 felt by that object : it is not anger, but grief 
 assuming the appearance of anger, — love 
 awkwardly counterfeiting hate, as sweet counte- 
 nances when they try to frown. But such stern- 
 ness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 179 
 
 show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of abso- 
 lute aversion, of irreconcilable alienation. It 
 may be said he puts on the madman ; but then 
 he should only so far put on this counterfeit 
 lunacy as his own real distraction will give him 
 leave ; that is, imcompletely, imperfectly, not 
 in that confirmed, practised way, like a master 
 of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would say, 
 ' like one of those harlotry players." 
 
 I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort 
 of pleasure which Shakspeare's plays give in the 
 acting seems to me not at all to differ from that 
 which the audience receive from those of other 
 writers ; and, they being in themselves essentially 
 so different from all others, I must conclude that 
 there is something in the nature of acting which 
 levels all distinctions. And, in fact, who does 
 not speak indifferently of the ' Gamester' and of 
 'Macbeth' as fine stage performances, and praise 
 the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady 
 Macbeth of Mrs. S. ? Belvidera and Calista 
 and Isabella and Euphrasia, are they less liked 
 than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desde- 
 mona ? Are they not spoken of and remem- 
 bered in the same way ? Is not the female 
 performer as great (as they call it) in one as in 
 the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he 
 not ambitious of shining, in every drawling
 
 i8o Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 tragedy that his wretched day produced, — the 
 productions of the Hills and the Murphys and 
 the Browns, — and shall he have that honour to 
 dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable 
 concomitant with Shakspeare ? A kindred 
 mind ! Oh, who can read that affecting sonnet 
 of Shakspeare which alludes to his profession 
 as a player, — 
 
 Oh, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 
 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than public means which public manners breeds. 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand, — 
 
 Or that other confession, — 
 
 Alas, 't is true, I have gone here and there, 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most 
 dear, — 
 
 Who can read these instances of jealous self- 
 watchfulness in our sweet Shakspeare and 
 dream of any congeniality between him and one 
 that, by every tradition of him, appears to have 
 been as mere a player as ever existed ; to have 
 had his mind tainted with the lowest player's 
 vices, — envy and jealousy and miserable crav- 
 ings after applause ; one who in the exercise of
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 181 
 
 his profession was jealous even of the women- 
 performers that stood in his way, — a manager 
 full of managerial tricks and stratagems and 
 finesse ; that any resemblance should be dreamed 
 of between him and Shakspeare, — Shakspeare, 
 who in the plenitude and consciousness of his 
 own powers could with that noble modesty 
 which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, 
 express himself thus of his own sense of his 
 own defects, — 
 
 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
 Featured like him, like him with friends possessed : 
 Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope! 
 
 I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the 
 merits of being an admirer of Shakspeare. A 
 true lover of his excellences he certainly was 
 not ; for would any true lover of them have ad- 
 mitted into his matchless scenes such ribald trash 
 as Tate and Cibber and the rest of them, that 
 
 With their darkness durst affront his light, 
 
 have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare ? 
 I believe it impossible that he could have had a 
 proper reverence for Shakspeare and have con- 
 descended to go through that interpolated scene 
 in ' Richard the Third ' in which Richard tries 
 to break his wife's heart by telling her he loves 
 another woman, and says, ' If she survives this
 
 1 82 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 she is immortal.' Yet I doubt not he delivered 
 this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of em- 
 phasis as any of the genuine parts ; and for act- 
 ing, it is as well calculated as any. But we 
 have seen the part of Richard lately produce 
 great fame to an actor by his manner of playing 
 it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of 
 popular judgments of Shakspeare derived from 
 acting. Not one of the spectators who have 
 witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions in that part but 
 has come away with a proper conviction that 
 Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little 
 children in their beds with something like the 
 pleasure which the giants and ogres in children's 
 books are represented to have taken in that 
 practice; moreover, that he is very close and 
 shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could see 
 that by his eye. 
 
 But is in fact this the impression we have in 
 reading the Richard of Shakspeare ? Do we 
 feel anything like disgust, as we do at that 
 butcher-like representation of him that passes 
 for him on the stage ? A horror at his crimes 
 blends with the effect which we feel ; but how 
 is it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich 
 intellect which he displays, his resources, his 
 wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and 
 insight into characters, the poetry of his part ! —
 
 On the Tragedies of Shahspeare. 183 
 
 not an atom of all which is made perceivable in 
 Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing but his 
 crimes, his actions, is visible, — they are promi- 
 nent and staring; the murderer stands out, — but 
 where is the lofty genius, the man of vast ca- 
 pacity, the profound, the witty, accomplished 
 Richard ? 
 
 The truth is, the characters of Shakspeare are 
 so much the objects of meditation rather than of 
 interest or curiosity as to their actions that 
 while we are reading any of his great criminal 
 characters, — Macbeth, Richard, even lago, — 
 we think not so much of the crimes which they 
 commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, 
 the intellectual activity which prompts them to 
 overleap those moral fences. Barnwell is a 
 wretched murderer ; there is a certain fitness 
 between his neck and the rope ; he is the legiti- 
 mate heir to the gallows ; nobody who thinks at 
 all can think of any alleviating circumstances in 
 his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or 
 to take an instance from the higher tragedy, 
 what else but a mere assassin in Glenalvon ? 
 Do we think of anything but of the crime which 
 he commits and the rack which he deserves ? 
 That is all which we really think about him. 
 Whereas in corresponding characters in Shak- 
 speare, so little do the actions comparatively
 
 1 84 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind 
 in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real, 
 and is exclusively attended to, the crime is com- 
 paratively nothing. But when we see these 
 things represented, the acts which they do are 
 comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. 
 The state of sublime emotion into which we are 
 elevated by those images of night and horror 
 which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn 
 prelude with which he entertains the time till 
 the bell shall strike which is to call him to 
 murder Duncan, — when we no longer read it 
 in a book, when we have given up that vantage- 
 ground of abstraction which reading possesses 
 over seeing, and come to see a man in his 
 bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing 
 to commit a murder, if the acting be true and 
 impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s 
 performance of that part, the painful anxiety 
 about the act, the natural longing to prevent it 
 while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close 
 pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and 
 an uneasiness which totally destroy all the de- 
 light which the words in the book convey, where 
 the deed doing never presses upon us with the 
 painful sense of presence ; it rather seems to 
 belong to history, to something past and inevit- 
 able, if it has anything to do with time at all.
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 185 
 
 The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that 
 which is present to our minds in the reading. 
 
 So to see Lear acted, — to see an old man 
 tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, 
 turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy 
 night, has nothing in it but what is painful and 
 disgusting. We want to take him into shelter 
 and relieve him, — that is all the feeling which 
 the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But 
 the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The 
 contemptible machinery, by which they mimic 
 the storm which he goes out in, is not more in- 
 adequate to represent the horrors of the real 
 elements than any actor can be to represent 
 Lear ; they might more easily propose to perso- 
 nate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one 
 of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The 
 greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, 
 but in intellectual ; the explosions of his passion 
 are terrible as a volcano, — they are storms turn- 
 ing up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his 
 mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind 
 which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood 
 seems too insignificant to be thought on, even 
 as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see 
 nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, 
 the impotence of rage ; while we read it, we 
 see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his
 
 1 86 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which 
 baffles the malice of daughters and storms. In 
 the aberrations of his reason we discover a 
 mighty, irregular power of reasoning, immethod- 
 ized from the ordinary purposes of life, but ex- 
 erting its powers, as the wind blows where it 
 listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses 
 of mankind. What have looks or tones to do 
 with that sublime identification of his age with 
 that of the heavens themselves, when in his re- 
 proaches to them for conniving at the injustice 
 of his children he reminds them that ' they 
 themselves are old ' ? What gestures shall we 
 appropriate to this ? What has the voice or the 
 eye to do with such things ? But the play is 
 beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show ; 
 it is too hard and stony, — it must have love- 
 scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough 
 that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as 
 a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nos- 
 trils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his fol- 
 lowers, the showmen of scene, to draw the 
 mighty beast about more easily. A happy end- 
 ing ! — as if the living martyrdom that Lear had 
 gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, 
 did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of 
 life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to 
 live and be happy after, if he could sustain this
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 187 
 
 world's burden after, why all this pudder and 
 preparation, why torment us with all this un- 
 necessary sympathy ? As if the childish pleas- 
 ure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again 
 could tempt him to act over again his misused 
 station ; as if at his years, and with his expe- 
 rience, anything was left but to die ! 
 
 1 Lear ' is essentially impossible to be repre- 
 sented on a stage. But how many dramatic per- 
 sonages are there in Shakspeare which, though 
 more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) 
 than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some 
 adjunct to their character, are improper to be 
 shown to our bodily eye. ' Othello,' for instance. 
 Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering 
 to the nobler parts of our natures, than to read 
 of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction, 
 through the force of love and from a sense of 
 merit in him whom she loved, laying aside every 
 consideration of kindred and country and 
 colour, and wedding with a coal-black Moor 
 (for such he is represented, in the imperfect 
 state of knowledge respecting foreign countries 
 in those days compared with our own, or in 
 compliance with popular notions ; though the 
 Moors are now well enough known to be by 
 many shades less unworthy of white woman's 
 fancy), — it is the perfect triumph of virtue over
 
 1 88 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 accidents, of the imagination over the senses. 
 She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But 
 upon the stage, when the imagination is no 
 longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our 
 poor, unassisted senses, I appeal to every one 
 that has seen ' Othello 1 played, whether he did 
 not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in 
 his colour ; whether he did not find something 
 extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded 
 caresses of Othello and Desdemona ; and 
 whether the actual sight of the thing did not 
 overweigh all that beautiful compromise which 
 we make in reading. And the reason it should 
 do so is obvious, because there is just so much 
 reality presented to our senses as to give a per- 
 ception of disagreement, with not enough of be- 
 lief in the internal motives — all that which is 
 unseen — to overpower and reconcile the first 
 and obvious prejudices. 1 What we see upon a 
 
 1 The error of supposing that because Othello's colour 
 does not offend us in the reading, it should also not 
 offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing 
 that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as 
 they do in the poem. But in the poem we for a while 
 have paradisaical senses given us, which vanish when we 
 see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture. 
 The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the 
 awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look 
 not quite naked, — by a sort of prophetic anachronism
 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspeare. 189 
 
 stage is^body and bodily action; what we 
 are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively 
 the mind and its movements ; and this, I 
 think, may sufficiently account for the very 
 different sort of delight with which the same 
 play so often affects us in the reading and the 
 seeing. 
 
 It requires little reflection to perceive that if 
 those characters in Shakspeare which are within 
 the precincts of nature have yet something in 
 them which appeals too exclusively to the im- 
 agination to admit of their being made objects 
 to the senses without suffering a change and a 
 diminution, — that still stronger the objection 
 must lie against representing another line of 
 characters which Shakspeare has introduced to 
 give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to 
 his scenes, as if to remove them still further 
 from that assimilation to common life in which 
 their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. 
 When we read the incantations of those terrible 
 beings, the Witches in ' Macbeth, 1 though some 
 of the ingredients of their hellish composition 
 savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon 
 us other than the most serious and appalling 
 
 antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading 
 of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes ; in the seeing 
 of it, we are forced to look with our own.
 
