Atlantic Monthly | Page 9

obligation: a fanciful mode of illustration, derived from the accidents and habits of his past calling _spiritualized_, rather than from any accurate acquaintance with the Hebrew text, in which report speaks him but a raw scholar. Mr. Elliston, from all that we can learn, has his religion yet to choose; though some think him a Muggletonian."
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Willis, in his "Pencillings by the Way," describing his interview with Charles and Mary Lamb, says,--"Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and affection between the brother and the sister, though Lamb was continually taking advantage of her deafness to mystify her with the most singular gravity upon every topic that was started. 'Poor Mary!' said he, 'she hears all of an epigram but the point.' 'What are you saying of me, Charles?' she asked. 'Mr. Willis,' said he, raising his voice, 'admires your "Confessions of a Drunkard" very much, and I was saying it was no merit of yours that you understood the subject.' We had been speaking of this admirable essay (which is his own) half an hour before."
That essay has been strangely and purposely misunderstood. Elia, albeit he loved the cheerful glass, was not a drunkard. The "poor nameless egotist" of the Confessions is not Charles Lamb. In printing the article in the "London Magazine," (it was originally contributed to a collection of tracts published by Basil Montagu,) Elia introduced it to the readers of that periodical in the following explanatory paragraphs. They should be printed in all editions of Elia as a note to the article they explain and comment on. For many persons, like a writer in the London "Quarterly Review" for July, 1822, believe, or profess to believe, that this "fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance" is a true tale. "How far it was from actual truth," says Talfourd, "the essays of Elia, the production of a later day, in which the maturity of his feeling, humor, and reason is exhibited, may sufficiently show."
ELIA ON HIS "CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD."
"Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his lucubrations, set forth for the most part (such his modesty!) without a name, scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the dust of some of these it is our intention occasionally to revive a tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate, especially at a time like the present, when the pen of our industrious contributor, engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Continental tour, may haply want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous speculations. We have been induced, in the first instance, to reprint a thing which he put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled 'The Confessions of a Drunkard,' seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom; adding, from their peculiar brains, the gratuitous affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer (in his delineations of a drunkard, forsooth!) partly sat for his own picture. The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the essays of a contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate appetite; and it struck him that a better paper--of deeper interest, and wider usefulness--might be made out of the imagined experiences of a Great Drinker. Accordingly he set to work, and, with that mock fervor and counterfeit earnestness with which he is too apt to over-realize his descriptions, has given us a frightful picture indeed, but no more resembling the man Elia than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L., its author. It is, indeed, a compound extracted out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture, (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some times have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?)--but then how heightened! how exaggerated! how little within the sense of the Review, where a part, in their slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for the whole! But it is useless to expostulate with this Quarterly slime, brood of Nilus, watery heads with hearts of jelly, spawned under the sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless. Elia shall string them up one day, and show their colors,--or rather, how colorless and vapid the whole fry,--when he putteth forth his long-promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed, 'Confessions of a Water-Drinker.'"
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In turning over the leaves