essay has been strangely and purposely misunderstood. Elia, albeit
he loved the cheerful glass, was not a drunkard. The "poor nameless
egotist" of the Confessions is not Charles Lamb. In printing the article
in the "London Magazine," (it was originally contributed to a collection
of tracts published by Basil Montagu,) Elia introduced it to the readers
of that periodical in the following explanatory paragraphs. They should
be printed in all editions of Elia as a note to the article they explain
and comment on. For many persons, like a writer in the London "Quarterly
Review" for July, 1822, believe, or profess to believe, that this
"fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance" is a true tale.
"How far it was from actual truth," says Talfourd, "the essays of Elia,
the production of a later day, in which the maturity of his feeling,
humor, and reason is exhibited, may sufficiently show."

ELIA ON HIS "CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD."

"Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his lucubrations,
set forth for the most part (such his modesty!) without a name,
scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From
the dust of some of these it is our intention occasionally to revive a
tract or two that shall seem worthy of a better fate, especially at a
time like the present, when the pen of our industrious contributor,
engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Continental tour, may haply
want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous speculations. We
have been induced, in the first instance, to reprint a thing which
he put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled 'The
Confessions of a Drunkard,' seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly
Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with fruitful
quotations therefrom; adding, from their peculiar brains, the gratuitous
affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer (in his
delineations of a drunkard, forsooth!) partly sat for his own picture.
The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the essays of a
contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in
which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate
appetite; and it struck him that a better paper--of deeper interest, and
wider usefulness--might be made out of the imagined experiences of a
Great Drinker. Accordingly he set to work, and, with that mock fervor
and counterfeit earnestness with which he is too ap