actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them;
but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many
centuries--of six short twelvemonths--had wrought in me.--Perhaps it
was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an
indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable
expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions
with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance
to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon
yielded to the present attraction of the scene; and the theatre became
to me, upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations.

_Lamb._

DREAM-CHILDREN; A REVERIE

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when _they_
were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a
traditionary great-uncle or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in
this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to
hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house
in Norfolk[24] (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and
papa lived) which had been the scene--so at least it was generally
believed in that part of the country--of the tragic incidents which
they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children
in the Wood. [Footnote 24: Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, is meant,
where Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, was housekeeper.] Certain it is
that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be
seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great
hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish
rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention
in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her
dear mother's looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went
on to say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field
was, how beloved and respected by every body, though she was not
indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it
(and yet in some respects she might be said to be the mistress of it
too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer
and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the
adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had
been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort
while she lived, which afterwards came to decay