startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary delicacies. But then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots, is the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe! We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing. CORRESPONDENT, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,-for his handwriting 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 clamours 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 Postscript 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 the 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 him self. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomontade 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, prima 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 favours 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 con tradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenious 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 honoured with the epithet "twice born."1 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." 66 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 churchwarden 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. 1 Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis abalvo Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi. Metamorph., lib. iii. IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT EAR M--Though none of your acquaintance can with greater sincerity congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myself, one of the oldest of them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony, depositing in the vestry-room what is called a Protest. I thought you superior to this little sophistry. What! after submitting to the service of the Church of England,-after consenting to receive a boon from her, in the person of your amiable consort, -was it consistent with sense, or common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with false worship? This language is a little of the strongest in your books and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from religious zeal and the native warmth of nonconformity. But at the altar, -the Churchof-England altar,-adopting her forms, and complying with her requisitions to the letter,-to be consistent, together with the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no longer sturdy non-cons: you are there occasional |