THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA. BEING A SEQUEL TO ESSAYS PUBLISHED UNDER LONDON: EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 1833. PREFACE. BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. THIS poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature. To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they are, 1 grant you— a sort of unlicked, incondite things-villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer |