elt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected
rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year,
than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I
am none of those who--

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces,
new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to
face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine
only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into
foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past
disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I
forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again _for
love_, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so
dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and
events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the
incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I
should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall
to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W----n, than that so
passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our
family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us
of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds _in
banco_, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon
those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping
over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love
_himself_, without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective--and
mine is painfully so--can have a less respect for his present
identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and
vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse
from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;--*** besides;
a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I
subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay
at his door--but for the child Elia--that "other me," there, in the
back-ground--I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that
young master--with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid
changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other
house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox a