By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, F.S.A. 195 



realer say at once that he called Calne his native town? He 

 certainly was so understood by several correspondents of the London 

 Magazine. One of them, who signed himself " A Wiltshireman/' 

 wrote joyfully to claim him. Others wrote in a rather saucy tone, 

 protesting against the impropriety of an author pretending to have 

 been born at Calne, when it was notorious, and when Lamb himself, 

 in another part of his writings, had already published that he was born 

 somewhere near Cavendish Square, in London. 1 To these corres- 

 pondents Lamb, in one of the Elia essays, replies — but in a different 

 tone — " To the ' Wiltshireman/ who writes kindly and courteously, 

 I will give a courteous answer.'''' And the way in which he gets 

 out of the difficulty is not only courteous but amusing. It is to 

 this effect, for the passage is too long to be quoted : — " Certainly I 

 have in one part of my works spoken of London as my native place : 

 and in the way in which in another part I have spoken of Calne I 

 confess I have rather encouraged the notion that Calne was my 

 native place. But when a writer of generally truthful and respect- 

 able reputation happens to make two statements, the one of which 

 does not appear to harmonise quite exactly with the other, the in- 

 dulgent reader will not refuse to allow a little license, and will 

 graciously suppose one of the statements to be taken in an allegorical 

 sense : so that when I spoke of Calne as my native town I may be 

 supposed to mean a town where I might have been born, or where 

 it may be desirable that I should have been born, as being in a whole- 

 some air, upon a dry chalky soil in which I delight ; or, a town with 

 the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks of a summer or 

 two so agreeably that it became, in a manner, native to me. As to 

 the other correspondents, who had written in a disagreeable tone, 

 all I have to say to them is that, if ever I haVe occasion to refer to 

 the subject again, I shall be born in whatever place it shall seem 

 good unto me." 



Bowood. 



The last subject connected with Calne to which I have to ask your 

 kind attention is one with which most present will be familiar 



1 He*.;vas born in Prince's Street, Cavendish Square. 

 VOL. XXIV. HO. LXXI. O 



