1828.] On Personal Identity. 7 



from a low condition in life (it is a perpetual obligation and reproach) ; 

 though, I believe, men often feel the most disinterested regard for women 

 under such circumstances. Sancho Panza discovered no less folly in his 

 eagerness to enter upon his new government, than wisdom in quitting it 

 as fast as possible. Why will Mr. Cobbett persist in getting into Parlia- 

 ment ? He would find himself no longer the same man. What member 

 of Parliament, I should like to know, could write his Register ? As a 

 popular partisan, he may (for aught I can say) be a match for the whole 

 Honourable House ; but, by obtaining a seat in St. Stephen's Chapel, he 

 would only be equal to a 576th part of it. It was surely a puerile ambi- 

 tion in Mr. Addington to succeed Mr. Pitt as prime-minister. The situa- 

 tion was only a foil to his imbecility. Gipsies have a fine faculty of 

 evasion : catch them who can in the same place or story twice ! Take 

 them ; teach them the comforts of civilization ; confine them in warm 

 rooms, with thick carpets and down beds ; and they will fly out of the 

 window like the bird, described by Chaucer, out of its golden cage. I 

 maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding 

 between people of education and without it between those who judge 

 of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the 

 advantage over learning ; for it can make an appeal to you from what 

 you know ; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a per- 

 fect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power. This is what foiled Buona- 

 parte in Spain and Russia. The people can only be gained over by 

 informing them, though they may be enslaved by fraud or force. You say 

 there is a common language in nature. They see nature through their 

 wants, while you look at it for your pleasure. Ask a country lad if he 

 does not like to hear the birds sing in the spring ? And he will laugh in 

 your face. " What is it, then, he does like ?" " Good victuals and 

 drink !" As if you had not these too ; but because he has them not, he 

 thinks of nothing else, and laughs at you and your refinements, supposing 

 you to live upon air. To those who are deprived of every other advan- 

 tage, even nature is a book sealed. I have made this capital mistake all 

 my life, in imagining that those objects which lay open to all, and 

 excited an interest merely from the idea of them, spoke a common lan- 

 guage to all ; and that nature was a kind of universal home, where all 

 ages, sexes, classes met. Not so. The vital air, the sky, the woods, 

 the streams all these go for nothing, except with a favoured few. The 

 poor are taken up with their bodily wants the rich, with external acqui- 

 sitions : the one, with the sense of property the other, of its privation. 

 Both have the same distaste for sentiment. The genteel are the slaves 

 of appearances the vulgar, of necessity ; and neither has the smallest 

 regard to true worth, refinement., generosity. All savages are irreclaim- 

 able. I can understand the Irish character better than the Scotch. I 

 hate the formal crust of circumstances and the mechanism of society. I 

 have been recommended, indeed, to settle down into some respectable 

 profession for life : 



" Ah ! why so soon the blossom tear ?" 



I am " in no haste to be venerable !" 



In thinking of those one might wish to have been, many people will 

 exclaim, " Surely, you would like to have been Shakspeare ?" Would 

 Garrick have consented to the change ? No, nor should he ; for the 



