is about with the navy board. Meantime, hands with a wretch on the fatal scaffold, the projector is hungry. Will you answer me two questions, and return them with the papers as soon as you can? Imprimis, is there any chance of success in application to Parliament for a reward? Did you ever hear of the invention? You see its benefits and saving to the nation (always the first motive with a true projector) are feelingly set forth the last paragraph but one of the estimate, in enumerating the shifts poor seamen are put to, even approaches to the pathetic. But, agreeing to all he says, is there the remotest chance of Parliament giving the projector anything; and when should application be made, now or after a report (if he can get it) from the navy board? Secondly, let the infeasibility be as great as you will, you will oblige me by telling me the way of introducing such an application to Parliament, without buying over a majority of members, which is totally out of projector's power. I vouch nothing for the soap myself; for I always wash in fresh water, and find it answer tolerably well for all purposes of cleanliness; nor do I know the projector; but a relation of mine has put me on writing to you, for whose parliamentary knowledge he has great veneration. and, when you are down the ladder, you can 6 beneath their shoulders, that you make a coming to you. It will be a point of condraught of them. It will be very curious. science to send you none but bran-new news Oh! Manning, I am serious to sinking almost, (the latest edition), which will but grow the when I think that all those evenings, which better, like oranges, for a sea voyage. Oh you have made so pleasant, are gone perhaps that you should be so many hemispheres off for ever. Four years, you talk of, may be if I speak incorrectly you can correct me ten, and you may come back and find such-why the simplest death or marriage that alterations! Some circumstances may grow takes place here must be important to you up to you or to me, that may be a bar to the return of any such intimacy. I dare say all this is hum and that all will come back; but, indeed, we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone. I have friends, but some of 'em are changed. Marriage, or some circumstance, rises up to make them not the same. But I felt sure of you. And that last token you gave me of expressing a wish to have my name joined with yours, you know not how it affected me: like a legacy. "Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August the what-was-it? came to hand. I can scarce hope that mine will have the same luck. China-Canton-bless us-how it strains the imagination and makes it ache! I write under another uncertainty, whether it can go to-morrow by a ship which I have just learned is going off direct to your part of the world, or whether the despatches may not be sealed up and this have to wait, for if it is detained here, it will grow staler in a fortnight than in a five months' voyage as news in the old Bastile. There's your friend Tuthill has got away from Franceyou remember France ? and Tuthill ?—tento-one but he writes by this post, if he don't get my note in time, apprising him of the vessel sailing. Know then that he has found means to obtain leave from Bonaparte, without making use of any incredible romantic pretences as some have done, who never meant to fulfil them, to come home, and I have seen him here and at Holcroft's. An't you glad about Tuthill ? Now then be sorry for Holcroft, whose new play, called 'The Vindictive Man,' was damned about a fortnight since. It died in part of its own weakness, and in part for being choked up with bad actors. The two principal parts were destined to Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Bannister, but Mrs. J. has not come to terms with the managers, they have had some squabble, and Bannister shot some of his fingers off by the going off of a gun. So Miss Duncan had her part, and Mr. De Camp took his. His part, the principal comic hope of the play, was most unluckily Goldfinch, taken out of the 'Road to Ruin,' not only the same character, but the identical Goldfinch-the same as Falstaff is in two plays of Shakspeare. As the devil of ill-luck would have it, half the audience did not know that H. had written it, but were displeased at his stealing from the 'Road to Ruin;' and those who might have borne a gentlemanly coxcomb with his 'That's your sort,' 'Go it '-such as Lewis is did not relish the intolerable vulgarity and inanity of the idea stript of his manner. De Camp was hooted, more than hist, hooted and bellowed off the stage before the second act was finished, so that the remainder of his part was forced to be, with some violence to the play, omitted. In addition to this, a woman of the town was another principal character -a most unfortunate choice in this moral day. The audience were as scandalised as if you were to introduce such a personage to their private tea-tables. Besides, her action G in the play was gross-wheedling an old man In less than a fortnight I heard the principal into marriage. But the mortal blunder of part was given to Elliston, who liked it and the play was that which, oddly enough, H. only wanted a prologue, which I have since took pride in, and exultingly told me of the done and sent, and I had a note the day before night before it came out, that there were no yesterday from the manager, Wroughton less than eleven principal characters in it, (bless his fat face-he is not a bad actor in and I believe he meant of the men only, for some things), to say that I should be the playbill exprest as much, not reckoning summoned to the rehearsal after the next, one woman- —and true it was, for