" This reads like
a sentence from "The School for Scandal."
In truth, hissing is very hard to endure. Lamb treated the misfortune
of "Mr. H." as lightly as he could, yet it is plain he took his
failure much to heart. In his letter signed Semel-Damnatus, upon
"Hissing at the Theatres," he is alternately merry and sad over his
defeat as a dramatist. "Is it not a pity," he asks, "that the sweet
human voice which was given man to speak with, to sing with, to
whisper tones of love in, to express compliance, to convey a favour,
or to grant a suit--that voice, which in a Siddons or a Braham rouses
us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us--that the musical
expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of the noises
of silly geese and irrational venomous snakes? I never shall forget
the sounds on my night!" He urges that the venial mistake of the poor
author, "who thought to please in the act of filling his pockets, for
the sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that," is too severely
punished; and he adds, "the provocations to which a dramatic genius is
exposed from the public are so much the more vexatious as they are
removed from any possibility of retaliation, the hope of which
sweetens most other injuries; for the public never writes itself.
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