Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon.  Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume[3]), I must confess, that the term ‘native town,’ applied to Calne, prima facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly Correspondent is willing to put upon it.  The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it.  But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended.  So by the word ‘native,’ I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born; or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town, with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to me.  Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent.  Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet ’Twice born.’[4] But not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was delivered,—­for by either birth he may probably be challenged for a Theban—­in a strict way of speaking, he was a filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius alvi, for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture.  Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous ’Wiltshire man.’—­To ‘Indagator,’ ‘Investigator,’ ‘Incertus,’ and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth—­as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish—­to all such churchwarden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him.

    “Modo me Thebis—­modo Athenis.

    “ELIA.”

[Footnote 1:  “Clearly a fictitious appellation; for if we admit the latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is Leigh?  Christian nomenclature knows no such.”]

[Footnote 2:  “It is clearly of transatlantic origin.”]

[Footnote 3:  See page 15 of this volume.]