TO THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA

This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friends writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you -- a sort of unlicked, incondite things -- villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances) -- where under the first person (his favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections -- in direct opposition to his own early history.

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