 190 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 that can be imagined ? Do we not feel spell- 
 bound as Macbeth was ? Can any mirth ac- 
 company a sense of their presence ? We might 
 as well laugh under a consciousness of the prin- 
 ciple of Evil himself being truly and really 
 present with us. But attempt to bring these 
 beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly 
 into so many old women that men and children 
 are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, 
 that ' seeing is believing, 1 the sight actually 
 destroys the faith ; and the mirth in which we 
 indulge at their expense, when we see these 
 creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of 
 indemnification which we make to ourselves for 
 the terror which they put us in when reading 
 made them an object of belief, — when we sur- 
 rendered up our reason to the poet, as children 
 to their nurses and their elders ; and we laugh 
 at our fears, as children who thought they saw 
 something in the dark triumph when the bring- 
 ing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their 
 fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents 
 upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to ex- 
 pose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary 
 taper and the book that generates a faith in these 
 terrors ; a ghost by chandelier light and in 
 good company deceives no spectators, — a ghost 
 that can be measured by the eye, and his human
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspeare. 191 
 
 dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a 
 well-lighted house and a well-dressed audi- 
 ence shall arm the most nervous child against 
 any apprehensions, as Tom Brown says of the 
 impenetrable skin of Achilles, with his impene- 
 trable armour over it, ' Bully Dawson would 
 have fought the devil with such advantages.' 
 
 Much has been said, and deservedly, in repro- 
 bation of the vile mixture which Dryden has 
 thrown into the ' Tempest ; ' doubtless without 
 some such vicious alloy, the impure ears of that 
 age would never have sat out to hear so much 
 innocence of love as is contained in the sweet 
 courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda. But is 
 the ' Tempest ' of Shakspeare at all a subject for 
 stage representation ? It is one thing to read of 
 an enchanter, and to believe the wondrous tale 
 while we are reading it ; but to have a conjuror 
 brought before us in his conjuring-gown, with 
 his spirits about him, which none but himself 
 and some hundred of favoured spectators before 
 the curtain are supposed to see, involves such a 
 quantity of the hateful incredible that all our 
 reverence for the author cannot hinder us from 
 perceiving such gross attempts upon the senses 
 to be in the highest degree childish and inef- 
 ficient. Spirits and fairies cannot be repre- 
 sented, they cannot even be painted ; they can 

 
 19 2 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 only be believed. But the elaborate and 
 anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury 
 of the age demands, in these cases works a quite 
 contrary effect to what is intended. That which 
 in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so 
 much to the life of the imitation, in plays which 
 appeal to the higher faculties positively destroys 
 the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A 
 parlour or a drawing-room, a library opening 
 into a garden, a garden with an alcove in it, a 
 street, or the piazza of Covent Garden, does 
 well enough in a scene ; we are content to give 
 as much credit to it as it demands ; or rather, 
 we think little about it, it is little more than 
 reading at the top of a page, ' Scene, a garden ; ' 
 we do not imagine ourselves there, but we 
 readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. 
 But to think, by the help of painted trees and 
 caverns which we know to be painted, to trans- 
 port our minds to Prospero and his island and 
 his lonely cell, 1 or by the aid of a fiddle dex- 
 terously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, 
 to make us believe that we hear those super- 
 
 1 It will be said these things are done in pictures. 
 But pictures and scenes are very different things. Paint- 
 ing is a word of itself; but in scene-painting there is the 
 attempt to deceive, and there is the discordancy, never to 
 be got over, between painted scenes and real people.
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspeare. 193 
 
 natural noises of which the isle was full, — the 
 Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket might as 
 well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly 
 stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to 
 make us believe that we do indeed hear the 
 crystal spheres ring out that chime which, if it 
 were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks, 
 
 Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, 
 
 And speckled vanity 
 
 Would sicken soon and die, 
 
 And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould, — 
 
 Yea, Hell itself would pass away, 
 
 And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day. 
 
 The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in 
 it, is not more impossible to be shown on a 
 stage than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less 
 interesting and innocent first settlers. 
 
 The subject of scenery is closely connected 
 with that of the dresses, which are so anxiously 
 attended to on our stage. I remember, the last 
 time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I 
 felt at the changes of garment which he varied, 
 — the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish 
 priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improve- 
 ments and the importunity of the public eye 
 require this. The coronation robe of the Scot- 
 tish monarch was fairly a counterpart to that 
 
 13
 
 194 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 which our king wears when he goes to the 
 parliament-house, — just so full and cumber- 
 some, and set out with ermine and pearls. And 
 if things must be represented, I see not what to 
 find fault with in this. But in reading, what 
 robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of 
 royalty, a crown and sceptre, may float before 
 our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of 
 it ? Do we see in our mind's eye what Webb 
 or any other robe-maker could pattern ? This 
 is the inevitable consequence of imitating every- 
 thing, to make all things natural. Whereas the 
 reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It 
 presents to the fancy just so much of external 
 appearances as to make us feel that we are 
 among flesh and blood, while by far the greater 
 and better part of our imagination is employed 
 upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the 
 character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the 
 most contemptible things, call upon us to judge 
 of their naturalness. 
 
 Perhaps it would be no bad similitude to 
 liken the pleasure which we take in seeing one 
 of these fine plays acted, compared with that 
 quiet delight which we find in the reading of it, 
 to the different feelings with which a reviewer 
 and a man that is not a reviewer reads a 
 fine poem. The accursed critical habit, the
 
 On the Tragedies of Sbakspare. 195 
 
 being called upon to judge and pronounce, 
 must make it quite a different thing to the 
 former. In seeing these plays acted, we are 
 affected just as judges. When Hamlet com- 
 pares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and 
 second husband, who wants to see the pictures ? 
 But in the acting, a miniature must be lugged 
 out, — which we know not to be the picture, but 
 only to show how finely a miniature may be 
 represented. This showing of everything levels 
 all things ; it makes tricks, bows, and courtesies 
 of importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame 
 by anything than by the manner in which she 
 dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in 
 ' Macbeth ; ' it is as much remembered as any of 
 her thrilling tones or impressive looks. But 
 does such a trifle as this enter into the imagina- 
 tions of the reader of that wild and wonderful 
 scene ? Does not the mind dismiss the feasters 
 as rapidly as it can ? Does it care about the 
 gracefulness of the doing it ? But by acting, 
 and judging of acting, all these non-essentials 
 are raised into an importance injurious to the 
 main interest of the play. 
 
 I have confined my observations to the tragic 
 parts of Shakspeare. It would be no very diffi- 
 cult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies, 
 and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh
 
 196 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Evans, and the rest are equally incompatible 
 with stage representation. The length to which 
 this essay has run, will make it, I am afraid, 
 sufficiently distasteful to the amateurs of the 
 theatre, without going any deeper into the 
 subject at present.
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 197 
 
 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS 
 CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 "\irHEN I selected for publication, in 1808, 
 •■ Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 
 who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the 
 kind of extracts which I was anxious to give 
 were, not so much passages of wit and humor, 
 though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes 
 of passion, sometimes of the deepest quality, 
 interesting situations, serious descriptions, that 
 which is more nearly allied to poetry than 
 to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic 
 poetry. The plays which I made choice of 
 were, with few exceptions, such as treat of 
 human life and manners, rather than masques 
 and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of ab- 
 stractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate 
 mortals, — Claius and Medorus and Amintas 
 and Amarillis. My leading design was to il- 
 lustrate what may be called the moral sense of 
 our ancestors. To show in what manner they 
 felt when they placed themselves by the power 
 of imagination in trying circumstances, in the
 
 198 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife of 
 contending duties ; what sort of loves and en- 
 mities theirs were ; how their griefs were tem- 
 pered, and their full-swoln joys abated ; how 
 much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his 
 contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind 
 and manners he surpassed them and all man- 
 kind. I was also desirous to bring together some 
 of the most admired scenes of Fletcher and 
 Massinger, — in the estimation of the world the 
 only dramatic poets of that age entitled to be 
 considered after Shakspeare, — and by exhibiting 
 them in the same volume with the more impres- 
 sive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tour- 
 neur, Webster, Ford, and others, to show what 
 we had slighted, while beyond all proportion 
 we had been crying up one or two favourite 
 names. From the desultory criticisms which 
 accompanied that publication I have selected a 
 few which I thought would best stand by 
 themselves as requiring least immediate refer- 
 ence to the play or passage by which they 
 were suggested. 
 
 Christopher Marlowe. 
 
 Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. — 
 This tragedy is in King Cambyses 1 vein, — rape
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 199 
 
 and murder and superlatives ; ' huffing braggart 
 puft lines, 1 such as the play-writers anterior to 
 Shakspeare are full of, and Pistol but coldly 
 imitates. 
 
 Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shep- 
 herd. — The lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect 
 midsummer madness. Nebuchadnezzar's are 
 mere modest pretensions compared with the 
 thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. 
 He comes in, drawn by conquered kings, and 
 reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that 
 they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I 
 saw this passage with my own eyes I never be- 
 lieved that it was anything more than a pleasant 
 burlesque of mine ancient's. But I can assure 
 my readers that it is soberly set down in a play 
 which their ancestors took to be serious. 
 
 Edward the Second. — In a very different style 
 from mighty ' Tamburlaine ' is the tragedy of 
 1 Edward the Second.' The reluctant pangs of 
 abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints 
 which Shakspeare scarcely improved in his 
 ' Richard the Second ; ' and the death-scene of 
 Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond 
 any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am 
 acquainted. 
 
 The Rich Jew of Malta. — Marlowe's Jew 
 does not approach so near to Shakspeare's as
 
 200 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 his ' Edward the Second ' does to ' Richard the 
 Second.' Barabas is a mere monster brought in 
 with a large painted nose to please the rabble. 
 He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, in- 
 vents infernal machines. He is just such an ex- 
 hibition as a century or two earlier might have 
 been played before the Londoners ' by the royal 
 command,' when a general pillage and massacre 
 of the Hebrews had been previously resolved 
 on in the cabinet. It is curious to see a super- 
 stition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which 
 our pious ancestors contemplated with so much 
 horror, has nothing in it now revolting. We 
 have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its 
 nails, and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, 
 write plays to flatter it ; it is visited by princes, 
 affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and is the 
 only liberal and gentlemanlike thing in 
 Christendom. 
 
 Doctor Fausius. — The growing horrors of 
 Faustus's last scene are awfully marked by the 
 hours and half-hours as they expire, and bring 
 him nearer and nearer to the exactment of his 
 dire compact. It is indeed an agony and a 
 fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have 
 been tainted with atheistical positions, to have 
 denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius 
 the history of Faustus must have been delec-
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 201 
 
 table food : to wander in fields where curiosity 
 is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf 
 near enough to look in, to be busied in specula- 
 tions which are the rottenest part of the core of 
 the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge. 1 
 Barabas the Jew and Faustus the conjuror are 
 offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to 
 dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk 
 a language which a believer would have been 
 tender of putting into the mouth of a character 
 though but in fiction. But the holiest minds 
 have sometimes not thought it reprehensible to 
 counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to 
 bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own 
 dialect ; and, themselves being armed with an 
 unction of self-confident impunity, have not 
 scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly 
 which would be death to others. Milton in the 
 person of Satan has started speculations hardier 
 than any which the feeble armoury of the atheist 
 ever furnished ; and the precise, strait-laced 
 Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the 
 mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries 
 and abstruse pleas against her adversary, 
 
 1 Error, entering into the world with Sin among us 
 poor Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of 
 knowledge itself and from the rotten kernels of that 
 fatal apple. — Howell's Letters.
 
 202 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester 
 wanted depth of libertinism enough to have 
 invented. 
 
