"A writer, whose real name, it seems, is _Boldero_, but who has been
entertaining the town for the last twelve months with some very pleasant
lucubrations under the assumed signature of _Leigh Hunt_,[2] in his
'Indicator' of the 31st January last has thought fit to insinuate that
I, _Elia_, do not write the little sketches which bear my signature, in
this Magazine, but that the true author of them is a Mr. L----b. Observe
the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny!--on
the very eve of the publication of our last number,--affording no scope
for explanation for a full month,--during which time I must needs lie
writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity.--Good
heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed _to be!_
"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.
"Take away my moral reputation,--I may live to discredit that calumny.
Injure my literary fame,--I may write that up again. But when a
gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?
"Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle
at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence,--who
not only forbids us _to be_ any longer, but _to have been_ at all. Let
our ancestors look to it.
"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes Street,
Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago,
nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished
four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero[3] was known
to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name,
transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing?
Are the archives of the steelyard, in succeeding reigns, (if haply they
survive the fury of our envious enemies,) showing that we flourished in
prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth,
nothing?
"'Why, then the world, and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing.'
"I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so.
"ELIA."
* * * * *
"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.
"A correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,--for his
hand-writing is as ragged as his manners,--admonishes me of the old
saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less
ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my 'Old Benchers of
the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born.
Bell clamors upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems
that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called
my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I
profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my
remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling
cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a
fool according to his folly,--that Elia there expresseth himself
ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth,
and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to
his delusions,--or, leading him from error still to contradictory error,
to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he
suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such
obvious rodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than
English.
"To a second correspondent, who signs himself 'A Wiltshire Man,' and
claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in
my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the
Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a
more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon.
Referring to the passage, I must confess that the term 'native town,'
applied to Calne, _primâ facie_ seems to bear out the construction which
my friendly correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context, too, I
am afraid, a little favors it. But where the words of an author, taken
literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to
be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom
of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition
that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly
intended. So by the word 'native' I may be supposed to mean a town where
I might have been born,--or where it might be desirable that I should
have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry, chalky
soil, in which I delight,--or a town with the inhabitants of which I
passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it
became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of
interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling
into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be
born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike
abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to
have honored with the epithet 'twice-born.'[4] But not to mention that
he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places _whence_ rather
than the places _where_ he was delivered,--for by either birth he may
probably be challenged for a Theban,--in a strict way of speaking, he
was a _filius femoris_ by no means in the same sense as he had been
before a _filius alvi_, for that latter was but a secondary and
tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house
of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the
courteous 'Wiltshire Man.'
"To 'Indagator,' 'Investigator, 'Incertus,' and the rest of the pack,
that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth,--as if,
forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish,--to all
such church-warden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here
given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty
vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument
shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever
place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him,--
"'Modò me Thebis, modò Athenis.'
"ELIA."
* * * * *
Lamb excels as a critic. His article on Hogarth is a masterly specimen
of acute and subtile criticism. Hazlitt says it ought to be read by
every lover of Hogarth and English genius. His paper on "The Tragedies
of Shakspeare, considered with Reference to their Fitness for
Stage-Representation," is, in the opinion of good judges, the noblest
criticism ever written. The brief, "matterful" notes to his Specimens of
the Old English Dramatists are the very quintessence of criticism,--the
flower and fruit of years of thoughtful reading of the old English
drama. Nay, even his incidental allusions to his favorite old poets and
prose-writers are worth whole pages of ordinary criticism.
Therefore I do not see what reason or excuse Talfourd could have for not
publishing the critical paper on De Foe's Secondary Novels, which Lamb
contributed to Walter Wilson's Life of De Foe. The author of "Robinson
Crusoe" was a great favorite with Lamb, and his criticism of "Colonel
Jack," "Moll Flanders," etc., was written _con amore_, and is, perhaps,
the very best thing ever said about those remarkable works. Those who
have read Lamb's letter to Wilson, dated December, 1822, and therefore
know how admirably he could write of the author of the best and most
popular book for boys ever written, will be right glad to read his
* * * * *