"Now you'd like to know the subject. 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 an 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 their 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 despatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after;—but all China will ring of it by-and-by."
Would that Lamb's joyous and exultant anticipations of "Mr. H."'s success had proved true! But, instead of being greeted with the applause of pit and gallery, which would have stood Elia instead of "the unheard voice of posterity," the piece was hissed and hooted from the stage.
In a letter to Manning, written early in 1808, he thus, half humorously, half pathetically, describes the reception the town gave "Mr. H.":—
"So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury-Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them."
If his farce had been—what "Gentleman Lewis," who was present on the night of its performance, said, if he had had it, he would have made it, by a few judicious curtailments—"the most popular little thing that had been brought out for some time," Lamb would not have written the following article.
"ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS.
"Mr. Reflector,—I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces suffered at Drury-Lane Theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned.
"Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal. The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then the public. Like him, I was condemned because I could write.
"Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savored a little of harshness and of the summum jus. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the 'Vindictive Man,' and some pieces of that nature, and it retained through the remainder of it a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said: Sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house.
"Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those which met with it. I am willing to put, a favorable construction upon the votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or designed partiality in the case;—only 'our nonsense did not happen to suit their nonsense'; that was all.