 Thomas Decker. 
 
 Old Fortunatus. — The humour of a frantic 
 lover, in the scene where Orleans to his friend 
 Galloway defends the passion with which him- 
 self, being a prisoner in the English king's 
 court, is enamoured to frenzy of the king's 
 daughter Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans 
 is as passionate an inamorata as any which 
 Shakspeare ever drew. He is just such another 
 adept in Love's reasons. The sober people of 
 the v/orld are with him — 
 
 A swarm of fools 
 Crowding together to be counted wise. 
 
 He talks ' pure Biron and Romeo,' he is almost 
 as poetical as they, quite as philosophical, only 
 a little madder. After all, Love's sectaries are 
 a reason unto themselves. We have gone retro- 
 grade to the noble heresy since the days when 
 Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed 
 health and disease ; the kindliest symptom, yet 
 the most alarming crisis in the ticklish state of 
 youth ; the nourisher and the destroyer of hope-
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 203 
 
 ful wits ; the mother of twin births, wisdom and 
 folly, valour and weakness ; the servitude above 
 freedom ; the gentle mind's religion ; the liberal 
 superstition. 
 
 The Honest Whore. — There is in the second 
 part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed 
 harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her pro- 
 fession, a simple picture of honour and shame, 
 contrasted without violence, and expressed 
 without immodesty, which is worth all the strong 
 lines against the harlot's profession with which 
 both parts of this play are offensively crowded. 
 A satirist is always to be suspected who, to 
 make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and 
 minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and 
 retrospective fondness. But so near are the 
 boundaries of panegyric and invective that a 
 worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the 
 best declaimer against sin. The same high- 
 seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate 
 state served but to inflame his appetites, in his 
 new province of a moralist will serve him, a 
 little turned, to expose the enormity of those 
 appetites in other men. When Cervantes with 
 such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the 
 Don's library, who sees not that he has been a 
 great reader of books of knight-errantry, — per- 
 haps was at some time of his life in danger of
 
 204 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 falling into those very extravagances which he 
 ridiculed so happily in his hero ? 
 
 John Marston. 
 
 Antonio and Mellida. — The situation of An- 
 drugio and Lucio in the first part of this 
 tragedy — where Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, 
 banished his country, with the loss of a son 
 supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of 
 his mortal enemy, the Duke of Venice, with no 
 attendants but Lucio, an old nobleman, and a 
 page — resembles that of Lear and Kent in that 
 king's distresses. Andrugio, like Lear, mani- 
 fests a kinglike impatience, a turbulent great- 
 ness, an affected resignation. The enemies 
 which he enters lists to combat, ' Despair and 
 mighty Grief and sharp Impatience,' and the 
 forces which he brings to vanquish them, ' cor- 
 nets of horse,' etc., are in the boldest style of 
 allegory. They are such a ' race of mourners ' 
 as the ' infection of sorrows loud ' in the intel- 
 lect might beget on some ' pregnant cloud ' in 
 the imagination. The prologue to the second 
 part, for its passionate earnestness and for the 
 tragic note of preparation which it sounds, 
 might have preceded one of those old tales of
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 205 
 
 ' Thebes or Pelops" line ' which Milton has so 
 highly commended as free from the common 
 error of the poets in his day of ' intermixing 
 comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, 
 brought in without discretion corruptly to gratify 
 the people." It is as solemn a preparative as 
 the ' warning voice which he who saw the 
 Apocalypse heard cry.' 
 
 What You Will. — O, / shall ne'er forget how 
 he went cloath'd. Act I. Scene 1. — To judge 
 of the liberality of these notions of dress, we 
 must advert to the days of Gresham, and the 
 consternation which a phenomenon habited like 
 the merchant here described would have ex- 
 cited among the flat round caps and cloth 
 stockings upon "Change when those ' original 
 arguments or tokens of a citizen's vocation were 
 in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness 
 than for distinction and grace." The blank uni- 
 formity to which all professional distinctions in 
 apparel have been long hastening, is one in- 
 stance of the decay of symbols among us, which, 
 whether it has contributed or not to make us 
 a more intellectual, has certainly made us a less 
 imaginative, people. Shakspeare knew the force 
 of signs : a 'malignant and a turban'd Turk." 
 This ' meal-cap miller,' says the author of 
 'God's Revenge against Murder,' to express
 
 206 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 his indignation at an atrocious outrage com- 
 mitted by the miller Pierot upon the person 
 of the fair Marieta. 
 
 Author Unknown. 
 
 The Merry Devil of Edmonton. — The scene 
 in this delightful comedy, in which Jerningham, 
 ' with the true feeling of a zealous friend,' 
 touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems 
 written to make the reader happy. Few of our 
 dramatists or novelists have attended enough to 
 this. They torture and wound us abundantly. 
 They are economists only in delight. Nothing 
 can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler 
 than the conversation and compliments of these 
 young men. How delicious is Raymond Moun- 
 chensey's forgetting, in his fears, that Jerning- 
 ham has a 'Saint in Essex,' and how sweetly 
 his friend reminds him ! I wish it could be as- 
 certained, which there is some grounds for be- 
 lieving, that Michael Drayton was the author of 
 this piece. It would add a worthy appendage 
 to the renown of that panegyrist of my native 
 earth, who has gone over her soil, in his ' Poly- 
 olbion, 1 with the fidelity of a herald and the 
 painful love of a son ; who has not left a rivulet, 
 so narrow that it may be stept over, without
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 207 
 
 honourable mention ; and has animated hills and 
 streams with life and passion beyond the dreams 
 of old mythology. 
 
 Thomas Heywood. 
 
 A Woman Killed with Kindness. — Heywood 
 is a sort of prose Shakspeare ; his scenes are 
 to the full as natural and affecting. But we 
 miss the poet, that which in Shakspeare always 
 appears out and above the surface of the nature. 
 Heyvvood's characters in this play, for instance, 
 his country gentlemen, etc., are exactly what 
 we see, but of the best kind of what we see in 
 life. Shakspeare makes us believe, while we 
 are among his lovely creations, that they are 
 nothing but what we are familiar with, as in 
 dreams new things seem old ; but we awake, 
 and sigh for the difference. 
 
 The English Traveller. — Hey wood's pref- 
 ace to this play is interesting, as it shows the 
 heroic indifference about the opinion of pos- 
 terity, which some of these great writers seem 
 to have felt. There is a magnanimity in author- 
 ship as in everything else. His ambition seems 
 to have been confined to the pleasure of hearing 
 the players speak his lines while he lived. It 
 does not appear that he ever contemplated the
 
 208 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 possibility of being read by after ages. What a 
 slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to 
 the production of such plays as the ' English 
 Traveller,' the 4 Challenge for Beauty,' and the 
 ' Woman Killed with Kindness.' Posterity is 
 bound to take care that a writer loses nothing 
 by such a noble modesty. 
 
 Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. 
 
 A Fair Quarrel. — The insipid levelling mo- 
 rality to which the modern stage is tied down, 
 would not admit of such admirable passions 
 as these scenes are filled with. A puritanical 
 obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile 
 goodness, is creeping among us, instead of 
 the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in 
 flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists 
 present us. Those noble and liberal casuists 
 could discern in the differences, the quarrels, 
 the animosities of men, a beauty and truth 
 of moral feeling, no less than in the everlast- 
 ingly inculcated duties of forgiveness and 
 atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meek- 
 ness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion 
 never so absurd, never fails of applause. Our 
 audiences come to the theatre to be comph-
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 209 
 
 mented on their goodness. They compare notes 
 with the amiable characters in the play, and find 
 a wonderful sympathy of disposition between 
 them. We have a common stock of dramatic 
 morality, out of which a writer may be supplied 
 without the trouble of copying it from originals 
 within his own breast. To know the bounda- 
 ries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, to have 
 a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in 
 the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as 
 nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent 
 is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble 
 under a pious cowardice when that ark of an 
 honest confidence is found to be frail and tot- 
 tering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace 
 blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes 
 of a supposed false imputation had put so keen 
 an edge upon but lately, — to do, or to imagine 
 this done in a feigned story, asks something 
 more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater deli- 
 cacy of perception in questions of right and 
 wrong, than goes to the writing of two or 
 three hackneyed sentences about the laws of 
 honour, as opposed to the laws of the land, or a 
 commonplace against duelling. Yet such things 
 would stand a writer nowadays in far better 
 stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious 
 honour ; and he would be considered as a far 
 
 M
 
 210 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 better teacher of morality than old Rowley or 
 
 Middleton, if they were livin 
 
 or 
 
 6" 
 
 William Rowley. 
 
 A New Wonder; a Woman Neper Vext. — 
 The old play-writers are distinguished by an 
 honest boldness of exhibition ; they show every- 
 thing without being ashamed. If a reverse in 
 fortune is to be exhibited, they fairly bring us 
 to the prison-grate and the alms-basket. A 
 poor man on our stage is always a gentleman ; 
 he may be known by a peculiar neatness of 
 apparel, and by wearing black. Our delicacy, 
 in fact, forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. 
 It is never shown in its essential properties ; it 
 appears but as the adjunct of some virtue, as 
 something which is to be relieved, from the 
 approbation of which relief the spectators are to 
 derive a certain soothing of self-referred satis- 
 faction. We turn away from the real es- 
 sences of things to hunt after their relative 
 shadows, — moral duties ; whereas, if the truth 
 of things were fairly represented, the relative 
 duties might be safely trusted to themselves, 
 and moral philosophy lose the name of a 
 science.
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 2 1 1 
 
 Thomas Middleton. 
 
 The Witch. — Though some resemblance may 
 be traced between the charms in 'Macbeth ' and 
 the incantations in this play, which is supposed 
 to have preceded it, this coincidence will not 
 detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. 
 His witches are distinguished from the witches 
 of Middleton by essential differences. These 
 are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting 
 some dire mischief, might resort for occasional 
 consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, 
 and begin bad impulses to men. From the 
 moment that their eyes first meet with Mac- 
 beth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways 
 his destiny. He can never break the fascina- 
 tion. These witches can hurt the body, those 
 have power over the soul. Hecate in Middle- 
 ton has a son, a low buffoon ; the hags of Shak- 
 speare have neither child of their own, nor 
 seem to be descended from any parent. They 
 are foul anomalies, of whom we know not 
 whence they are sprung, nor whether they have 
 beginning or ending. As they are without 
 human passions, so they seem to be without 
 human relations. They come with thunder and 
 lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all
 
 212 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 we know of them. Except Hecate, they have 
 no names, — which heightens their mysterious- 
 ness. The names, and some of the properties, 
 which the other author has given to his hags 
 excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious 
 things ; their presence cannot co-exist with 
 mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches of 
 Middleton are fine creations. Their power, 
 too, is in some measure over the mind. They 
 raise jars, jealousies, strifes, ' like a thick scurf,' 
 over life. 
 
 William Rowley, Thomas Decker, 
 John Ford, etc. 
 
 The Witch of Edmonton. — Mother Sawyer, 
 in this wild play, differs from the hags of both 
 Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain, 
 traditional old woman witch of our ancestors, — 
 poor, deformed, and ignorant ; the terror of 
 villages, herself amenable to a justice. That 
 should be a hardy sheriff, with the power of 
 the county at his heels, that would lay hands 
 upon the Weird Sisters. They are of another 
 jurisdiction. But upon the common and re- 
 ceived opinion, the author (or authors) have
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 213 
 
 engrafted strong fancy. There is something 
 frightfully earnest in her invocations to the 
 Familiar. 
 
