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839

1892

Copyright, 1892,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.

PREFACE.

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 friend's 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 selfpleasing 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 favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a

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