The first performance of the play occurred May 8, 1777, at the Drury Lane Theatre, which had been opened under Sheridan's management the previous year. A publisher immediately offered five hundred guineas for a corrected copy of the comedy, and Sheridan promised to prepare it for the press; but Mr. W. Fraser Rae tells us that when importuned for the revised manuscript Sheridan "always replied that he had never been able to satisfy himself as to the version which he wished to be published, and the comedy, with any of his final corrections, has not yet been given to the world." The Ewling edition was printed from an acting copy which Sheridan had given to his sister, Mrs. LeFanu of Dublin, who, for one hundred guineas and free admission to the theater for herself and family, had let it go to Mr. Roger of the Theatre Royal. A dated edition appeared in Dublin in 1781. The omission of the author's name from the title-page recalls the foolish statement made by Dr. Watkins on the authority of Isaac Reed, "that the play was written by a young lady, the daughter of a merchant in Thames Street [whose name and the number of whose house are judiciously withheld], that, at the beginning of the season when Mr. Sheridan commenced his management, the manuscript was put into his hands for judgment, soon after which the fair writer, who was then in a stage of decline, went to Bristol Hot Wells, where she died." Duodecimo. COLLATION: _vi, 93 pp., 1 l._ WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800) 60. The | Task, | A | Poem, | In Six Books. | By William Cowper, | Of The Inner Temple, Esq. | Fit ſurculus arbor. | Anonym. | To which are added, | By The Same Author, | An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Eſq. Tirocinium, or a | Review of Schools, and the History of John Gilpin. | London: | Printed For J. Johnson, N^o 72, St. Paul's | Church-Yard: | 1785. In October, 1784, William Cawthorne Unwin, "A friend whose worth deserves as warm a lay As ever friendship penned," received from Cowper "four quires of verse" with the request that it might be read by him and, if approved, conveyed to Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Cowper's first volume. "If, when you make the offer of my book [_The Task_], to Johnson, he should stroke his chin, and look up at the ceiling and cry 'Humph!', anticipate him, I beseech you, at once by saying 'that you know I should be sorry that he should undertake for me to his own disadvantage, or that my volume should be in any degree pressed upon him. I make him the offer merely because I think he would have reason to complain of me if I did not.' But, that punctilio once satisfied, it is a matter of indifference to me what publisher sends me forth." Johnson, however, accepted.