That 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 apt to over-realize his descriptions, has given us a frightful picture indeed, but no more resembling the man Elia than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L., its author.  It is, indeed, a compound extracted out of his long observations of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him; and this accumulated mass of misery he hath centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure.  We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture,