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?

"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,—

"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

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS.

"It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.

"Again, it has happened, that, from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and Scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer, (we are all such upon earth,) addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the 'Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus,' of the same author,—a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding