the orthography to be—­as I have given it—­fortifying his authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy.  Some do spell it yet perversely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape, and that of the aspirate so denominated.  I had almost forgotten Mingay with the iron hand—­but he was somewhat later.  He had lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness.  I detected the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not.  I remember the astonishment it raised in me.  He was a blustering, loud-talking person; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power—­somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo’s Moses.  Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple.

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled?  Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they no more for me?  Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you?  Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me—­to my childish eyes—­the mythology of the Temple?  In those days I saw Gods, as “old men covered with a mantle,” walking upon the earth.  Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish,—­extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling,—­in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition—­the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital—­from every-day forms educing the unknown and the uncommon.  In that little Goshen there will be light, when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality.  While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.

* * * * *

P.S.  I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt.  See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood!  Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor!  This gentleman, R.N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady in child-bed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly recovered.  In what a new light does this place his rejection (O call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P——­, unravelling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character!—­Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records!  They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes, not verities—­or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history.  He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done better