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
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, _prima 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