rship is inconclusive--to have been written by
Charles or Mary Lamb. It is a simple rendering in Hudibrastic verse of
a familiar nursery story. Perhaps a very slight piece of evidence in
favour of the Lamb authorship may be found in the fact that it shares
with "Prince Dorus" the sub-title, "A Poetical Version of an Ancient
Tale."

CRITICISM

In the mid-part of the period during which Charles Lamb was writing,
either on his own account or in collaboration with his sister, the
books for children to which reference has just been made, he was also
engaged upon the work which was to bring him before the world as a
great critic, as the first of the Neo-Elizabethans if I may substitute
that nickname for the time-honoured one which calls him the last of
the Elizabethans. For us, to-day, with our bountiful acknowledgment of
all that we owe to the great body of dramatic poets who flourished
during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half of
the seventeenth, for us with our many collected editions of the works
of these men it is somewhat difficult to realize the benighted
condition in which our fellows were situated a century ago.
Elizabethan drama to by far the greater number of our great
grandparents meant Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone; to us
Shakespeare is only the sun of a great dramatic planetary system, and
the corrected view is largely owing to the efforts of one
revolutionary critic, and that critic was Charles Lamb. His earliest
letters show that he had revelled in this by-way of literature, and
had there found much that was of the best comparatively forgotten, or
at least wholly neglected, and he gladly availed himself of an
opportunity afforded for selecting striking passages from the English
dramatic poets. "Specimens are becoming fashionable," he wrote. "We
have 'Specimens of Ancient English Poets,' 'Specimens of Modern
English Poets,' 'Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,' without
end. They used to be called 'Beauties'! You have seen 'Beauties of
Shakspeare'? so have many people that never saw any beauties in
Shakspeare." Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the
unfortunate clerical forger, Dodd, in the scheme which he had in hand.
When we turn to the "Specimens" themselves we discover them to be fine
indeed, and in reading them and the brief but pregnant notes upon
them, we marvel at the sureness of the touch and the maturity of the
writer. The notes, or commentary,