fter all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of
time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To
confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never
think of sending away. Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks,
geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn,
sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French
pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to
myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop
somewhere--where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack
than the sensual rarity--there my friends (or any good man) may command
me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I
should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed
such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious
gift. One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a
child--when my kind old aunt had strained her pocketstrings to bestow a
sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I
met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts--a
look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of
taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all
the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's
kindness crossed me--the sum it was to her--the pleasure she had a right
to expect that I--not the old impostor --should take in eating her
cake--the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian
virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took
it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like--and I
was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to
me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill
with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a
pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

Yours (short of pig) to command in everything. C.L.

[This letter probably led to the immediate composition of the _Elia_
essay "A Dissertation on Roast Pig" (see Vol. II. of the present
edition), which was printed in the _London Magazine_ for September,
1822. See also "Thoughts on Presents of Game," Vol. I. of this edition.

"Owen."