Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article--as the
wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads,
seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the _quis
sculpsit_ in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a
Vivares, or a Woollet--methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, _Who is
Elia?_
Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten
humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long
since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your
mind as one of the self-same college--a votary of the desk--a notched
and cropt scrivener--one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick
people are said to do, through a quill.
Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my
humour, my fancy--in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your
man of letters requires some relaxation--(and none better than such
as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)--to
while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos,
cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first
place ******* and then it sends you home with such increased appetite
to your books ***** not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste
wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally,
the impression of sonnets, epigrams, _essays_--so that the very
parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an
author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among
the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its
ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.--It
feels its promotion. ***** So that you see, upon the whole, the
literary dignity of _Elia_ is very little, if at all, compromised in
the condescension.
Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental
to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain
flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's
vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret
the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory
interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four
seasons,--the _red-letter days_, now become, to all intents and
purposes, _dead-letter days_. There was Paul, and Stephen, and
Barnabas--