Mr. Powell, which next was to be yesterday. I had no Mr. Raymond, Mr. Bartlett, Mr. H. Siddons, idea it was so forward. I have had no Mr. Barrymore, &c. &c.,-to the number of trouble, attended no reading or rehearsal, eleven, had all parts equally prominent, and made no interest; what a contrast to the there was as much of them in quantity and usual parade of authors! But it is peculiar rank as of the hero and heroine-and most to modesty to do all things without noise or of them gentlemen who seldom appear but pomp! I have some suspicion it will appear as the hero's friend in a farce-for a minute in public on Wednesday next, for W. says in or two-and here they all had their ten- his note, it is so forward that if wanted it minute speeches, and one of them gave the may come out next week, and a new meloaudience a serious account how he was now drame is announced for every day till then; a lawyer but had been a poet, and then a and 'a new farce is in rehearsal,' is put up long enumeration of the inconveniences of in the bills. Now you'd like to know the authorship, rascally booksellers, reviewers, subject. The title is 'Mr. H.,' no more; how &c.; which first set the audience a gaping; simple, how taking! A great H. sprawling but I have said enough. You will be so over the play-bill and attracting eyes at every sorry, that you will not think the best of me corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing for my detail; but news is news at Canton. at Bath, vastly rich—all the ladies dying for Poor H. I fear will feel the disappointment him-all bursting to know who he is—but very seriously in a pecuniary light. From he goes by no other name than Mr. H.—a what I can learn he has saved nothing. You curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg and I were hoping one day that he had, but about the man with the great nose. But I I fear he has nothing but his pictures and won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I books, and a no very flourishing business, and will: but I can't give you an idea how I to be obliged to part with his long-necked have done it. I'll just tell you that after Guido that hangs opposite as you enter, and much vehement admiration, when his true the game-piece that hangs in the back draw- name comes out, 'Hogsflesh,' all the women ing-room, and all those Vandykes, &c. God shun him, avoid him, and not one can be should temper the wind to the shorn connois found to change their name for him—that's seur. I hope I need not say to you, that I the idea-how flat it is here - but how feel for the weather-beaten author, and for whimsical in the farce! and only think how all his household. I assure you his fate has hard upon me it is that the ship is despatched soured a good deal the pleasure I should to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascerhave otherwise taken in my own little farce tained till the Wednesday after-but all being accepted, and I hope about to be acted China will ring of it by and by. N.B. (But —it is in rehearsal actually, and I expect it this is a secret.) The Professor has got a to come out next week. It is kept a sort of tragedy coming out with the young Roscius secret, and the rehearsals have gone on in it in January next, as we say―January privately, lest by many folks knowing it, the last it will be with you—and though it is a story should come out, which would infallibly profound secret now, as all his affairs are, it damn it. You remember I had sent it before cannot be much of one by the time you read you went. Wroughton read it, and was much this. However, don't let it go any further. pleased with it. I speedily got an answer. I understand there are dramatic exhibitions I took it to make alterations, and lazily kept in China. One would not like to be foreit some months, then took courage and stalled. Do you find in all this stuff I have furbished it up in a day or two and took it. written anything like those feelings which one should send my old adventuring friend, Wednesday, 10th December, 1806, was the that is gone to wander among Tartars and wished-for evening which decided the fate of may never come again? I don't-but your "Mr. H." on the boards of Drury. Great going away, and all about you, is a thread- curiosity was excited by the announcement; bare topic. I have worn it out with thinking the house was crowded to the ceiling; and -it has come to me when I have been dull the audience impatiently waited the conwith anything, till my sadness has seemed clusion of the long, dull, intolerable opera of more to have come from it than to have "The Travellers," by which it was preceded. introduced it. I want you, you don't know At length, Mr. Elliston, the hero of the farce, how much-but if I had you here in my entered, gaily dressed, and in happiest spirits, European garret, we should but talk over-enough, but not too much, elated,—and such stuff as I have written-so-Those delivered the prologue with great vivacity 'Tales from Shakspeare' are near coming and success. The farce began; at first it was out, and Mary has begun a new work. Mr. Dawe is turned author, he has been in such a way lately-Dawe, the painter, I mean-he sits and stands about at Holcroft's and says nothing-then sighs and leans his head on his hand. I took him to be in love-but it seems he was only meditating a work, 'The Life of Morland,'-the young man is not used to composition. Rickman and Captain Burney are well; they assemble at my house pretty regularly of a Wednesday -a new institution. Like other great men I have a public day, cribbage and pipes, with Phillips and noisy much applauded; but the wit seemed wiredrawn; and when the curtain fell on the first act, the friends of the