cause. "Pshaw! Pshaw!" said Colman, "don't be afraid of squibs, when we have been sitting on a barrel of gun-powder these two hours." The fact was, that the comedy had been completely successful, and that it was the farce which had excited those sounds so terrific to Goldsmith. A scene very different from that occurred at another "first acting"--as remarkable if not as famous. It was on the occasion of the first presentation of Lamb's farce of Mr. H., thirty years later, at Drury Lane. That acute dramatic scholar and critic had written a tragedy,--John Woodvil,--the fate of which his friend Procter has pleasantly narrated: "It had been in Mr. Kemble's hands for about a year, and Lamb naturally became urgent to hear his decision upon it. Upon applying for this he found that his play was--lost! This was at once acknowledged, and a 'courteous request made for another copy, if I had one by me.' Luckily, another copy existed. The 'first runnings' of a genius were not, therefore, altogether lost, by having been cast, without a care, into the dusty limbo of the theatre. The other copy was at once supplied, and the play very speedily rejected. It was afterward facetiously brought forward in one of the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review, and there noticed as a rude specimen of the earliest age of the drama, 'older than AEschylus.'" But the condemnation of his tragedy did not discourage him; he now tried his genius upon a farce. Its acceptance, Talfourd says, gave Lamb some of the happiest moments he ever spent. He wrote joyously to Wordsworth about it, even carrying his humorous anticipations so far as to indulge in a draft of the "orders" he should send out to his friends after it had had a successful run: "Admit to Boxes. Mr. H. Ninth Night. Charles Lamb." Hear what he says about it to his friend Manning, then in China: "The title is Mr. H., no more; how simple, how taking! A great H-- sprawling over the play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich--all the ladies dying for him--all bursting to know who he is--but he goes by no other name than Mr. H.; a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you that after much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out,--'Hogsflesh,'--all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change her name for him--that's the idea: how flat it is here, but how whimsical in the farce! And only think how hard upon me it is that the ship is dispatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after; but all China will ring of it by and by.... I shall get two hundred pounds from the theatre if Mr. H. has a good run, and I hope one hundred pounds for the copyright.... Mary and I are to sit next the orchestra in the pit, next the dweedle dees." The Wednesday came, the