 Cyril Tourneur. 
 
 The Revengers' 1 Tragedy. — The reality and 
 life of the dialogue in which Vindici and Hip- 
 polito first tempt their mother, and then 
 threaten her with death for consenting to 
 the dishonour of their sister, passes any scen- 
 ical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my 
 ears tingle and I feel a hot blush overspread 
 my cheeks, as if I were presently about to 
 proclaim such malefactions of myself as the 
 brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, 
 in words more keen and dagger-like than those 
 which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such 
 power has the passion of shame truly person- 
 ated, not only to strike guilty creatures unto 
 the soul, but to ' appal ' even those that are 
 ' free.' 
 
 John Webster. 
 
 The Duchess of Malfy. — All the several 
 parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the 
 death of the Duchess is ushered in, — the waxen 
 images which counterfeit death, the wild masque
 
 214 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the 
 living person's dirge, the mortification by de- 
 grees, — are not more remote from the concep- 
 tions of ordinary vengeance than the strange 
 character of suffering which they seem to bring 
 upon their victim is out of the imagination of 
 ordinary poets. As they are not like inflictions 
 of this life, so her language seems not of this 
 world. She has lived among horrors till she 
 is become ' native and endowed unto that ele- 
 ment.' She speaks the dialect of despair ; her 
 tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls 
 in bale. To move a horror skilfully, to touch a 
 soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as 
 it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is 
 ready to drop, and then step in with mortal 
 instruments to take its last forfeit, — this only a 
 Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may ' upon 
 horror's head horrors accumulate,' but they 
 cannot do this. They mistake quantity for 
 quality ; they 'terrify babes with painted devils, 1 
 but they know not how a soul is to be moved. 
 Their terrors want dignity, their affrightments 
 are without decorum. 
 
 The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona. — 
 This White Devil of Italy sets off a bad cause 
 so speciously, and pleads with such an inno- 
 cence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 2 1 5 
 
 that matchless beauty of her face which inspires 
 such gay confidence into her, and are ready to 
 expect, when she has done her pleadings, that 
 her very judges, her accusers, the grave ambas- 
 sadors who sit as spectators, and all the court, 
 will rise and make proffer to defend her in spite 
 of the utmost conviction of her guilt, — as the 
 Shepherds in ' Don Quixote' make proffer to fol- 
 low the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, ' without 
 making any profit of her manifest resolution 
 made there in their hearing.' 
 
 So sweet and lovely does she make the shame, 
 Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, 
 Does spot the beauty of her budding name ! 
 
 I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in 
 this play, for the death of Marcello, except the 
 ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned 
 father in the ' Tempest.' As that is of the water, 
 watery, so this is of the earth, earthy. Both 
 have that intenseness of feeling which seems 
 to resolve itself into the element which it 
 contemplates. 
 
 In a note on the ' Spanish Tragedy ' in the 
 Specimens, I have said that there is nothing in 
 the undoubted plays of Jonson which would 
 authorize us to suppose that he could have 
 supplied the additions to 'Hieronymo.' I sus-
 
 216 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 pected the agency of some more potent spirit. 
 I thought that Webster might have furnished 
 them. They seemed full of that wild, solemn, 
 preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in 
 the Duchess of Malfy. On second considera- 
 tion, I think this a hasty criticism. They are 
 more like the overflowing griefs and talking 
 distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows 
 of the Duchess set inward ; if she talks, it is 
 little more than soliloquy imitating conversation 
 in a kind of bravery. 
 
 John Ford. 
 
 The Broken Heart. — I do not know where 
 to find, in any play, a catastrophe so grand, so 
 solemn, and so surprising as in this. This is 
 indeed, according to Milton, to describe high 
 passions and high actions. The fortitude of 
 the Spartan boy who let a beast gnaw out his 
 bowels till he died, without expressing a groan, 
 is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the 
 spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, 
 which Calantha, with a holy violence against 
 her nature, keeps closely covered till the last 
 duties of a wife and a queen are fulfilled. 
 Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 217 
 
 the stake, — a little bodily suffering. These 
 torments — 
 
 On the purest spirits prey, 
 
 As on entrails, joints, and limbs, 
 
 With answerable pains, but more intense. 
 
 What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths 
 and in its weaknesses ! Who would be less 
 weak than Calantha ? Who can be so strong ? 
 The expression of this transcendent scene 
 almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and 
 the Cross ; and we seem to perceive some 
 analogy between the scenical sufferings which 
 we are here contemplating, and the real agonies 
 of that final completion to which we dare no 
 more than hint a reference. Ford was of the 
 first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, 
 not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, 
 but directly where she has her full residence in 
 the heart of man, — in the actions and sufferings 
 of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of 
 the soul above mountains, seas, and the ele- 
 ments. Even in the poor perverted reason of 
 Giovanni and Annabella, in the play * which 
 stands at the head of the modern collection of 
 the works of this author, we discern traces 
 of that fiery particle which, in the irregular 
 
 1 'Tis pity she is a Whore.
 
 2i8 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 starting from out the road of beaten action; 
 discovers something of a right line even in 
 obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable 
 greatness in the lowest descents and degrada- 
 tions of our nature. 
 
 Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. 
 
 Alaham, Mustapha. — The two tragedies of 
 Lord Brooke, printed among his poems, might 
 with more propriety have been termed political 
 treatises than plays. Their author has strangely 
 contrived to make passion, character, and in- 
 terest, of the highest order, subservient to the 
 expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He 
 is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one 
 part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer's 
 estimate of the powers of the mind, the under- 
 standing must have held a most tyrannical pre- 
 eminence. Whether we look into his plays or 
 his most passionate love-poems, we shall find 
 all frozen and made rigid with intellect. The 
 finest movements of the human heart, the 
 utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, 
 are essentially comprised in the actions and 
 speeches of Caelica and Camena. Shakspeare, 
 who seems to have had a peculiar delight in
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 219 
 
 contemplating womanly perfection, whom for 
 his many sweet images of female excellence all 
 women are in an especial manner bound to love, 
 has not raised the ideal of the female character 
 higher than Lord Brooke, in these two women, 
 has done. But it requires a study equivalent 
 to the learning of a new language to understand 
 their meaning when they speak.. It is indeed 
 hard to hit, — 
 
 Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day 
 Or seven, though one should musing sit. 
 
 It is as if a being of pure intellect should take 
 upon him to express the emotions of our sensi- 
 tive natures. There would be all knowledge, 
 but sympathetic expressions would be wanting. 
 
 Ben Jonson. 
 
 The Case is Altered. — The passion for 
 wealth has worn out much of its grossness 
 in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly con- 
 ceived of money as able to confer a distinct 
 gratification in itself, not considered simply as 
 a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they 
 introduce a miser, make him address his gold as 
 his mistress ; as something to be seen, felt, and
 
 220 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 hugged ; as capable of satisfying two of the 
 senses at least. The substitution of a thin, 
 unsatisfying medium in the place of the good 
 old tangible metal has made avarice quite a 
 Platonic affection in comparison with the see- 
 ing, touching, and handling pleasures of the 
 old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more 
 satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this 
 passion than Creusa could return her husband's 
 embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mam- 
 mon in Spenser ; Barabas' contemplation of his 
 wealth in the ' Rich Jew of Malta ; ' Luke's rap- 
 tures in the 'City Madam ;' the idolatry and abso- 
 lute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early 
 comic production of Ben Jonson's. Above all, 
 hear Guzman, in that excellent old translation 
 of the ' Spanish Rogue, 1 expatiate on the ' ruddy 
 cheeks of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish 
 pistolets, your plump and full-faced Portuguese, 
 and your clear-skinned pieces of eight of Cas- 
 tile,' which he and his fellows the beggars kept 
 secret to themselves, and did privately enjoy in 
 a plentiful manner. ' For to have them, to pay 
 them away, is not to enjoy them ; to enjoy 
 them is to have them lying by us, having no 
 other need of them than to use them for the 
 clearing of the eye-sight and the comforting of 
 our senses. These we did carry about with us,
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 22 1 
 
 sewing them in some patches of our doublets 
 near unto the heart, and as close to the sk'in as 
 we could handsomely quilt them in, holding 
 them to be restorative.' 
 
 Poetaster. — This Roman play seems written 
 to confute those enemies of Ben in his own 
 days and ours who have said that he made a 
 pedantical use of his learning. He has here 
 revived the whole court of Augustus by a 
 learned spell. We are admitted to the society 
 of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, 
 Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more 
 finely and poetically than they were used to 
 express themselves in their native Latin. Noth- 
 ing can be imagined more elegant, refined, and 
 court-like than the scenes between this Louis 
 the Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. 
 The whole essence and secret of that kind of 
 intercourse is contained therein. The econom- 
 ical liberality by which greatness, seeming to 
 waive some part of its prerogative, takes care to 
 lose none of the essentials ; the prudential liber- 
 ties of an inferior, which flatter by commanded 
 boldness and soothe with complimentary sincer- 
 ity. These, and a thousand beautiful passages 
 from his ' New Inn,' his 'Cynthia's Revels,' and 
 from those numerous court-masques and enter- 
 tainments which he was in the daily habit of
 
 222 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 furnishing, might be adduced to show the poet- 
 ical fancy and elegance of mind of the supposed 
 rugged old bard. 
 
 Alchemist. — The judgment is perfectly over- 
 whelmed by the torrent of images, words, and 
 book-knowledge with which Epicure Mammon 
 (Act II. Scene 2) confounds and stuns his in- 
 credulous hearer. They come pouring out like 
 the successive falls of Nilus. They 'doubly 
 redouble strokes upon the foe.' Description 
 outstrides proof. We are made to believe 
 effects before we have testimony for their 
 causes. If there is no one image which attains 
 the height of the sublime, yet the confluence 
 and assemblage of them all produces a result 
 equal to the grandest poetry. The huge Xer- 
 xean army countervails against single Achilles. 
 Epicure Mammon is the most determined off- 
 spring of its author. It has the whole ' matter 
 and copy of the father, — eye, nose, lip, the 
 trick of his frown. 1 It is just such a swaggerer 
 as contemporaries have described old Ben to 
 be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New 
 Inn, have all his image and superscription. 
 But Mammon is arrogant pretension personi- 
 fied. Sir Samson Legend, in 'Love for Love,' 
 is such another lying, overbearing character, 
 but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon.
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 223 
 
 What a • towering bravery ' there is in his sen- 
 suality ! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. 
 It is as if 'Egypt with Assyria strove in 
 luxury.' 
 
 George Chapman. 
 
 Bussy D' Ambois, Byron s Conspiracy, Byron s 
 Tragedy, etc. — Webster has happily character- 
 ized the ' full and heightened style ' of Chap- 
 man, who of all the English play-writers 
 perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in 
 the descriptive and didactic, in passages which 
 are less purely dramatic. He could not go 
 out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at 
 pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, 
 but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a 
 soul to embrace all forms and modes of being. 
 He would have made a great epic poet, if in- 
 deed he has not abundantly shown himself to be 
 one ; for his Homer is not so properly a trans- 
 lation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re- 
 written. The earnestness and passion which he 
 has put into every part of these poems would be 
 incredible to a reader of mere modern transla- 
 tions. His almost Greek zeal for the glory of 
 his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce
 
 224 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as 
 if personating one of the zealots of the old law, 
 clothed himself when he sat down to paint the 
 acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The 
 great obstacle to Chapman's translations being 
 read, is their unconquerable quaintness. He 
 pours out in the same breath the most just and 
 natural, and the most violent and crude expres- 
 sions. He seems to grasp at whatever words 
 come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon 
 him, as if all other must be inadequate to the 
 divine meaning. But passion (the all-in-all in 
 poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, 
 dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the 
 absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep, 
 tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be 
 moved by words, or, in spite of them, be dis- 
 gusted and overcome their disgust. 
 