author began to fear. The second act dragged heavily on, as second acts of farces will do ; a rout at Bath, peopled with ill-dressed and over-dressed actors and actresses, increased the disposition to yawn; and when the moment of disclosure came, and nothing worse than the name Hogsflesh was heard, the audience resented the long play on their curiosity, and would hear no more. Lamb, with his sister, sat, as he anticipated, in the front of the pit, and having joined in encoring the epilogue, the brilliancy of which injured the farce, he gave way with equal pliancy to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted as loudly as any of his neighbours. The next morning's play-bill contained a veracious announcement, that "the new farce of MR. H., performed for the first time last night, was received by an and will be repeated for the second time tomorrow;" but the stage lamps never that morrow saw ! Elliston would have tried it again: but Lamb saw at once that the case was hopeless, and consoled his friends with a century of puns for the wreck of his dramatic hopes. "Good Heaven! what a bit only I've got left! How shall I squeeze all I know into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going to turn lecturer on taste at the Royal Institution. I shall get 2007. from the theatre if 'Mr. H.' has a good run, and I hope 1007. for the copyright. Nothing if it fails; and there never was a more ticklish thing. The overflowing audience with universal applause, whole depends on the manner in which the name is brought out, which I value myself on, as a chef-d'œuvre. How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the great Wall of China. N.B. Is there such a wall! Is it as big as Old London Wall, by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton ?-if | you are acquainted, remember me kindly to him. N.B. If my little thing don't succeed, I shall easily survive, having, as it were, compared to H.'s venture, but a sixteenth in the lottery. Mary and I are to sit next the orchestra in the pit, next the tweedledees. She remembers you. You are more to us than five hundred farces, clappings, &c. C. LAMB." "Come back one day. CHAPTER IX. LETTERS TO MANNING, MONTAGUE, WORDSWORTh, and FROM this period, the letters of Lamb which have been preserved are comparatively few, with reference to the years through which they are scattered. He began to write in Something about settlements only Little Fenwick (you don't see the connexion of ideas here, how the devil should you?) is in the rules of the Fleet. Cruel creditors! operation of iniquitous laws; is Magna Charta then a mockery? Why, in general (here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good, but I have my depressions, black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I have recourse to a pipe, which is like not being at home to a dun; he comes again with tenfold bitterness the next day.-(Mind, I am not in debt, I only borrow a similitude from others; it shows imagination.) I have done two books since the failure of my farce; they will both be out this summer. The one is a juvenile book—'The Adventures of Ulysses,' intended to be an introduction to the reading of Telemachus! it is done out of the Odyssey, not from the Greek. I would not mislead you: nor yet from Pope's Odyssey, but from an older translation of one Chapman. The 'Shakspeare Tales' suggested the doing earnest for the press, and the time thus Stoddart. occupied was withdrawn from his correspon- retards it. dents, while his thoughts and feelings were developed by a different excitement, and expressed in other forms. In the year 1807 the series of stories founded on the plays of Shakspeare, referred to in his last letter to Manning, was published; in which the outlines of his plots are happily brought within the apprehension of children, and his language preserved wherever it was possible to retain it; a fit counterpoise to those works addressed to the young understanding, to which Lamb still cherished the strong distaste which broke out in one of his previous letters. Of these tales, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello, are by Charles, and the others by Mary Lamb; hers being, as Lamb always insisted, the most felicitous, but all well adapted to infuse some sense of the nobleness of the poet's thoughts into the hearts of their little readers. Of two other works preparing for the press, he thus speaks in a letter which bears date 26th February, 1808, it. Godwin is in both those cases my bookaddressed to Manning at Canton, in reply to a letter received thence, in which Manning informed Lamb, that he had consigned a parcel of silk to a Mr. Knox for him. TO MR. MANNING. "Dear Missionary,-Your letters from the farthest ends of the world have arrived safe. Mary is very thankful for your remembrance of her; and with the less suspicion of mercenariness, as the silk, the symbolum materiale of your friendship, has not yet appeared. I think Horace says somewhere, nox longa. I would not impute negligence or unhandsome delays to a person whom you have honoured with your confidence, but I have not heard of the silk, or of Mr. Knox, save by your letter. Maybe he expects the first advances! or it may be that he has not succeeded in getting the article on shore, for it is among the res prohibitæ et non nisi smuggle-ationis viâ fruendæ. But so it is, in the friendships between wicked men, the very expressions of their good-will cannot but be sinful. I suppose you know my farce was damned. The noise still rings in my ears. Was you ever in the pillory ?-being damned is something like that. A treaty of marriage is on foot between William Hazlitt and Miss seller. The other is done for Longman, and |