1828.] O/i Personal Identity. 5 



and garlanded like Ariadne's crown ; and is it not better to have had this 

 idea all through life to have caught but glimpses of it, to have known 

 it but in a dream than to have been born a lord ten times over, with 

 twenty pampered menials at one's back, and twenty descents to boast of? 

 It is the envy of certain privileges, the sharp privations we have under- 

 gone, the cutting neglect we have met with from the want of birth or 

 title, that gives its zest to the distinction : the thing itself may be indif- 

 ferent or contemptible enough. It is the becoming a lord that is to be 

 desired ; but he who becomes a lord in reality is an upstart a mere pre- 

 tender, without the sterling essence ; so that all that is of any worth in 

 this supposed transition is purely imaginary and impossible. Had I been 



a lord, I should have married Miss , and my life would not have 



been one long-drawn sigh, made up of sweet and bitter regret !* Had 

 I been a lord, I would have been a Popish lord, and then I might also 

 have been an honest man : poor, and then I might have been proud and not 

 vulgar ! Kings are so accustomed to look down on all the rest of the 

 world, that they consider the condition of mortality as vile and intolerable, 

 if stripped of royal state, and cry out in the bitterness of their despair, 

 " Give me a crown, or a tomb !" It should seem from this as if all man- 

 kind would change with the first crowned head that could propose the 

 alternative, or that it would be only the presumption of the supposition, 

 or a sense of their own unworthiness, that would deter them. Perhaps 

 there is not a single throne that, if it was to be filled by this sort of 

 voluntary metempsychosis, would not remain empty. Many would, no 

 doubt, be glad to " monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks" in their 

 own persons and after their own fashion : but who would be the double 



of , or of those shadows of a shade those " tenth transmitters of a 



foolish face" Charles X. and Ferdinand VII. ? If monarchs have little 

 sympathy with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They 

 are merely to us a sort of state-puppets or royal wax- work, which we 

 may gaze at with superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become ; 

 and he who should meditate such a change must not only feel by anti- 

 cipation an utter contempt for the slough of humanity which he is pre- 

 pared to cast, but must feel an absolute void and want of attraction in 

 those lofty and incomprehensible sentiments which are to supply its 

 place. With respect to actual royalty, the spell is in a great measure 

 broken. But, among ancient monarchs, there is no one, I think, who 

 envies Darius or Xerxes. One has a different feeling with respect to 

 Alexander or Pyrrhus ; but this is because they w r ere great men as well 

 as great kings, and the soul is up in arms at the mention of their names 

 as at the sound of a trumpet. But as to all the rest those " in the 

 catalogue who go for kings" the praying, eating, drinking, dressing 

 monarchs of the earth, in time past or present one would as soon think 

 of wishing to personate the Golden Calf, or to turn out with Nebuchad- 

 nezzar to graze, as to be transformed into one of that " swinish multi- 

 tude." There is no point of affinity. The extrinsic circumstances are 

 imposing : but, within, there is nothing but morbid humours and proud 

 flesh ! Some persons might vote for Charlemagne ; and there are others 



* When Lord Byron was cut by the great, on account of his quarrel with his wife, he 

 stood leaning on a marble slab at the entrance of a room, while troops of duchesses and 

 countesses passed out. One little, pert, red-haired girl staid a few paces behind the rest ; 

 and, as she passed him, said with a nod, " Aye, you should have married me, and then 

 all this wouldn't have happened to you !" 



