bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure
in my relation, who made up to me--to my childish eyes--the mythology
of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a
mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry
perish,--extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary
fabling,--in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a
well of innocent or wholesome superstition--the seeds of exaggeration
will be busy there, and vital--from every-day forms educing the
unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light,
when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and
materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood,
shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings
totally to fly the earth.

* * * * *

P.S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See
what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of
childhood! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor!
This gentleman, R.N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady
in child-bed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep
melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly
recovered. In what a new light does this place his rejection (O
call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P----, unravelling
into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring
character!--Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for
true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history. He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done
better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these
incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer--who
respects his old and his new masters--would but have been puzzled
at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not,
peradventure, of the license which _Magazines_ have arrived at in this
plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the
_Gentleman's_--his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having
been long confined to the holy ground of honest _Urban's_ obituary.
May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns
of unenvied flattery!--Meantime, O ye New Benchers of the Inner
Temple, cherish him kindly, for