 Francis Beaumont. — John Fletcher. 
 
 Maid's Tragedy. — One characteristic of the 
 excellent old poets is, their being able to bestow 
 grace upon subjects which naturally do not seem 
 susceptible of any. I will mention two instances. 
 Zelmane in the 'Arcadia' of Sidney, and Helena 
 in the 'All 's Well that Ends Well ' of Shakspeare.
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 22$ 
 
 What can be more unpromising at first sight 
 than the idea of a young man disguising himself 
 in woman's attire, and passing himself off for a 
 woman among women ; and that for a long 
 space of time ? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so 
 matchless a decorum that neither does Pyrocles' 
 manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of 
 Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses 
 at all diminished when the deception comes to 
 be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of 
 Sir Philip Sidney it seems as if no ugly thought 
 or unhandsome meditation could find a harbour. 
 He turned all that he touched into images of 
 honour and virtue. Helena in Shakspeare is a 
 young woman seeking a man in marriage. The 
 ordinary rules of courtship are reversed, the 
 habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with such 
 exquisite address this dangerous subject is 
 handled that Helena's forwardness loses her no 
 honour ; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her 
 favour, and nature, in her single case, seems 
 content to suffer a sweet violation. Aspatia, in 
 the ' Maid's Tragedy,' is a character equally diffi- 
 cult, with Helena, of being managed with grace. 
 She too is a slighted woman, refused by the 
 man who had once engaged to marry her. Yet 
 it is artfully contrived that while we pity we 
 respect her, and she descends without degrada-
 
 226 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 tion. Such wonders true poetry and passion 
 can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which 
 do not seem capable of it. But Aspatia must 
 not be compared at all points with Helena ; she 
 does not so absolutely predominate over her sit- 
 uation, but she suffers some diminution, some 
 abatement of the full lustre of the female charac- 
 ter, which Helena never does. Her character has 
 many degrees of sweetness, some of delicacy , 
 but it has weakness, which, if we do not de- 
 spise, we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont 
 and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of 
 Shakspeares and Sidneys. 
 
 Philaster. — The character of Bellario must 
 have been extremely popular in its day. For 
 many years after the date of 'PhilasterY first 
 exhibition on the stage, scarce a play can be 
 found without one of these women pages in it, 
 following in the train of some pre-engaged 
 lover, calling on the gods to bless her happy 
 rival (his mistress), whom no doubt she secretly 
 curses in her heart, giving rise to many pretty 
 dquipoques by the way on the confusion of sex, 
 and either made happy at last by some surprising 
 turn of fate, or dismissed with the joint pity of 
 the lovers and the audience. Donne has a 
 copy of verses to his mistress dissuading her 
 from a resolution, which she seems to have
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 227 
 
 taken up from some of these scenical represen- 
 tations, of following him abroad as a page. It 
 is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in 
 sense, in wit and pathos, that it deserves to 
 be read as a solemn close in future to all such 
 sickly fancies as he there deprecates. 
 
 John Fletcher. 
 
 Thierry and Theodoret. — The scene where 
 Ordella offers her life a sacrifice, that the king 
 of France may not be childless, I have always 
 considered as the finest in all Fletcher, and 
 Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the 
 female heroic character, next to Calantha in the 
 'Broken Heart.' She is a piece of sainted nature. 
 Yet noble as the whole passage is, it must be 
 confessed that the manner of it, compared with 
 Shakspeare's finest scenes, is faint and languid. 
 Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each 
 line revolves on itself in a sort of separate orbit ; 
 they do not join into one another like a run- 
 ning-hand. Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his 
 versification, though sweet, is tedious, — it stops 
 at every turn ; he lays line upon line, making 
 up one after the other, adding image to image 
 so deliberately that we see their junctures.
 
 228 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Shakspeare mingles everything, runs line into 
 line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors ; 
 before one idea has burst its shell, another is 
 hatched and clamorous for disclosure. Another 
 striking difference between Fletcher and Shak- 
 speare is the fondness of the former for unnatu- 
 ral and violent situations. He seems to have 
 thought that nothing great could be produced 
 in an ordinary way. The chief incidents in 
 some of his most admired tragedies show this. 1 
 Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his 
 mind, none of that craving after violent situa- 
 tions, and flights of strained and improbable 
 virtue, which I think always betrays an imper- 
 fect moral sensibility. The wit of Fletcher is 
 excellent, 2 like his serious scenes, but there is 
 something strained and far-fetched in both. 
 He is too mistrustful of Nature ; he always goes 
 a little on one side of her. Shakspeare chose 
 her without a reserve ; and had riches, power, 
 understanding, and length of days, with her, for 
 a dowry. 
 
 Faithful Shepherdess. — If all the parts of this 
 delightful pastoral had been in unison with its 
 many innocent scenes and sweet lyric inter- 
 
 1 Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, Double Mar- 
 riage, etc. 
 
 2 Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.
 
 Characters of Dramatic Writers. 229 
 
 mixtures, it had been a poem fit to vie with 
 ' Comus' or the 'Arcadia,' to have been put into 
 the hands of boys and virgins, to have made 
 matter for young dreams, like the loves of 
 Hermia and Lysander. But a spot is on the 
 face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatua- 
 tion could have driven Fletcher upon mixing 
 with this ' blessedness ' such an ugly deformity 
 as Cloe, the wanton shepherdess ! If Cloe was 
 meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher 
 should have known that such weeds by juxta- 
 position do not set off, but kill sweet flowers. 
 
 Philip Massinger. — Thomas Decker. 
 
 The Virgin Martyr. — This play has some 
 beauties of so very high an order that with all 
 my respect for Massinger I do not think he 
 had poetical enthusiasm capable of rising up to 
 them. His associate, Decker, who wrote ' Old 
 Fortunatus,' had poetry enough for anything. 
 The very impurities which obtrude themselves 
 among the sweet pieties of this play, like Satan 
 among the Sons of Heaven, have a strength of 
 contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which 
 are beyond Massinger. They are to the reli- 
 gion of the rest what Caliban is to Miranda.
 
 230 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Philip Massinger. — Thomas Middleton. — 
 William Rowley. 
 
 Old Law. — There is an exquisiteness of 
 moral sensibility/making one's eyes to gush out 
 tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness in 
 the circumstances of this sweet tragi-comedy, 
 which are unlike anything in the dramas which 
 Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of a 
 subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley, who 
 assisted in it, had both of them finer geniuses 
 than their associate. 
 
 James Shirley 
 
 Claims a place amongst the worthies of this 
 period, not so much for any transcendent talent 
 in himself, as that he was the last of a great 
 race, all of whom spoke nearly the same lan- 
 guage and had a set of moral feelings and 
 notions in common. A new language, and 
 quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest, 
 came in with the Restoration.
 
 Barbara S . 231 
 
 BARBARA S- 
 
 (~\N the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 
 ^-^ or 1744, I forget which it was, just as the 
 
 clock had struck one, Barbara S , with her 
 
 accustomed punctuality, ascended the long, 
 rambling staircase, with awkward, interposed 
 landing-places, which led to the office, or rather 
 a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the 
 then treasurer of (what few of our readers may 
 remember) the old Bath Theatre. All over the 
 island it was the custom, and remains so, I be- 
 lieve, to this day, for the players to receive their 
 weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not 
 much that Barbara had to claim. 
 
 The little maid had just entered her eleventh 
 year ; but her important station at the theatre, 
 as it seemed to her, with the benefits which 
 she felt to accrue from her pious application of 
 her small earnings, had given an air of woman- 
 hood to her steps and to her behaviour. You 
 would have taken her to have been at least five 
 years older.
 
 232 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Till latterly she had merely been employed in 
 choruses, or where children were wanted to 
 fill up the scene. But the manager, observing 
 a diligence and adroitness in her above her age, 
 had for some few months past intrusted to her 
 the performance of whole parts. You may 
 guess the self-consequence of the promoted 
 Barbara. She had already drawn tears in 
 young Arthur ; had rallied Richard with infan- 
 tine petulance in the Duke of York ; and in her 
 turn had rebuked that petulance when she was 
 Prince of Wales. She would have done the 
 elder child in Morton's pathetic afterpiece to 
 the life ; but as yet the ' Children in the Wood ' 
 was not. 
 
 Long after this little girl was grown an aged 
 woman, I have seen some of these small parts, 
 each making two or three pages at most, copied 
 out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, 
 who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully 
 and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of 
 the establishment. But such as they were, 
 blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she 
 kept them all ; and in the zenith of her after 
 reputation it was a delightful sight to behold 
 them bound up in costliest morocco, each 
 single, each small part making a book, with fine 
 clasps, gilt-splashed, etc. She had conscien-
 
 Barbara S . 233 
 
 tiously kept them as they had been delivered to 
 her ; not a blot had been effaced or tampered 
 with. They were precious to her for their 
 affecting remembrancings. They were her prin- 
 cipia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms, 
 the little steps by which she pressed forward to 
 perfection. ' What,' she would say, ' could 
 India-rubber, or a pumice-stone, have done for 
 these darlings ? ' 
 
 I am in no hurry to begin my story, — indeed 
 I have little or none to tell, — so I will just 
 mention an observation of hers connected with 
 that interesting time. 
 
 Not long before she died I had been dis- 
 coursing with her on the quantity of real present 
 emotion which a great tragic performer experi- 
 ences during acting. I ventured to think that 
 though in the first instance such players must 
 have possessed the feelings which they so 
 powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent 
 repetition those feelings must become deadened 
 in great measure, and the performer trust to the 
 memory of past emotion, rather than express 
 a present one. She indignantly repelled the 
 notion that with a truly great tragedian the 
 operation by which such effects were produced 
 upon an audience could ever degrade itself into 
 what was purely mechanical. With much deli-
 
 234 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 cacy, avoiding to instance in her ^//-experi- 
 ence, she told me that so long ago as when she 
 used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. 
 Porter's Isabella (I think it was), when that 
 impressive actress has been bending over her in 
 some heartrending colloquy, she has felt real 
 hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use 
 her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded 
 her back. 
 
 I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. 
 Porter, but it was some great actress of that 
 day. The name is indifferent ; but the fact of 
 the scalding tears I most distinctly remember. 
 
 I was always fond of the society of players, 
 and am not sure that an impediment in my 
 speech (which certainly kept me out of the 
 pulpit), even more than certain personal dis- 
 qualifications, which are often got over in that 
 profession, did not prevent me at one time of 
 life from adopting it. I have had the honour 
 (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted 
 to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played 
 at serious wh'ist with Mr. Liston. I have 
 chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles 
 Kemble. I have conversed as friend to friend 
 with her accomplished husband. I have been 
 indulged with a classical conference with Ma- 
 cready, and with a sight of the Player-picture
 
 Barbara S . 235 
 
 gallery, at Mr. Mathews's when the kind 
 owner, to remunerate me for my love of the 
 old actors (whom he loves so much), went over 
 it with me, supplying to his capital collection 
 what alone the artist could not give them, — 
 voice, and their living motion. Old tones, 
 half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons and Bad- 
 deley, have lived again for me at his bidding. 
 Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I 
 have supped with — . But I am growing a 
 coxcomb. 
 
