some things that had been told before.  Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, ‘I say,’ ‘Mind,’ and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before:  which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen.  And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that of the servant-maid or the sailor.  Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate—­Colonel Jack, the thief,—­Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot,—­Roxana, harlot and something worse,—­would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modern literary delicacies.  But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe?  We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted.  They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing.”

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Lamb, in a letter to one of his correspondents, says, after speaking of his recent contributions to the “London Magazine,”—­“In the next number I shall figure as a theologian, and have attacked my late brethren, the Unitarians.  What Jack-Pudding tricks I shall play next I know not; I am almost at the end of my tether.”  Talfourd, of course, does not publish the article, or even give its title, which is, “Unitarian Protests.”  Those who would see how well or how ill Elia figures as a theologian should read

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“UNITARIAN PROTESTS:  IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED.

“Dear M——­,—­Though none of your acquaintance can with greater sincerity congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myself, one of the oldest of them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony, depositing in the vestry-room what is called a Protest.  I thought you superior to this little sophistry.  What! after submitting to the service of the Church of England,—­after consenting to receive a boon from her, in the person of your amiable consort,—­was it consistent with sense, or common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with false worship?