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, _primâ 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.'[4] 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 'Wiltshire Man.'