the episode, and Mr. G.A.  Aitken, Defoe’s latest editor, doubts Southerne’s interference altogether and considers Susannah’s curiosity an alien interpolation.  For Lamb’s other remarks on Defoe see also the “Ode to the Tread Mill,” page 72 of this volume, and “Estimate of Defoe’s Secondary Novels” (Vol.  I.).  Writing to Walter Wilson on November 15, 1829, on the receipt of his memoirs of Defoe, Lamb exclaims:  “De Foe was always my darling.”

Page 140. Epilogue to “Time’s a Tell-Tale."

A play by Henry Siddons (1774-1815), Mrs. Siddons’ eldest son.  It was produced in 1807 at Drury Lane, with Lamb’s prologue, which was, however, received so badly that on the second night another was substituted for it.

* * * * *

Page 142. Prologue to “Remorse."

Coleridge’s tragedy “Remorse,” a recasting of his “Osorio” (written at Sheridan’s instigation in 1797), was produced with success on January 23, 1813; and was printed, with the prologue, in the same year.  Lamb’s prologue, “spoken by Mr. Carr,” was (according to Mr. Dykes Campbell) a recasting of some verses composed for the prize offered by the Drury Lane Committee in the previous year, 1812, in response to their advertisement for a suitable poem to be read at the reopening of the new building after the fire of 1809.  It was, of course, this competition which brought forth the Rejected Addresses (1812) of the brothers James and Horace Smith.

The prologue as printed is very different from that which was spoken at the theatre by Mr. Carr.  A writer in the Theatrical Inquisitor for February, 1813, in his contemptuous criticism, refers to several passages that are no longer extant.  I quote from an account of the matter by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell in the Illustrated London News, October 22, 1892:—­

I am afraid the true text of Lamb’s “Rejected Address,” even as modified for use as a prologue, has not come down to us.  This is how the severe and suspicious Inquisitor describes it and its twin brother the epilogue—­

The Prologue and Epilogue were among the most stupid productions of the modern muse; the former was, in all probability, a Rejected Address, for it contained many eulogiums on the beauty and magnificence of the “dome” of Drury; talked of the waves being not quite dry, and expressed the happiness of the bard at being the first whose muse had soared within its limits.  More stupid than the doggerel of Twiss, and more affected than the pretty verses of Miles Peter Andrews, the Epilogue proclaimed its author and the writer of the Prologue to be par nobile fratrum, in rival dulness both pre-eminent.

The reader of Lamb’s prologue will find little of all this in it, but there is no reason for doubting the critic’s account of what he heard at the theatre.  It is not at all unlikely that it was this paragraph which suggested to Lamb the advisability of still further revising the “Rejected Address.”  In the prologue there is a good deal about the size of the theatre, as compared with “the Lyceum’s petty sphere,” and of how pleased Shakspere would have been had he been able to hear—­