correct with regard to
the _title_ of the _play_. Allowing your objection (which is not
necessary, as pride may be, and is in real life often, cured by
misfortunes not directly originating from its own acts, as Jeremy Taylor
will tell you a naughty desire is sometimes sent to cure it; I know you
read these _practical divines_)--but allowing your objection, does not
the betraying of his father's secret directly spring from pride?--from
the pride of wine, and a full heart, and a proud over-stepping of the
ordinary rules of morality, and contempt of the prejudices of mankind,
which are not to bind superior souls--'as _trust_ in _the matter of
secrets_ all _ties_ of _blood_, etc., etc., keeping of _promises_, the
feeble mind's religion, binding our _morning knowledge_ to the
performance of what _last night's ignorance spake_'--does he not prate,
that '_Great Spirits_' must do more than die for their friend? Does not
the pride of wine incite him to display some evidence of friendship,
which its own irregularity shall make great? This I know, that I meant
his punishment not alone to be a cure for his daily and habitual
_pride_, but the direct consequence and appropriate punishment of a
particular act of pride.

"If you do not understand it so, it is my fault in not explaining my
meaning."]

Manning seems to have begged for a copy--or reconsideration,
perhaps--for Lamb, on February 13, 1800, promised him a copy "of my play
and the _Falstaff Letters_ in a day or two." There is no trace of the
former having been sent, but the latter certainly was, for on March 1 he
presses Manning for his opinion of it--hopes he is "prepared to call it
a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours," etc., as he
was accustomed to hope when that book was in question. The next mention
of the play occurs in an undated letter to Coleridge [accompanying a MS.
copy of the play for the Wordsworths], dated by Talfourd and other
editors "end of 1800," which must have been written in March or April,
1800 [since Coleridge was then staying with Wordsworth, engaged in
completing the translation of _Wallenstein,_ the last of the MS. being
sent to the printer in April]. Talfourd's mistake in dating it perhaps
led him to suppose that the copy sent through Coleridge to Wordsworth
was a printed copy, and that Lamb had printed _John Woodvil_ a year
before he published it. If any other proof were needed that Talfourd
guessed wrongly, it is supplied by th