Lamb met these accidents of fortune manfully, and did not abstain from exercising his own Shandean humor thereon. It must be confessed that "John Woodvil" is not a tragedy likely to bring much success to a playhouse. It is such a drama as a young poet, full of love for the Elizabethan writers, and without any knowledge of the requisitions of the stage, would be likely to produce. There is no plot; little probability in the story; which itself is not very scientifically developed. There are some pretty lines, especially some which have often been the subject of quotation; but there is not much merit in the characters of the drama, with the exception of the heroine, who is a heroine of the "purest water." Lamb's friend Southey, in writing to a correspondent, pronounces the following opinion: "Lamb is printing his play, which will please you by the exquisite beauty of its poetry, and provoke you by the exquisite silliness of its story." In October, 1799, Lamb went to see the remains of the old house (Gilston) in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother once lived, and the "old church where the bones of my honored granddame lie." This visit was, in later years, recorded in the charming paper entitled "Blakesmoor in H----shire." He found that the house where he had spent his pleasant holidays, when a little boy, had been demolished; it was, in fact, taken down for the purpose of reconstruction; but out of the ruins he conjures up pleasant ghosts, whom he restores and brings before a younger generation. There are few of his papers in which the past years of his life are more delightfully revived. The house had been "reduced to an antiquity." But we go with him to the grass plat, were he used to read Cowley; to the tapestried bedrooms, where the mythological people of Ovid used to stand forth, half alive; even to "that haunted bedroom in which old Sarah Battle died," and into which he "used to creep in a passion of fear." These things are all touched with a delicate pen, mixed and incorporated with tender reflections; for, "The solitude of childhood" (as he says) "is not so much the mother of thought as the feeder of love." With him it was both.