INTRODUCTION. CHARLES LAMB AND THE THEATRE. AMERICANS take a peculiar delight in the By the capwas not an humour of Charles Lamb, for he is one of the foremost of American humourists. On the roll which is headed by Benjamin Franklin, and on which the latest signatures were made by Mark Twain and Mr. Bret Harte, no name shines more brightly than Lamb's. tious it may be objected that he American at all; but surely this should not be remembered to his discredit, it was a mere accident of birth. Elia could have taken out his naturalization papers at any time. It is related that once a worthy Scotchman, commenting on the well-known fact that all the greatest British authors had come from the far side of the Tweed, and citing in proof thereof the names of Burns and Byron and Scott, was met by the query whether Shakspeare was a Scotchman also. Reluctantly enough it was acknowledged that he was not, although he had parts not unworthy of that honour. So it is with Charles Lamb. He was an Englishman; nay, more, a Cockney, indeed, a Cockney of the strictest sect; but he had parts not unworthy of American adoption. He had humour, high and dry, like that which England is wont to import from America in the original package. At times this humour has the same savor of irreverence toward things held sacred by commonplace humanity. Charles Lamb never hesitated to speak disrespectfully of the Equator, and he was forever girding at the ordinary degrees of latitude. His jests were as smooth as they seemed reckless. He had a gift of imperturbable exaggeration; his inventive mendacity was beyond all praise; he took a proper pride in his ingenious fabrications,-and these are all characteristics of the humour to be found freely along the inlets and by the hills of New England and on the prairies and in the sierras of the boundless West. He had a full sense of his high standing as a matter-of-lie man. Moreover, he had a distaste for the straight way and the broad road, and he had a delight in a quiet tramp along the by-path which pleased him personally, a quality relished in a new country, where a man may blaze out a track through the woods for himself, and where academic and even scholastic methods have hard work to hold their own. Even his mercantile training, in so far as it might be detected, was in his favour in a land whose merchants are princes. And behind the mask were the features of a true man, shrewd, keen, and quick in his judgments; one who might make his way in the New World as in the Old. There is something in the man, as in the writer, which lets him keep step to a Yankee tune. Wordsworth wrote, And you must love him ere to you The Americans loved Lamb, early, as they did Carlyle and Praed, to name two, as dissimilar as may be, of the many British writers who have found their first full appreciation across the Atlantic. Charles Lamb's only acted play met in America a far different fate from that which befell it in England; and I have a notion that his writings were aforetime, and are to-day, more widely read in these United States than in Great Britain. "Truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick," said Leigh Hunt; and although the phrase is not altogether happy, it serves to recall two of Lamb's chief characteristics, his humour, and his love of the stage in general and of Shakspeare in particular. That Lamb |