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here we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero[2] was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England, in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steel yard, in succeeding reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies) showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the commonwealth, nothing? "Why then the world, and all that's in't is nothing-- The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia is nothing.-- "I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so." Leigh Hunt, in _The Indicator_, January 31 and February 7, 1821, had reprinted from _The Examiner_ a review of Lamb's _Works_, with a few prefatory remarks in which it was stated: "We believe we are taking no greater liberty with him [Charles Lamb] than our motives will warrant, when we add that he sometimes writes in the _London Magazine_ under the signature of Elia." In _The Indicator_ of March 7, 1821, Leigh Hunt replied to Elia. Leigh Hunt was no match for Lamb in this kind of raillery, and the first portion of the reply is rather cumbersome. At the end, however, he says: "There _was_, by the bye, a family of the name of Elia who came from Italy,--Jews; which may account for this boast about Genoa. See also in his last article in the London Magazine [the essay on "Ears"] some remarkable fancies of conscience in reference to the Papal religion. They further corroborate what we have heard; _viz._ that the family were obliged to fly from Genoa for saying that the Pope was the author of Rabelais; and that Elia is not an anagram, as some have thought it, but the Judaico-Christian name of the writer before us, whose surname, we find, is not Lamb, but Lomb;--Elia Lomb! What a name! He told a friend of ours so in company, and would have palmed himself upon him for a Scotchman, but that his countenance betrayed him." It is amusing to note that Maginn, writing the text to accompany the Maclise portrait of Lamb in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1835, gravely states that Lamb's name was really Lomb, and that he was of Jewish extraction. The subject of Lamb's birth reopened a little while later. In the "Lion's Head," which was the title of the pages given to correspondence in the _London Magazine_, in the number for November, 1821, was the following short article
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