labours of their fellow creatures, who
are desirous to please thern!"

We are informed by Lamb's excellent
biographer, Mr. Justice Talfourd, that, seeing the
lame and impotent conclusion of his farce, the
author was himself disgusted, and liissed in
concert with the audience. That he hissed is
undoubted; but that the defect of the dénouement
of Mr. H—incited him to do so, I
cannot believe. He felt—the house had so
decided—that he was a dramatic culprit. He
was

"A guilty creature sitting at a play"

—at a play of his own too; and an exquisite
consciousness of his own miserable identity
awoke a fearful suspicion that the audience
would detect him. Accordingly, like many a
true culprit in the world's ways and highways,
he joined the cry of "Stop thief!"—
set off on an imaginary chase—in other
words, hissed himself with all his might.

"De Camp was hooted more than hissed—
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."

This, with other particulars, is related by
Charles Lamb as having taken place on the
first night of his friend Holcroft's Vindictive
Man. The Good-natured Man, some forty
years before, had been treated in pretty much
the same manner. But let me find room for a
graphic description from the pen of Lord
Byron. It chronicles the disastrous doom of
Ina, a tragedy:—

"Mrs. Wilmot's tragedy was last night
damned. They may bring it on again, and
probably will; but damned it was—not a
word of the last act audible. I went and witnessed
the whole process. The first three
acts, with transient gushes of applause, oozed
patiently but heavily on. I must say it was
badly acted, particularly by Kean, who was
groaned upon in the third act. Well, the
fourth act became as muddy and turbid as
need be. But the fifth! the fifth stuck fast
at the king's prayer. He was no sooner upon
his knees than the audience got upon their
legs—the villanous pit—and roared, and
groaned, and hissed, and whistled. Well,
that was choked a little; but the ruffian
scene, the penitent peasantry, and killing the
bishop and princes—oh, it was all over! The
curtain fell upon unheard actors, and the announcement
attempted by Kean for Monday
was equally ineffectual. Mrs. Bartley was so
frightened, that, though the people were
"tolerably quiet, the epilogue was quite
inaudible to half the house."

We have quoted the above description that
full weight may be given to the comment by
the writer on the scene which he had been
so recently witnessing. He says, "It is,
however, a good warning not to risk or write
tragedies. I never had much bent that
way; but if I had, this would have cured
me." Herein we see plainly enough the evil
consequences to dramatic literature that arise
from this mode of manifesting disapproval of
a play. "But Byron had no dramatic genius;
he himself confesses he had no bent that way."
I am by no means sure that he had no such
genius; but, whether or not, that is little to
the purpose. "If I had, this would have
cured me." There is the point. Others have
been as sensitive to criticism as Byron; indeed,
young Keats and others have proved
themselves much more so; but what was
Byron's mental plight when he heard that
Elliston was about to bring upon the stage
his Marino Faliero? It is possible that the
torture he describes himself as suffering, in
his letters to Mr. Murray, may be exaggerated;
and that, after all, there might be
within him some lurking "fearful joy" that
his tragedy might be produced and be
successful, I can believe; but that he had a most
acute and painful remembrance of poor Mrs.
Wilmot's Inn, I am quite certain. I say,
then, that the system of damning plays has
often dismayed poets—and, perhaps, great
ones—from attempting to write for the stage,
or, having made an attempt and failed, from
renewing it.

Not to speak farther of the feelings of
authors in this matter, where, let us ask, is
the necessity, what is the use of hissing and
hooting a new play? The time has been,
indeed, when, if no justification could be
found for this most uncivil and unfeeling
custom, a plea might be offered in palliation of
it, on the ground that the Mitre and the
Mermaid, or Will's and Button's ought not
to be permitted to decide upon the merit of
plays in an authoritative manner, and to
dictate to the town what entertainment
it was to see, and to pay its money for
seeing.

But now-a-days, what play of any pretensions
can be performed any night which, on
the next morning, has not half-a-dozen, and
by the end of the week, a couple of score
newspapers that will tell us all about it:
what it was like, how it was liked; and this,
in most instances, infinitely better than any
jury that could be empanelled from the pit, or
any critic that could be persuaded to descend
from the gallery, even were he as acute as
Addison's renowned trunk-maker himself?
But for these papers, indeed, the public
would not know in what spirit the audience
of the first night had exercised its self-imposed
critical functions; and the press has told us
before now of suspected enemies of the author
in the house, and has often warned us against
being guided by their report of a favourable
reception of a piece, because the house was
pretty nearly filled by his friends. Mr. Nightingale,
in Fielding's great romance, is a good-natured
young fellow, but he entreats Tom
Jones to go with him "to a new play, which
was to be acted that evening, and which a
very large party had agreed to damn, from