With “My First Play” Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in which he is so often at his happiest.  He represents the emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens.  “At school all play-going was inhibited.”  He concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that “we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six.”

“Dream Children,” again, has much in it of the story of the writer’s childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother’s recent death and interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been.  Elia pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood’s days when visiting grandmother Field: 

When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech:  “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all.  The children of Alice call Bartrum father.  We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams.  We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name”—­and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side—­but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every reading though known almost by heart.

The essay on “Distant Correspondents,” in the form of a playful epistle to a friend, B. F. (i.e., Barron Field, also a contributor to the “London Magazine”) has much that is characteristic of the writer.  In it he plays—­as he does in other letters to distant friends—­on the way in which “this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents” renders writing difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some indication—­we have several such indications in his letters—­of his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends, or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as actualities.