 As I was about to say, at the desk of the 
 then treasurer of the old Bath Theatre — not 
 Diamond's — presented herself the little Bar- 
 bara S . 
 
 The parents of Barbara had been in reputable 
 circumstances. The father had practised, I be- 
 lieve, as an apothecary in the town ; but his 
 practice, from causes which I feel my own in- 
 firmity too sensibly that way to arraign, — or 
 perhaps from that pure infelicity which accom- 
 panies some people in their walk through life, 
 and which it is impossible to lay at the door of 
 imprudence, — was now reduced to nothing. 
 They were, in fact, in the very teeth of starva- 
 tion when the manager, who knew and re- 
 spected them in better days, took the little 
 Barbara into his company.
 
 236 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 At the period I commenced with, her slender 
 earnings were the sole support of the family, 
 including two younger sisters. I must throw 
 a veil over some mortifying circumstances. 
 Enough to say that her Saturday's pittance 
 was the only chance of a Sunday's (generally 
 their only) meal of meat. 
 
 One thing I will only mention, that in some 
 child's part, where in her theatrical character 
 she was to sup off a roast fowl (O joy to Bar- 
 bara 1 ), some comic actor, who was for the 
 night caterer for this dainty, in the misguided 
 humour of his part, threw over the dish such a 
 quantity of salt (O grief and pain of heart to 
 Barbara ! ) that when he crammed a portion of 
 it into her mouth, she was obliged sputteringly 
 to reject it ; and what with shame of her ill- 
 acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing 
 such a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to 
 breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well- 
 fed spectators were totally unable to compre- 
 hend, mercifully relieved her. 
 
 This was the little starved, meritorious maid 
 who stood before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, 
 for her Saturday's payment. 
 
 Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many 
 old theatrical people besides herself say, of all 
 men least calculated for a treasurer. He had
 
 Barbara S . 237 
 
 no head for accounts, paid away at random, 
 kept scarce any books, and summing up at the 
 week's end, if he found himself a pound or 
 so deficient, blest himself that it was no 
 worse. 
 
 Now, Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare 
 half-guinea. By mistake he popped into her 
 hand — a whole one. 
 
 Barbara tripped away. 
 
 She was entirely unconscious at first of the 
 mistake. God knows, Ravenscroft would never 
 have discovered it. 
 
 But when she had got down to the first of 
 those uncouth landing-places, she became sen- 
 sible of an unusual weight of metal pressing in 
 her little hand. 
 
 Now mark the dilemma. 
 
 She was by nature a good child. From her 
 parents and those about her she had imbibed 
 no contrary influence. But then they had 
 taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins 
 are not always porticos of moral philosophy. 
 This little maid had no instinct to evil, but then 
 she might be said to have no fixed principle. 
 She had heard honesty commended, but never 
 dreamed of its application to herself. She 
 thought of it as something which concerned 
 grown-up people, men and women. She had
 
 238 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 never known temptation, or thought of prepar- 
 ing resistance against it. 
 
 Her first impulse was to go back to the old 
 treasurer and explain to him his blunder. He 
 was already so confused with age, besides a 
 natural want of punctuality, that she would 
 have had some difficulty in making him under- 
 stand it. She saw that in an instant. And 
 then it was such a bit of money 1 And then the 
 image of a larger allowance of butcher's meat 
 on their table the next day came across her, 
 till her little eyes glistened and her mouth 
 moistened. But then Mr. Ravenscroft had 
 always been so good-natured, had stood her 
 friend behind the scenes, and even recommen- 
 ded her promotion to some of her little parts. 
 But again the old man was reputed to be worth 
 a world of money. He was supposed to have 
 fifty pounds a-year clear of the theatre. And 
 then came staring upon her the figures of her 
 little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And 
 when she looked at her own neat white cotton 
 stockings, which her situation at the theatre 
 had made it indispensable for her mother to 
 provide for her, with hard straining and pinch- 
 ing from the family stock, and thought how 
 glad she should be to cover their poor feet with 
 the same, and how then they could accompany
 
 Barbara S . 239 
 
 her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been 
 precluded from doing, by reason of their un- 
 fashionable attire, — in these thoughts she 
 reached the second landing-place — the second, 
 I mean, from the top, for there was still 
 another left to traverse. 
 
 Now virtue support Barbara 1 
 
 And that never-failing friend did step in ; for 
 at that moment a strength not her own, I have 
 heard her say, was revealed to her, — a reason 
 above reasoning, — and without her own agency, 
 as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to 
 move), she found herself transported back to 
 the individual desk she had just quitted, and 
 her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who 
 in silence took back the refunded treasure, and 
 who had been sitting (good man) insensible to 
 the lapse of minutes which to her were anxious 
 ages ; and from that moment a deep peace fell 
 upon her heart, and she knew the quality of 
 honesty. 
 
 A year or two's unrepining application to her 
 profession brightened up the feet and the pros- 
 pects of her little sisters, set the whole family 
 upon their legs again, and released her from the 
 difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a 
 landing-place. 
 
 I have heard her say that it was a surprise
 
 240 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 not much short of mortification to her, to see 
 the coolness with which the old man pocketed 
 the difference which had caused her such mor- 
 tal throes. 
 
 This anecdote of herself I had in the year 
 1800 from the mouth of the late Mrs. Craw- 
 ford, 1 then sixty-seven years of age (she died 
 soon after) ; and to her struggles upon this 
 childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to 
 think her indebted for that power of rending 
 the heart in the representation of conflicting 
 emotions, for which in after years she was con- 
 sidered as little inferior (if at all so in the part 
 of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. 
 
 1 The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she 
 changed, by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, 
 Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, a third 
 time a widow, when I knew her.
 
 Criticisms. 241 
 
 CRITICISMS. 
 
 OLYMPIC THEATRE. 
 
 ''PHIS theatre, fitted up with new and taste- 
 A ful decorations, opened on Monday with 
 a burletta founded upon a pleasant extravagance 
 recorded of Wilmot, the ' mad Lord ' of Roch- 
 ester. The house, in its renovated condition, is 
 just what playhouses should be, and once were, 
 from its size admirably adapted for seeing and 
 hearing, and only perhaps rather too well lit up. 
 Light is a good thing, but to preserve the eyes 
 is still better. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin per- 
 sonated a reigning wit and beauty of the court 
 of Charles the Second to the life. But the 
 charm of the evening to us, we confess, was the 
 acting of Mrs. T. Gould (late Miss Burrell) in 
 the burlesque ' Don Giovanni,' which followed. 
 This admirable piece of foolery takes up our 
 hero just where the legitimate drama leaves him, 
 — on the ' burning marl.' We are presented 
 with a fair map of Tartarus, the triple-headed 
 cur, the Furies, Tormentors, and the Don, 
 prostrate, thunder-smitten. But there is an 
 
 16
 
 242 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 elasticity in the original make of this strange 
 man, as Richardson would have called him. 
 He is not of those who change with the change 
 of climate. He brings with him to his new 
 habitation ardours as glowing and constant as 
 which he finds there. No sooner is he recov- 
 ered from his first surprise, than he falls to his 
 old trade, is caught ' ogling Prosperine/ and 
 coquets with two she-devils at once, till he 
 makes the house too hot to hold him, and Pluto 
 (in whom a wise jealousy seems to produce the 
 effects of kindness) turns him neck and heels 
 out of his dominions, — much to the satisfaction 
 of Giovanni, who, stealing a boat from Charon, 
 and a pair of light heels from Mercury, or (as he 
 familiarly terms him) ' Murky,' sets off with flying 
 colours, conveying to the world above, the souls 
 of three damsels, just eloped from Styx, to com- 
 fort his tender and new-born spiritualities on 
 the journey. Arrived upon earth (with a new 
 body, we are to suppose, but his old habits), he 
 lights d propos upon a tavern in London, at the 
 door of which three merry weavers, widowers, 
 are trolling a catch in triumph over their de- 
 ceased spouses, — 
 
 They lie in yonder churchyard 
 At rest — and so are we.
 
 Criticisms. 243 
 
 Their departed partners prove to be the iden- 
 tical lady ghosts who have accompanied the 
 Don in his flight, whom he now delivers up 
 in perfect health and good plight, not a jot the 
 worse for their journey, to the infinite surprise 
 and consternation, ill-dissembled, of their ill- 
 fated, twice-yoked mates. The gallantries of 
 the Don in his second state of probation, his 
 meeting with Leporello, with Donna Anna, and 
 a countless host of injured virgins besides, doing 
 penance in the humble occupation of apple-wo- 
 men, fish-wives, and sausage-fryers, in the pur- 
 lieus of Billingsgate and Covent Garden, down 
 to the period of his complete reformation, and 
 being made an honest man of, by marrying into 
 a sober English citizen's family, although in- 
 finitely pleasant in the exhibition, would be 
 somewhat tedious in the recital ; but something 
 must be said of his representative. 
 
 We have seen Mrs. Jordan in male characters, 
 and more ladies besides than we would wish 
 to recollect, but never any that so completely 
 answered the purpose for the mock Giovanni. 
 This part, as it is played at the Great House in 
 the Haymarket (shade of Mozart, and ye living 
 admirers of Ambrogetti, pardon the barbarity I), 
 had always something repulsive and distasteful 
 to us. We cannot sympathize with Leporello's
 
 244 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 brutal display of the list, and were shocked 
 (not straitlaced moralists either) with the ap- 
 plauses, with the endurance we ought rather 
 to say, which fashion and beauty bestowed upon 
 that disgustful insult to feminine unhappiness. 
 The Leporello of the Olympic Theatre is not of 
 the most refined order ; but we can bear with 
 an English blackguard better than with the 
 hard Italian. But Giovanni. — free, fine, frank- 
 spirited, single-hearted creature, turning all the 
 mischief into fun as harmless as toys or children's 
 make-believe, — what praise can we repay to you 
 adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? 
 We had better be silent, for you have no names, 
 and our mention may be thought fantastical. 
 You have taken out the sting from the evil 
 thing, but by what magic we know not ; for 
 there are actresses of greater mark and attri- 
 butes than you. With you and your Giovanni 
 our spirits will hold communion whenever sor- 
 row or suffering shall be our lot. We have 
 seen you triumph over the infernal powers, 
 and pain and Erebus and the powers of dark- 
 ness are henceforth ' shapes of a dream.'
 
 Criticisms. 245 
 
 Miss Kelly at Bath. 
 
