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himself, it is like Coleridge's visit to Germany, which turned the tides of his soul clean away from the isles of song and bore them in a direction where fewer have cared to follow him, but those few of the best and strongest. I do not mean to argue that Lamb's discovery of the Elizabethans had, in a wide sense, the character of momentousness which belongs to the first three, at least, of those instances, or that it had an influence of such general consequence to the world. Its influence has, of course, been strictly insular; including in that term the American Continent. What I wish to bring out by these comparisons is merely this, that Lamb's Elizabethanism, not less than Kant's transcendentalism, was something superinduced upon an earlier stock which it (only partially, however, in his case) replaced-that it flowed, in the same way, from the historical turning-point of an intellectual life—that it recorded, in the same way, the Hegira of a mind.

To return to the book itself. It was published by Longman in 1808, and was upon the whole as well received as, under the permanent moral circumstances of the world, any work can hope to be which betrays tokens of some originality, sincerity, or power. Á second edition was produced by another publisher (John Bumpus) five years later, and there seems to have been a third in Lamb's lifetime. Its best success,

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however, was the high esteem in which it was held by the fit and the few, including, in this instance, Lamb himself. When, about twenty years later, he wrote his humorous page of autobiography in the Manuscript-Book of his friend Mr Upcott, he left unnamed the works to which his fame is more commonly referred, but boasted that he had once caught a swallow flying, and that he "was also the first to draw the public attention to the old English

Dramatists, in a work called 'Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived about the Time of Shakspeare,' published about fifteen years since." To have given the title or the date correctly, he would have had to go out of his way; so the Reader will notice that he saves himself that trouble. But he was always ready to go out of his way, and to take a deal of trouble, to help a friend in an hour of need. One friend of his who was very apt to be in need, as a man will be who sees the odds of the world against him and accepts the fact, neither regarding fear nor bespeaking falsehood and favour in what he says or does, was William Hone. Lamb liked Hone very much, and his way of helping him was very happily conceived. "I am going through a course of reading at the Museum :" he writes to Bernard Barton in September 1826—" the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my Specimens. I have two thousand to go through; and in a few weeks have despatched the tythe of 'em. It is a sort of office to me; hours, ten to four, the same. It does me good. Man must have regular occupation, that has been used to it." This, the Reader will see, was some eighteen months after the liberation from the desk, and the work of these new "office hours" was intended for a benefaction to his friend Hone; in whose Table-Book the "Garrick Extracts" appeared in 1827. They were followed by some additional contributions called "Garrick Fragments," which will be found at the end of the next volume. The "Specimens" were frequently reprinted in the ten years following Lamb's death, but the "Garrick Extracts" were not exhumed from the Table-Book until H. G. Bohn added them to his edition of the "Specimens" in 1847. The next step in advance was made by Mr Gollancz, who produced in 1893 the first scholarly edition of this section of Lamb's Works-for so I

think the "Specimens," with their Notes, must be considered. Besides equipping his edition with biographical notes and an Apparatus Criticus at once exhaustive and concise, Mr Gollancz rendered three very good services to Lamb and to the Readers of Lamb. (1) He merged the "Specimens" and the "Garrick Extracts" so as to bring together the different selections from any one author which may have appeared in Lamb's separate samplings (the book of 1808, and the contributions of 1827), and so made one serviceable book of what, in Bohn's edition, had been two books within one pair of boards. (2) He arranged the whole in chronological order. (3) He rectified Lamb's text, which was in a very high degree faulty.

I do not think those innovations will seem to any one to require defence. The second and third, Lamb would certainly have desired to see done, though the doing of them might have been a little out of the way of his talents. The first also, I think, he would certainly have done himself in course of time, though he would probably have exercised a liberty of omitting here and there, in the interest of general effect, which no faithful Editor can allow himself now. The present Editor had some hesitations as to how far he should permit himself to follow the example set him by Mr Gollancz. There are sentimental reasons in favour of adhering to the actual first state, or authorised version, of the book in any edition of Lamb's Works; and in regard to the "Specimens,' there is no doubt something lost when we lose sight of the original book, which had a unity and a moral physiognomy of its own. Against this consideration there was to be set the greater convenience of having all the passages from each of the dramatists brought together. Also, while the "Specimens " and the "Extracts" would have made two very un

equal volumes if separated in that way, there would have been little satisfaction in a mere bisection of the total bulk, which would have made the "Extracts" appear as a very long appendix filling the better part of the second volume. The natural and convenient placing of the portraits, also, was a desideratum not to be disregarded. I have decided, then, that the merging of the first and second body of selections into one continuous Dramatic Anthology would make the better book, and would have been better liked by Lamb himself. This having been decided there was less doubt about aiming at those other perfections, of a chronological order and a purified text. I may say that the work in all these respects has been done independently and afresh for this occasion, with the smallest possible reference to the details of other editings and other orderings of the contents. I must hope that we have in some respects done a little better than has been done before, for I notice on a comparison that we have in a number of cases done differently.

The " we " in the last sentence is not an editorial expression, but simple truth and good grammar. It would have been impossible for me, in the condition under which this work has had to be done, to devote to one single part of it so much time and labour as an ipsa-manual collation of the whole text would have required. I have therefore been very glad to entrust this part of the business to the very competent care of Miss Marian Edwardes, who has done similar work before to the complete satisfaction of incomparably better scholars than myself, and who has been employed upon this collation almost continuously for several months. The principles upon which she has worked may briefly stated. The first principle was that of leaving unchanged, however corrupt, any reading upon which Lamb's comment was based. The next was, of

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going direct to the quartos, and taking their reading where it was different from Lamb's and distinctly better and of letting well alone, where there was little to choose between them. The third was, of referring to the works of such Great Masters in the history of editing as Dyce and Bullen, where this seemed necessary. And this has been necessary vastly seldomer than one would have expected, for the quartos are wonderful sane and sound; greatly more sane and sound than some modern texts of Lamb's Essays, even the Essays of Elia, that I know of, and that are in wide circulation. Scholarship has consisted, it would seem, mainly in getting back to the quartos, in getting rid of the misapprehensions, emendations and misprints of the earlier editors, Dodsley and others. The faults of Lamb's text had their origin there, though doubtless some of them were inventions, accidental or deliberate, of his own. Sometimes, one imagines, with the book open before him, he would yet write from memory and write wrong. The Notes at the end of this and the next volume do not pretend to be an Apparatus Criticus, though they sometimes explain what has been done here, and sometimes what ought to have been done but was not. Those upon the specimens contained in the earlier sheets are more especially of the latter kind; for at first the readings of the quartos were not accepted so freely as at a later stage of the work began to seem desirable. Upon the whole, however, the Notes only seek to embody an irreducible minimum of such useful information for the student as, for instance, a more precise citation of the title of each drama, a reference to its date, and to the time or place of its first production. The supplementing of Lamb's critical remarks (alas! too few, and too far between) by the offer of here and there an observation of one's own upon this and that