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,