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 from Lamb’s pen:—­

“ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.—­A Correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,—­for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners—­admonishes me of the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories.  In my ‘Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,’ I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born.  Bell clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox.  It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my ’Chapter on Ears,’) I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy.  But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly—­that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it?  Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself.  No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English.—­To a second Correspondent, who signs himself ‘a Wiltshire man,’ and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my ‘Christ’s Hospital,’ a more mannerly reply is due.