1828.] On Personal Identity. 9 



no more of a cat than her skin ; nor of an author than his brains. By 

 becoming Shakspeare in reality, we cut ourselves out of reading Milton, 

 Pope, Dryden, and a thousand more all of whom we have in our pos- 

 session, enjoy, and are, by turns, in the best part of them, their thoughts, 

 without any metamorphosis or miracle at all. What a microcosm is our's ! 

 What a Proteus is the human mind ! All that we know, think of, or can 

 admire, in a manner becomes ourselves. We are not (the meanest of us) 

 a volume, but a whole library ! In this calculation of problematical con- 

 tingencies, the lapse of time makes no difference. One would as soon 

 have been Raphael as any modern artist. Twenty, thirty, or forty years 

 of elegant enjoyment and lofty feeling were as great a luxury in the 

 fifteenth as in the nineteenth century. But Raphael did not live to see 

 Claude, nor Titian Rembrandt. Those who found arts and sciences are 

 not witnesses of their accumulated results and benefits; nor in general do 

 they reap the meed of praise which is their due. We who come after in 

 some " laggard age," have more enjoyment of their fame than they had. 

 Who would have missed the sight of the Louvre in all its glory to have 

 been one of those whose works enriched it ? Would it not have been 

 giving a certain good for an uncertain advantage ? No : I am as sure 

 (if it is not presumption to say so) of what passed through Raphael's 

 mind as of what passes through my own ; and I know the difference 

 between seeing (though even that is a rare privilege) and producing such 

 perfection. At one time I was so devoted to Rembrandt, that I think, 

 if the Prince of Darkness had made me the offer in some rash mood, I 

 should have been tempted to close with it, and should have become (in 

 happy hour, and in downright earnest) the great master of light and 

 shade ! 



I have run myself out of my materials for this Essay, and want a well- 

 turned sentence or two to conclude with ; like Benvenuto Cellini, who 

 complains that, with all the brass, tin, iron, and lead he could muster in 

 the house, his statue of Perseus was left imperfect, with a dent in the 

 heel of it. Once more then I believe there is one character that all the 

 world would be glad to change with which is that of a favoured rival. 

 Even hatred gives way to envy. We would be any thing a toad in a 

 dungeon to live upon her smile, which is our all of earthly hope and 

 happiness ; nor can we, in our infatuation, conceive that there is any 

 difference of feeling on the subject, or that the pressure of her hand is 

 not in itself divine, making those to whom such bliss is deigned like the 

 Immortal Gods ! 



M.M. New Series VoL.V. No. 25. C 



