of the work.  Goldsmith suffered exquisite distress.  Before his friends, at the club in Gerrard Street, he exerted him greatly to hide the fact of his discomfiture; chatted gaily and noisily, and even sang his favourite comic song with which he was wont to oblige the company only on special occasions.  But alone with Johnson he fairly broke down, confessed the anguish of his heart, burst into tears, and swore he would never write more.  The condemnation incurred by “The Rivals,” on its first performance, led to its being withdrawn for revision and amendment.  In his preface to the published play Sheridan wrote:  “I see no reason why an author should not regard a first-night’s audience as a candid and judicious friend attending, in behalf of the public, at his last rehearsal.  If he can dispense with flattery, he is sure at least of sincerity, and even though the annotation be rude, he may rely upon the justness of the comment.”  This is calm and complacent enough, but he proceeds with some warmth:  “As for the little puny critics who scatter their peevish strictures in private circles, and scribble at every author who has the eminence of being unconnected with them, as they are usually spleen-swoln from a vain idea of increasing their consequence, there will always be found a petulance and illiberality in their remarks, which should place them as far beneath the notice of a gentleman, as their original dulness had sunk them from the level of the most unsuccessful author.”  This reads like a sentence from “The School for Scandal.”

In truth, hissing is very hard to endure.  Lamb treated the misfortune of “Mr. H.” as lightly as he could, yet it is plain he took his failure much to heart.  In his letter signed Semel-Damnatus, upon “Hissing at the Theatres,” he is alternately merry and sad over his defeat as a dramatist.  “Is it not a pity,” he asks, “that the sweet human voice which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit—­that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us—­that the musical expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises of silly geese and irrational venomous snakes?  I never shall forget the sounds on my night!” He urges that the venial mistake of the poor author, “who thought to please in the act of filling his pockets, for the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that,” is too severely punished; and he adds, “the provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries; for the public never writes itself.”  He concludes with an account, written in an Addisonian vein, of a club to which he had the honour to belong.  “There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have been once in our lives what is called ‘damned.’