AN UNSENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.

BY ELIA.

66

READER, thou art haply one of those persons who feel themselves bound in honour to earn (in their own estimation) whatever title it may please others to bestow upon them. If so, reading thyself every day addressed as "reader," (not to reckon the flattering additaments of "gentle,' generous," "tasteful," "learned," "critical," and so forth,) thou hast doubtless felt thyself constrained in conscience to prove the validity of thy title, by perusing every Work (so we puny moderns are minded to denominate our poor, pigmy productions) that comes before thee in a questionable shape: meaning thereby, every one that thou art in the least likely to be questioned about, as to whether it has been perused by thee, or not. In this case, thou hast perchance whiled away an odd half hour now and then, in turning over and tasting the leaves of

certain lucubrations, erewhile distilled by driblets from the adust brain of one Elia.

I will suppose thou hast, at any rate. An author would drive a sorry trade indeed, if he were not privileged to suppose the case of his having readers. To nine out of ten it is the only means of securing any. And even to the tenth it is much the same.

Thou hast read Elia, then, and art therefore not absolutely incognizant of the turn of his humours and oddities, and the character which habit and nature, uniting together, have succeeded (and failed) in impressing upon his mental and bodily man. I put it to thy candour, then, whether, being thus informed, if any but Elia himself were to come and make averment before thee, that they had encountered his pale face, and attenuated form, beyond the confines of his own England, thou wouldest not have treated the tale as an ingenious, albeit an ill-conceived fiction, and greeted the teller with a glance chiefly compounded of the incredulus odi?

Perchance thou sufferest the equivocal happiness of being, like Elia himself, a pun-propounder: (for punster is " a weak invention of the enemy " of puns, and not to be uttered by one who honours them :) in which case thou wilt doubtless exclaim, "Elia incontinent! it cannot be ;" and wilt add,-as Othello

did when a charge of being similarly situated was made against his gentle mistress," I'll not believe it!"

Thou art altogether in the right, and Elia himself hereby thanks thee for thy well-placed confidence in his consistency. And yet Elia himself is at the same time constrained to assure thee, that thou art altogether as wrong as thou art right: for nothing is more easy (and hard) than to be entirely both, in regard to one and the same matter.

Look at the transparent tegument (mis-named paper) on which these uneven words are ecrivated. On turning it over, thou mayest, by following the fashion of the Hebrew, read them almost as well on the wrong side as on that which is not the right. Glance thine eye, too, towards the top of the page. It is dated "Calais." There is no gainsaying the fact. Elia is, like Bottom, "translated" from his own modest, low-roofed parlour, looking out upon the little Ever-Green (here they would think it a strip of baize) that stretches before the plain, uni-painted door of his quiet domicile, in the suburban village of "Shacklewell, near Hackney, near London, England—” for such is the endless supererogation which he is obliged to inscribe upon the letter which he has just dispatched (what a word, when they tell me it will

not reach her these three days!) to his dear cousin Bridget he is translated, I say, from the above spot (apt title, spot, when compared with the "infinite space" of which at present he is denizen) to a magnificent Scene in the Play which seems to be continually acting here, called "Dessin's Hotel."

Reader, if thou wilt accord me a more than ordinary share of thy patience, I will recount how this seeming inconsequentiality came about: for thy confidence in its unlikelihood merits my confidence in return.

As I have begun supposing for thee, I may as well go on. I suppose, then, that thou art not ignorant of the signal change which, a brief while ago, (brief it is by the book, though to me it already seems an age-so crowded has it been with thoughts, feelings, fancies, imaginations, and what not), took place in my terrene condition, in virtue of my becoming a 66 superannuated man.” Some of the consequences of this change I have elsewhere related; but the "greatest is behind."

If thou hast perused, reader, the relation I have just alluded to, touching the first impressions of a man who just begins to feel his freedom press upon him, with a weight

66 Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life,"