If our friend laughed at others, he was just as ready to laugh at himself; and his hissing his own play is historic. It is strange that, with his keen critical sense, he should have hoped for the success of this “Mr. H., A Farce in Two Acts;” produced at Drury Lane, in 1806, with the great Elliston in the title-rôle. Yet he had written to Manning in boyish glee: “All China shall ring with it--by and by.” In the same letter, he made fanciful designs for the orders he was to give for admission, elate with anticipation of the long run his piece was to have. He sat on the opening night with Mary and Crabb Robinson in the front of the pit (his favourite place), and joined with the audience in applauding his really witty prologue. Then, as the luckless farce fell flat and flatter, he was louder than any of them in their hisses. “Damn the word, I write it like kisses--how different!” he growled, in grotesque wrath, in his letter announcing the failure to Wordsworth. Hazlitt, who was present, dreamed of that dreadful damning every night for a month, but Lamb only wrote to him: “I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoky man must write smoky farces.” He and Mary were “pretty stout” about it, but, after all, they would rather have had success, he had to own. For he not only longed for the fame, but he needed the money, which that success in dramatic authorship would have brought.
He delighted in playing all sorts of pranks on his sister, and was quick to improve any occasion to tease her. Such a scene is described by N. P. Willis, in his “Pencillings by the Way;” where he relates his meeting and making acquaintance with them, at a friend’s rooms in London. He and Lamb were chatting, and Mary, not quite catching all their words--she was then slightly deaf--asked, “What are you saying of me, Charles?” Instantly he answered: “Mr. Willis admires _your_ ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’ very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood that subject!” She took all his freaks in good part, translating them in the light of her affection for him, and of her fondness for his sweet and stingless banter.