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This was the essay, Lamb suggested, which Southey may have had in mind when in an article in the Quarterly Review he condemned Elia as wanting "a sounder religious feeling." Perhaps the Paper on 'Saying Graces' was the obnoxious feature. I have endeavoured there to rescue a voluntary duty good in place, but never, as I remember, literally commanded from the charge of an undecent formality.

He's been away for days, and, well, I want to know where he is. I get so anxious when he's away. You see, he's so " "And does Peter know where he is?" "Yes. At least I'm hoping so. Elia goes with him a deal now, on his expeditions. Peter's real good to him. I think he's trying to help him in in you know Elia is so so delicate."

I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious *; addicted to : averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it; * besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door but for the child Elia that "other me," there, in the back-ground I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents.

Put as it usually is when the intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this: that the Essays of Elia, that Southey's Life of Nelson, that some of the best work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature.

Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes, not verities or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press.

With money it would be possible even for Elia to destroy the whole of Europe and to take Judas Petunikoff for his valet. He would go... Give him a hundred roubles a month and he would go! But he would be a bad valet, because he would soon begin to steal ..." "Now, besides that, the thin woman is better than the stout one, because she costs one less," said the Deacon, convincingly.

The very tricks mechanical dots, dashes, aposiopeses which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at all.

There are some memories of the childhood of western men unlike, and yet similar in their generous persuasions on all pure young hearts upon whose "Decay" might, also, be written a "Complaint," which should come as truly, and yet as sadly, from the heart of him, who remembers his boyhood, as did that from the heart of Elia.

Essays of Elia. "Would that Carlyle could now try his hand at the English Revolution!" was our exclamation, on laying down the last volume of his remarkable History of the French Revolution with its brilliant and startling word- pictures still flashing before us. To some extent this wish has been realized in the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.

Peter crossed the room to the barrel, and dipped out some water; and, further, he procured a washing flannel, and hastened back with them to Jim, who was kneeling supporting the girl's wounded head upon his hand. And all the time Elia, as though in sheer idle curiosity, watched the scene, steadily continuing his meal the while. There was no sort of feeling expressed in his cold eyes.