Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare—­and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker’s in Covent Garden?  Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late—­and when the old bookseller, with some grumbling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures—­and when you lugged it home wishing it were twice as cumbersome—­and when you presented it to me; and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it)—­and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak—­was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit—­your old corbeau—­for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen—­or sixteen shillings, was it?—­a great affair we thought it then—­which you had lavished on the old folio.  Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.

When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the “Lady Blanch”; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money,—­and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture—­was there no pleasure in being a poor man?  Now, you have nothing to do but walk into Colnaghi’s, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos.  Yet do you?

“Confessions of a Drunkard” and “Popular Fallacies” complete the tale of the “Essays of Elia” that were collected into volume form as such.  The first-named essay had been issued originally in 1813.  It is an attempt to set forth from a drunkard’s point of view the evils of drunkenness, and was first published in a periodical with a purpose over twenty years before its inclusion in the second edition of the “Last Essays of Elia.”  To accentuate the fact that it was purely a literary performance—­an attempt to project himself into the mind of a drunkard willing to allow others to profit by his example—­Lamb reprinted it in the “London Magazine” as one of his ordinary contributions.  There have not been wanting matter-of-fact people (with whom our Elia has recorded his imperfect sympathy) who have accepted this essay as pure biography; because details tally with the author’s life they think the whole must do so.  We have but to follow the story of Lamb’s life with understanding to realize how wrong is this impression.  The closing dozen of essays in brief, grouped under the title of “Popular Fallacies,” discuss certain familiar axioms and show them—­in the light of fun and fancy—­to be wholly fallacious.