 Dear G , — I was thinking yesterday of 
 
 our old play-going days, of your and my partiality 
 to Mrs. Jordan, of our disputes as to the rela- 
 tive merits of Dodd and Parsons, and whether 
 Smith or Jack Palmer were the most of a gentle- 
 man. The occasion of my falling into this train 
 of thinking, was my learning from the news- 
 papers that Miss Kelly is paying the Bath 
 Theatre a visit (your own theatre, I am sorry 
 to find, is shut up, either from parsimonious 
 feelings, or through the influence of * prin- 
 ciples). This lady has long ranked among the 
 most considerable of our London performers. 
 If there are one or two of greater name, I must 
 impute it to the circumstance that she has never 
 burst upon the town at once in the maturity of 
 her powers, — which is a great advantage to 
 debutantes who have passed their probationary 
 years in provincial theatres. We do not hear 
 them tuning their instruments. But she has 
 been winning her patient way from the humblest 
 degradations to the eminence which she has now 
 
 1 The word here omitted by the Bristol editor, we sup- 
 pose, is ' Methodistical.'
 
 246 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 attained, on the selfsame boards which sup- 
 ported her first in the slender pretensions of 
 chorus-singer. I very much wish you would go 
 and see her. You will not see Mrs. Jordan, 
 but something else, — something on the whole 
 very little, if at all, inferior to that lady in her 
 best days. I cannot hope that you will think 
 so, I do not even wish that you should. Our 
 longest remembrances are the most sacred, and 
 I shall revere the prejudice that shall prevent 
 you from thinking quite so favourably of her as 
 I do. I do not well know how to draw a par- 
 allel between their distinct manners of acting ; 
 I seem to recognize the same pleasantness and 
 nature in both. But Mrs. Jordan's was the 
 carelessness of a child ; her childlike spirit 
 shook off the load of years from her spectators ; 
 she seemed one whom care could not come near, 
 — a privileged being sent to teach mankind what 
 he most wants, joyousness. Hence if we had 
 more unmixed pleasure from her performances, 
 we had perhaps less sympathy with them than 
 with those of her successor. This latter lady's 
 is the joy of a freed spirit escaping from care, as 
 a bird that had been limed. Her smiles, if I 
 may use the expression, seemed saved out of 
 the fire, — relics which a good spirit had 
 snatched up as most portable. Her discontents
 
 Criticisms. 247 
 
 are visitors, and not inmates ; she can lay them 
 by altogether, and when she does so, I am not 
 sure that she is not greatest. She is, in truth, no 
 ordinary tragedian. Her Yarico is the most in- 
 tense piece of acting which I ever witnessed, 
 the most heartrending spectacle. To see her 
 leaning upon that wretched reed, her lover, — 
 the very exhibition of whose character would be 
 a moral offence, but for her clinging and noble 
 credulity, — to see her lean upon that flint, and 
 by the strong workings of passion imagine it a 
 gcd, is one of the most afflicting lessons of the 
 yearnings of the human heart, and its mistakes, 
 that was ever read upon a stage. The whole 
 performance is everywhere African, fervid, 
 glowing. Nor is this anything more than the 
 wonderful force of imagination in this per- 
 former ; for turn but the scene, and you shall 
 have her come forward in some kindly, home- 
 drawn character of an English rustic, a Phoebe 
 or a Dinah Cropley, where you would swear 
 that her thoughts had never strayed beyond the 
 precincts of the dairy or the farm, or her mind 
 known less tranquil passions than she might 
 have learned among the flock, her out-of-door 
 companions. See her again in parts of pure 
 fun, such as the Housemaid in the ' Merry 
 Mourners,' where the suspension of the broom
 
 248 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 in her hand, which she has been delightfully 
 twirling, on unexpectedly encountering her 
 sweetheart in the character of her fellow- 
 servant, is quite equal to Mrs. Jordan's cordial 
 inebriation in Nell. I do not know whether I 
 am not speaking it to her honour, that she does 
 not succeed in what are called fine-lady parts. 
 
 Our friend C once observed that no man of 
 
 genius ever figured as a gentleman. Neither 
 did any woman gifted with Mrs. Jordan's or Miss 
 Kelly's sensibilities ever take upon herself to 
 shine as a fine lady, — the very essence of this 
 character consisting in the entire repression of 
 all genius and all feeling. To sustain a part of 
 this kind to the life, a performer must be haunted 
 by a perpetual self-reference, she must be al- 
 ways thinking of her herself, and how she 
 looks, and how she deports herself in the eyes 
 of the spectators ; whereas the delight of ac- 
 tresses of true feeling, and their chief power, 
 is to elude the personal notice of an audience, 
 to escape into their parts and hide themselves 
 under the hood of their assumed character. 
 Their most self-possession is, in fact, a self- 
 forgetfulness, — an oblivion alike of self and 
 spectators. For this reason your most approved 
 epilogue-speakers have been always ladies who 
 have possessed least of this self-forgetting
 
 Criticisms. 249 
 
 quality ; and I think I have seen the amiable 
 actress in question suffering some embarrass- 
 ment when she has had an address of the sort to 
 deliver, when she found the modest veil of per- 
 sonation, which had half hid her from the audi- 
 ence, suddenly withdrawn, and herself brought 
 without any such gratifying intervention before 
 the public. 
 
 I would apologize for the length of this letter, 
 if I did not remember the lively interest you 
 used to take in theatrical performers. 
 
 I am, etc., 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Febn:ary 7, 18 19. 
 
 Richard Brome's 'Jovial Crew.' 
 
 The 'Jovial Crew,' or the ' Merry Beggars,' 
 has been revived here [at the English Opera] 
 after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven 
 years. Can it be so long (it seems but yester- 
 day) since we saw poor Lovegrove in Justice 
 Clack ? His childish treble still pipes in our 
 ears, — ' Whip 'em, whip 'em, whip 'em:' Dowton 
 was the representative of the justice the other 
 night, and shook our ribs most incontinently. He 
 was in 'excellent foolery,' and our lungs crowed 
 chanticleer. Yet it appears to us that there
 
 250 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 was a still higher strain of fatuity in his pre- 
 decessor, that his eyes distilled a richer 
 dotage. Perhaps, after all, it was an error of 
 the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us 
 strangely. 
 
 Easy, natural Wrench was the Springlove, — 
 too comfortable a personage, perhaps, to person- 
 ify Springlove, in whom the voice of the bird 
 awakens a restless instinct of roaming that had 
 slept during the winter. Miss Stevenson cer- 
 tainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence 
 of the lady, however agreeable, who formerly 
 performed the part of Meriel. Miss Stevenson 
 is a fine, open-countenanced lass, with glorious 
 girlish manners. But the Princess of Mumpers, 
 and Lady Paramount of beggarly counterfeit 
 accents, was she that played Rachel. Her 
 gabbling, lachrymose petitions ; her tones, such 
 as we have heard by the side of old woods 
 when an irresistible face has come peeping on 
 one on a sudden, with her full black locks and 
 a voice — how shall we describe it? — a voice 
 that was by nature meant to convey nothing but 
 truth and goodness, but warped by circumstance 
 into an assurance that she is telling us a lie ; 
 that catching twitch of the theivish, irreprova- 
 ble finger ; those ballad-singers' notes, so vul- 
 gar, yet so unvulgar ; that assurance so like
 
 Criticisms. 25 1 
 
 impudence, and yet so many countless leagues 
 removed from it ; her jeers, which we had 
 rather stand than be caressed with other ladies' 
 compliments a summer's day long ; her face 
 with a wild out-of-doors grace upon it — 
 
 Altogether, a brace of more romantic she- 
 beggars it was never our fortune to meet in this 
 supplicatory world. The youngest might have 
 sat for ' pretty Bessy,' whose father was an 
 earl and whose legend still adorns the front of 
 mine hostess's doors at Bethnal Green ; and the 
 other could be no less than the ' Beggar Maid ' 
 whom ' King Cophetua wooed.' ' What a lass 
 that were,' said a stranger who sat beside us, 
 speaking of Miss Kelly in Rachel, ' to go a- 
 gypsying through the world with I ' We con- 
 fess we longed to drop a tester in her lap, she 
 begged so masterly. 
 
 By the way, this is the true ' Beggar's Opera ; ' 
 the other should have been called the 'Mirror 
 for Highwaymen.' We wonder the societies 
 for the Suppression of Mendicity (and other 
 good things) do not club for the putting down 
 of this infamous protest in favor of air and clear 
 liberty and honest license and blameless asser- 
 tion of man's original blest charter of blue skies 
 and vagrancy and nothing to do. 
 
 July 4, 1 8 19.
 
 252 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Isaac Bickerstaff's 'The Hypocrite.' 
 
 By one of those perversions which actuate 
 poor mortals in the place of motives (to 
 persuade us into the notion that we are free 
 agents, we presume), we had never till the other 
 evening seen Dowton [at the English Opera] 
 in Dr. Cantwell. By a pious fraud of Mr. 
 Arnold's, who, by a process as simple as some 
 of those by which Mathews metamorphoses his 
 person, has converted the play into an opera, — 
 a conversion, by the way, for which we are 
 deeply indebted to him, — we have been fa- 
 voured with this rich novelty at our favourite 
 theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come 
 lagging in with a posthumous testimony to the 
 merits of a performance of which the town has 
 long rung, but we cannot help remarking, in 
 Mr. Dowton's acting, the subtle gradations of 
 the hypocrisy ; the length to which it runs in 
 proportion as the recipient is capable of taking 
 it in ; the gross, palpable way in which he ad- 
 ministers the dose in wholesale to old Lady 
 Lambert, that rich fanatic ; the somewhat more 
 guarded manner in which he retails it out, only 
 so much a time as he can bear, to the somewhat 
 less bitten fool her son ; and the almost absence
 
 Criticisms. 253 
 
 of it before the younger members of the family 
 when nobody else is by ; how the cloven foot 
 peeps out a little and a Tittle more, till the dia- 
 bolical nature is stung out at last into full mani- 
 festation of its horrid self. What a grand in- 
 solence in the tone which he assumes when he 
 commands Sir John to quit his house ; and then 
 the tortures and agonies when he is finally 
 baffled I It is in these last, perhaps, that he is 
 greatest, and we should be doing injustice not 
 to compare this part of the performance with, 
 and in some respects to give it the preference 
 above, the acting of Mr. Kean in a situation 
 nearly analogous, at the conclusion of the ' City 
 Madam.' Cantwell reveals his pangs with quite 
 as much force, and without the assistance of 
 those contortions which transform the detected 
 Luke into the similitude of a mad tiger or a 
 foaming demon. Dowton plays it neither like 
 beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, — 
 a bold bad man pushed to extremity ; humanity 
 is never once overstepped. Has it ever been 
 noticed, the exquisite modulation with which 
 he drawls out the word ' Charles ' when he 
 calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so 
 resigned ? The most diabolical of her sex that 
 we ever knew, accented her honey-devil words 
 in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The
 
 254 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 spirit of Whitefield seems hovering in the air, 
 to suck the blessed tones so much like his own 
 upon earth; Lady Huntingdon claps her neat' 
 white wings, and gives it out again in heaven 
 to the sainted ones in approbation. 
 
 Miss Kelly is not quite at home in Charlotte; 
 she is too good for such parts. Her cue is to 
 be natural ; she cannot put on the modes of 
 artificial life and play the coquette as it is ex- 
 pected to be played ; there is a frankness in her 
 tones which defeats her purposes. We could 
 not help wondering why her lover (Mr. Pear- 
 man) looked so rueful ; we forgot that she was 
 acting airs and graces, as she seemed to forget 
 it herself, turning them into a playfulness which 
 could breed no doubt for a moment which way 
 her inclinations ran. She is in truth not framed 
 to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a 
 hearty Yes or No ; to yield or refuse assent 
 with a noble sincerity. We have not the 
 pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we 
 have been told that she carries the same cordial 
 manners into private life. We have heard, too, 
 of some virtues which she is in the practice of ; 
 but they are of a description which repay them- 
 selves, and with them neither we nor the public 
 have anything to do. 
 
 One word about Wrench, who played the
 
 Criticisms. 255 
 
 Colonel. Was this man never unhappy? It 
 seems as if care never came near him, as if the 
 black ox could never tread upon his foot ; we 
 want something calamitous to befall him, to 
 bring him down to us. It is a shame he should 
 be suffered to go about with his well-looking, 
 happy face, and tones insulting us thin race of 
 irritable and irritable-making critics. 
 
 August 2, 1819. 
 
 New Pieces at the Lyceum. 
 
