"I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so.

"ELIA."

* * * * *

"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.

"A correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,--for his
hand-writing is as ragged as his manners,--admonishes me of the old
saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less
ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my 'Old Benchers of
the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born.
Bell clamors upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems
that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called
my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I
profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my
remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling
cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a
fool according to his folly,--that Elia there expresseth himself
ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth,
and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to
his delusions,--or, leading him from error still to contradictory error,
to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he
suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such
obvious rodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than
English.

"To a second correspondent, who signs himself 'A Wiltshire Man,' and
claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in