w, a preternatural interest over
the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his
conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It
is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it
with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar
in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of
Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it
touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the
seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter,
contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg
of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place
materials of life, like primaeval man with the sun and stars about him.

THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA

(_From the 1st Edition_, 1833)

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 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 favourite 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. If it
be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and
affections of another--making himself many, or reducing many unto
himself--then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his
hero, or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all;
who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And