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.
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