"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 TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS. A 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 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 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 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 From the "London Magazine," 1821. No mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. 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, 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 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." 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 ee 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." "Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis abalvo Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi." Metamorph., lib. 22. UNITARIAN PROTESTS;* IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED. DEAR 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 Church-ofEngland 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 noncons you are there occasional conformists. You submit to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words, exceptionable, and perhaps justly, in your view; but, so submitting, you have no right to quarrel with the * From the "London Magazine," 1825. You ritual which you have just condescended to owe an obligation to. They do not force you into their churches. You come voluntarily, knowing the terms. marry in the name of the Trinity. There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with your own interpretation: (and, so long as you can do this, where is the necessity of protesting?) for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker; else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You marry, then, essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied than, hey, presto! with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry. You cheat the church out of a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly despoiled the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense but you outwitted her; you assented to them in your sense only, and took from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined giving you. This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages, as at present contracted; and, so long as you Unitarians could salve your consciences with the équivoque, I do not see why the Established Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter. But the protesters necessarily see further. They have some glimmerings of the deception; they apprehend a flaw somewhere; they would fain be honest, and yet they must marry notwithstanding; for honesty's sake, they are fain to dehonestate themselves |