"ELIA."

* * * * *

Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off,--and he put off a good
many,--indeed, he valued himself on being "a matter-of-lie man,"
believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon everybody,--of all
the lies he ever put off, he valued his "Memoir of Liston" the most. "It
is," he confessed to Miss Hutchinson, "from top to toe, every paragraph,
pure invention, and has passed for gospel,--has been republished in the
newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic
account." And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its
facts all fictions, is not Lamb's "Memoir of Liston" a truer and more
trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible
biographers--unfortunately not yet extinct--so admirably ridiculed in
the thirty-fifth number of the "Freeholder"? In fact, is not this "lying
Life of Liston" a very clever satire on those biographers who, like the
monkish historians mentioned by Fuller, in his "Church History of
Britain," swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of
sufficient solid food to fill them,--who, according to Addison, ascribe
to the unfortunate persons whose lives they pretend to write works which
they never wrote and actions which they never performed, celebrate
virtues which they were never famous for and excuse faults which they
were never guilty of? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily
ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified
biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen's libraries?

Therefore, as a piece of most admirable fooling, as a bit of harmless,
good-natured pleasantry, as a specimen of pleasant satire, of subtile