“I am, dear Sir,

“With much respect, yours, etc.,

“ELIA.”

* * * * *

Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off,—­and he put off a good many,—­indeed, he valued himself on being “a matter-of-lie man,” believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon everybody,—­of all the lies he ever put off, he valued his “Memoir of Liston” the most.  “It is,” he confessed to Miss Hutchinson, “from top to toe, every paragraph, pure invention, and has passed for gospel,—­has been republished in the newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic account.”  And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its facts all fictions, is not Lamb’s “Memoir of Liston” a truer and more trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible biographers—­unfortunately not yet extinct—­so admirably ridiculed in the thirty-fifth number of the “Freeholder”?  In fact, is not this “lying Life of Liston” a very clever satire on those biographers who, like the monkish historians mentioned by Fuller, in his “Church History of Britain,” swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of sufficient solid food to fill them,—­who, according to Addison, ascribe to the unfortunate persons whose lives they pretend to write works which they never wrote and actions which they never performed, celebrate virtues which they were never famous for and excuse faults which they were never guilty of?  And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen’s libraries?

Therefore, as a piece of most admirable fooling, as a bit of harmless, good-natured pleasantry, as a specimen of pleasant satire, of subtile irony, this “Memoir of Listen” is well worthy of a place in all editions of Charles Lamb’s writings.

* * * * *

“BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON.

“The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan de L’Estonne, (see ‘Domesday Book,’ where he is so written,) who came in with the Conqueror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent.  His particular merits or services Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify.  Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo de Agmondesham, a powerful Norman baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the fatal Battle of Hastings.  Be this as it may, we find a family of that name flourishing some centuries later in that county.  John Delliston, Knight, was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, quinto Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing downwards,—­the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from Delleston to Leston or Liston, between which it seems to have alternated, till, in the latter end of the reign of James I., it finally