Casting a preparatla the bottom of this article -- as the wary oisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to sult the quis sculpsit in the er, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet -- methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia?
Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-fotten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since goo decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college -- a votary of the desk -- a notched and cropt scrivener -- ohat sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.
Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I fess that it is my humour, my fancy -- in the forest of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation -- (and ter than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies) -- to while away some good hours of my time in the plation of indigos, cottons, raw silk, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place * * * * * * and then it sends you home with sucreased appetite to your books * * * * * not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste ers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sos, epigrams, essays -- so that the very parings of a ting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the m among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. -- It feels its promotion. * * * * * * * So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, promised in the dession.
Not that, in my anxious detail of the many odities ial to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a ing carper might be able to pi this Josephs vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, tret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those solatory iices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons, -- the red-letter days, now bee, to all is and purposes, dead-letter days. There aul, and Stephen, and Barnabas -
"Andrew and John, men famous in old times "
we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at school at Christs. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett Prayer Book. There huer in his uneasy posture -- holy Bartlemy iroublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagi. I hohem all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot -- so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred -- only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon -- clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make up one paudy-day between them -- as an ey unworthy of the dispensation.
These were bright visitations in a scholars and a clerks life -- "far off their ing shone." -- I was as good as an almana those days. I could have told you such a saints-day falls out week, or the week after. Peradvehe Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity would, on six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not be thought tn the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a of such long standing,