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 rodomontade 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.  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, 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 favors 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 honored 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.’