PREFACE.

OME apology is perhaps needed for a title which inevitably Charles Lamb's "Tales from Shakespear." But if a title is to express anything at all, it should surely convey concisely a notion of the contents of a book, and the risk of a possible comparison with Charles Lamb (and the consequent inevitable exposure of my own defects) has not, I confess, appeared to me of enough importance to induce me to forego a title which accurately describes the book, for the sake of one more fanciful, or more original, but yet less expressive of a simple fact.

The comparison suggested by the title is not one, moreover, to be justified by the treatment of the Plays of the Old Dramatists which I have employed. To have deliberately attempted to imitate the manner in which Lamb treated the plays of Shakespear would have been unfair both to myself and to the Dramatists. Lamb and Shakespear stand equally beyond rivalry. Moreover, Shakespear's plays being (or being supposed to be) familiar to every one, there was no necessity for Lamb to do more than frame the plots of those plays which he selected into simple stories, without commenting on the Dramatist's use of those materials. In the case of the Dramatic Authors with whose works I have here dealt, the position is very different. Their works, now-a-days, are familiar to very few; yet the names of many of them, and of many of the characters in them, are familiar enough. Allusions are often made to such characters as Zanga, Bobadil, Mrs. Haller, Belvidera, or Mrs. Beverley, by many persons who clearly never read much, if any, of the plays in which the personages figure, and the "heaviness," "pomposity," "ponderousness," of old English tragedies is proverbial in the mouths of hundreds of people who have never attempted to test for themselves the truth of such sweeping censure, and whose only knowledge of the works is derived from Sheridan's "Critic."

Therefore, in telling the stories of some of these once famous, but now often abused, plays, it becomes a necessity for the narrator to attempt some defence of the several authors; not, indeed, a defence by means of his own critical views, but a defence by the

help of the authors themselves—allowing them to speak frequently in their own words. There are doubtless many persons who would shrink from the task of reading a five-act Tragedy in blank verse, who would yet gladly know "what it was all about," and gladly have some notion of the style of the Author's language. And therefore, in telling these stories, I have frequently put into the mouths of the dramatis persona the very words of the plays in which they appear.

There is another point of difference between such plays as these and those of Shakespear which must strike any one who is at all familiar with the history of the stage. It is in characters in such plays as these that some of our greatest English Actors and Actresses have achieved their most brilliant successes, and with which, rather than with Shakesperian characters, they have become in a manner identified; and conversely, it must be admitted, some of the plays and characters owe their celebrity in a great measure to such identification with certain famous Actors and Actresses. We can think of "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" without the name of any great impersonator inevitably rising to our mind at the mention of those Shakespearian heroes; but to speak of "Isabella" or "Belvidera" is to conjure up the memory of Sarah Siddons. Therefore, the stories of the plays have frequently led me, almost unavoidably, to speak of some of those great illustrators of the dramatists' work, who have either won their reputation by the help of these plays, or by the exercise of their genius have gained for the plays a fame which capricious fashion-ided by Sheridan's brilliant satire in the "Critic"-has since thought fit to ignore.

I am quite aware that there are those who attribute the success of Lamb's Tales from Shakespear not only to the intrinsic beauty of his writing and the charm of the stories themselves, but also to the fact that the book serves as an introduction to the study of an author of whose works it is considered a disgrace to be ignorant. And it might doubtless be argued that the plays of Dryden, Congreve, and Rowe are not such as young people should be required to know anything about, while those who want to know anything of them can read them in the original. To defend Dryden and his contemporaries against the charges brought against them would take up too much time and be foreign to my purpose at present; but I cannot refrain from saying that it can only be the parrot cry of entire ignorance which calls such plays as those which I have here selected "improper" and "unfit to