night clouds to rest,
    Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,
    And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
    Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep. 
    Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,
    Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,
    To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
    Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,
    When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
    Filch’d from the careless Amalthea’s horn;
    And how the woods berries and worms provide
    Without their pains, when earth has nought beside
    To answer their small wants. 
    To view the graceful deer come tripping by,
    Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
    Like bashful younkers in society. 
    To mark the structure of a plant or tree,
    And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.

Lamb’s next attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of “Mr. H——­,” in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts.  The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned.  The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a nobleman travelling incognito.  Hitherto always rejected by the ladies on account of his unfortunate patronym, he has wooed successfully under an initial, when he nearly spoils all by betraying that his name is—­Hogsflesh!  He is forthwith shunned, but his ladylove remains faithful to him on his making the very natural change of Hogsflesh into Bacon.  In his method and atmosphere, Lamb had passed from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century; he got a hearing, but he did not get—­and it must be admitted that he did not deserve—­success.  The farce is interesting as containing in an inquisitive landlord, Jeremiah Pry, the original, it may be assumed, of a whole family of Paul Prys, of which to-day John Poole’s is the best remembered.

Two other dramatic pieces were written by Lamb in his later years:  “The Wife’s Trial, or, The Intruding Widow” (founded upon Crabbe’s “The Confidant"), in blank verse, and a second farce, “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” in prose.  In these two pieces he had made distinct advances, yet neither was perhaps suited for stage representation.  In “The Wife’s Trial” we have a couple—­Mr. and Mrs. Selby—­five years married, on whose hospitality a widow forces herself owing to some mysterious hold which she has over the wife.  Mrs. Selby had been secretly married as a schoolgirl, though her husband left her at the church door and had died abroad.  The widow striving to use this knowledge for purposes not far removed from blackmail, is neatly hoist with her own petard, and the slight play ends with the cordial reconciliation of the Selbys.  In “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” once more the story is of the slightest, though the farce seems more fitted for the stage than “Mr. H——.”  Marion, the