 A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some 
 quarrel has been breeding between the male and 
 female performers, and the women have deter- 
 mined to set up for themselves. Seven of them, 
 ' Belles without Beaux,' they call themselves, 
 have undertaken to get up a piece without any 
 assistance from the men, and in our opinion 
 have established their point most successfully. 
 There is Miss Carew with her silvery tones, and 
 Miss Stevenson with her delicious mixture of 
 the school-girl and the waiting-maid, and Miss 
 Kelly, sure to be first in any mischief, and Mrs. 
 Chatterly, with some of the best acting we have 
 ever witnessed, and Miss Love, worthy of the 
 name, and Mrs. Grove, that rhymes to her, and
 
 256 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Mrs. Richardson, who might in charity have 
 been allowed somewhat a larger portion of the 
 dialogue. The effect was enchanting, — we 
 mean for once. We do not want to encourage 
 these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we 
 longed to have Wrench bustling among them. 
 A lady who sat near us was observed to gape 
 for want of variety. To us it was delicate 
 quintessence, — an apple-pie made all of quinces. 
 We remember poor Holcroft's last comedy, 
 which positively died from the opposite excess ; 
 it was choked up with men, and perished from 
 a redundancy of male population. It had nine 
 principal men characters in it, and but one 
 woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. 
 Mrs. Harlow, to do the part justice, chose to 
 play it in scarlet. 
 
 We did not know Mrs. Chatterly's merits 
 before ; she plays, with downright sterling good 
 acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of 
 her prudery by Miss Kelly's (we did not catch 
 her stage name) assumption of the dress and 
 character of a brother of seventeen, who makes 
 the prettiest unalarming Platonic approaches ; 
 and in the shyest mark of moral battery, no one 
 step of which you can detect, or say this is de- 
 cidedly going too far, vanquishes at last the ice 
 of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape,
 
 Criticisms. 257 
 
 and then with her own infinite good-humour 
 sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it 
 again with an explanation. Mrs. Chatterly's 
 embarrassments were masterly. Miss Steven- 
 son, her maid's, start at surprising a youth in 
 her mistress's closet at midnight was quite as 
 good. Miss Kelly we do not care to say any- 
 thing about, because we have been accused of 
 flattering her. The truth is, this lady puts so 
 much intelligence and good sense into every 
 part which she plays that there is no expressing 
 an honest sense of her merits without incurring 
 a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to 
 gain by praising Miss Kelly ? 
 
 Altogether, this little feminine republic, this 
 provoking experiment, went off most smoothly. 
 What a nice world it would be, we sometimes 
 think, all women! But then we are afraid we 
 slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypothesis ; 
 we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as 
 spectators, or something among them. 
 
 We saw Wilkinson after it in ' Walk for a 
 Wager.' What a picture of forlorn hope, of ab- 
 ject orphan destitution 1 He seems to have no 
 friends in the world but his legs, and he plies 
 them accordingly. He goes walking on like a 
 perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory 
 presence performs the part of a Greek chorus. 
 
 17
 
 258 Essays of Charles Lamb. 
 
 He is the walking gentleman of the piece, — a 
 peripatetic that would make a stoic laugh. He 
 made us cry. His Muffincap in ' Amateurs and 
 Actors ' is just such another piece of acting. 
 We have seen charity boys, both of St. Cle- 
 ment's and Farringdon Without, looking just 
 as old, ground down out of all semblance of 
 youth by abject and hopeless neglect, — you 
 cannot guess their age between fifteen and 
 fifty. If Mr. Peake is the author of these 
 pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their 
 reception. 
 
 We must apologize for an oversight in our 
 last week's article. The allusion made to Mr. 
 Keen's acting of Luke in the ' City Madam ' 
 was totally inapplicable to the part and to the 
 play. We were thinking of his performance of 
 the concluding scenes of ' The New Way to 
 Pay Old Debts.' We confounded one of Mas- 
 singer's strange heroes with the other. It was 
 Sir Giles Overreach we meant ; nor are we 
 sure that our remark was just, even with this 
 explanation. When we consider the intense 
 tone in which Mr. Keen thinks it proper (and 
 he is quite as likely to be in the right as his 
 blundering critic) to pitch the temperament of 
 that monstrous character from the beginning, it 
 follows but logically and naturally that where
 
 Criticisms. 259 
 
 the wild, uncontrollable man comes to be baffled 
 of his purpose, his passion should assume a 
 frenzied manner which it was altogether absurd 
 to expect should be the same with the manner 
 of the cautious and self-restraining Cantwell, 
 even when he breaks loose from all bonds in the 
 agony of his final exposure. We never felt 
 more strongly the good sense of the saying, 
 'Comparisons are odious.' They betray us 
 not seldom into bitter errors of judgment, and 
 sometimes, as in the present instance, into 
 absolute matter-of-fact blunders. But we have 
 recanted. 
 August, 1 819.
 
 NOTES. 
 
 ''l^IIE most o£ the papers gathered together in this vol- 
 1. ume are taken from the ' Essays ' and ' Last Essays of 
 Elia,' and from among the other articles published with 
 Elia's during Lamb's life. The loving industry of Mr. 
 J. E. Babson rescued from old magazines enough of 
 Lamb's neglected writings to make a volume of ' Eliana,' 
 published in Boston a score of years ago. The essays 
 brought to light by Mr. Babson — five of them are re- 
 printed here — have since found place in the later English 
 editions of Lamb's complete Works, whose editors have 
 been able to add a few other forgotten fragments, of 
 which only the dramatic criticisms furnished to the ' Ex- 
 aminer' fell within the scope of this collection. For the 
 grouping of the essays as they appear here the present 
 editor is responsible. For ampler notes than there is 
 need of here, the reader may be referred to the edition of 
 Lamb's Works prepared by his biographer, Canon Ainger, 
 an edition which is a model of wide knowledge, of loving 
 industry, of delicate taste, and of unfailing tact. 
 
 My First Play (page 35). 
 
 To be compared with this essay is a paragraph in the 
 paper on 'Old China,' in which Mary Lamb asks Charles, 
 " Do you remember where it was we used to sit when we
 
 262 Notes. 
 
 saw the ' Battle of Hexham ' and the ' Surrender of Ca- 
 lais,' and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the 'Children in 
 the Wood; ' when we squeezed out our shillings apiece 
 to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling 
 gallery, — where you felt all the time you ought not to 
 have brought me, and more strongly I felt obligation to 
 you for having brought me, and the pleasure was the 
 better for a little shame, — and when the curtain drew up, 
 what cared we for our place in the house, or what mat- 
 tered it where we were silting, when our thoughts were 
 with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of 
 lllyria ? " 
 
 The Old Actors (page 64). 
 
 This paper originally formed part of the essay ' On 
 Some of the Old Actors,' and is therefore printed here 
 immediately after it. 
 
 On the Acting of Munden (page 68). 
 
 Talfourd tells us that Lamb's "relish for Munden's 
 acting was almost a new sense. He did not compare him 
 with the old comedians, as having common qualities with 
 them, but regarded him as altogether of a different and 
 original style. On the last night of his appearance Lamb 
 was very desirous to attend, but every place in the boxes 
 had long been secured, — and Lamb was not strong enough 
 to stand the tremendous rush, by enduring which, alone, he 
 could hope to obtain a place in the pit, — when Munden's 
 gratitude for his exquisite praise anticipated his wish, by 
 providing for him and Miss Lamb places in a corner of 
 the orchestra, close to the stage. The play of the ' Poor
 
 Notes. 263 
 
 Gentleman,' in which Munden played Sir Robert Bramble, 
 had concluded, and the audience were impatiently waiting 
 for the farce, in which the great comedian was to delight 
 them for the last time, when my attention was suddenly 
 called to Lamb by Miss Kelly, who sat with my party far 
 withdrawn into the obscurity of one of the upper boxes,but 
 overlooking the radiant hollow which waved below us, to 
 our friend. In his hand, directly beneath the line of stage- 
 lights, glistened a huge pewter pot which he was draining, 
 while the broad face of old Munden was seen thrust out 
 from the door by which the musicians enter, watching the 
 close of the draught when he might receive and hide the 
 portentous beaker from the gaze of admiring neighbours. 
 Some unknown benefactor had sent four pots of stout to 
 keep up the veteran's heart during his last trial ; and not 
 able to drink them all, he bethought him of Lamb, and 
 without considering the wonder which would be excited 
 in the brilliant crowd who surrounded him, conveyed him- 
 self the cordial chalice to Lamb's parched lips." 
 
 Autobiography of Mr. Munden (page Si). 
 
 This is one of Lamb's most ingenious and ingenuous 
 fictions. It is the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table who 
 tells us that " all generous minds have a horror of what 
 are commonly called ' facts ; ' they are the brute beasts 
 of the intellectual domain." 
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston 
 {page 86). 
 
 Lamb wrote to Miss Hutchinson, January 20, 1825, — 
 " But did you read the ' Memoir of Liston,' and did you
 
 264 Notes. 
 
 guess whose it was ? Of all the lies I ever put off I value 
 this the most. It is from top to toe, every paragraph, 
 pure invention, and has passed for gospel ; has been re- 
 published, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an 
 authentic account. I shall certainly go to the naughty 
 man some day for my ribbings." 
 
 To the Shade of Elliston (page 100). 
 
 It is to be remembered that Elliston was Mr. H. when 
 Lamb's only acted farce was damned at Dairy Lane, 
 and that the actor tried to persuade the author to try the 
 piece a second time. 
 
 On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres 
 (page 121). 
 
 This essay originally appeared in the third number of 
 Leigh Hunt's magazine, ' The Reflector.' 
 
 John Kemble and Godwin's Tragedy of 
 'Antonio' (page 133). 
 
 Originally this account of Godwin's theatrical misad- 
 venture was the conclusion of the essay on the ' Artificial 
 Comedy of the Last Century.' It seems to fall into line 
 naturally after the paper on hissing. 
 
 On the Artificial Comedy of the Last 
 Century (page 14S). 
 
 It was the view Lamb expressed in this essay that 
 Macaulay thought needful emphatically to refute. Mat-
 
 Notes. 265 
 
 thew Arnold was in the habit now and again of writing 
 about the plays of the day in the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' 
 signing himself ' An Old Playgoer.' He went to see Mr. 
 Irving's revival of 'Much Ado about Nothing' at the 
 Lyceum Theatre, and in the ' Pall Mall Gazette ' of May 
 30, 1S83, the ' Old Playgoer ' gave his impression of the 
 performance, incidentally declaring himself to be on the 
 side of Charles Lamb : " So salutary is it to be carried 
 into a world of fantasy, that I doubt whether even the 
 comedy of Congreve and Wycherley, presented to us at 
 the present day by good artists, would do us harm. I 
 would not take the responsibility of recommending its re- 
 vival, but I doubt its doing harm, and I feel sure of its 
 doing less harm than pieces such as ' Heartsease ' and 
 ' Impulse.' And the reason is that Wycherley's comedy 
 places us in what is for us now a world wholly of fantasy, 
 and that in such a world, with a good critic and with good 
 actors, we are not likely to come to much harm. Such a 
 world's main appeal is to our imagination ; it calls into 
 play our imagination rather than our senses." 
 
 Barbara S {page 231). 
 
 This story Lamb had from Miss Kelly, although he has 
 dressed it up with his usual delight in mystifying his 
 readers. Two of Lamb's sonnets are to ' Miss Kelly ' and 
 to ' A Celebrated Female Performer in the Blind Boy,' — 
 that is, Miss Kelly.
 
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