1828.] On Personal Identity. 3 



This is gorgeous description and fine declamation : yet who would be 

 found to act upon it, even in the forming of a wish ; or would not rather 

 be the thrall of wretchedness, than launch out (by the aid of some magic 

 spell) into all the delights of such a butterfly state of existence ? The 

 French (if any people can) may be said to enjoy this airy, heedless 

 gaiety and unalloyed exuberance of satisfaction : yet what Englishman 

 would deliberately change with them ? We would sooner be miserable 

 after our own fashion than happy after their's. It is not happiness, then, 

 in the abstract, which we seek, that can be addressed as 



" That something still that prompts th' eternal sigh, 

 For which we wish to live or dare to die," 



but a happiness suited to our tastes and faculties that has become a part 

 of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment that is endeared to us by a thou- 

 sand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would wil- 

 lingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible pretences 

 held out to him. The most humiliating punishment inflicted in ancient 

 fable is the change of sex : not that it was any degradation in itself but 

 that it must occasion a total derangement of the moral economy and 

 confusion of the sense of personal propriety. The thing is said to have 

 happened, au sens contraire, in our time. The story is to be met with in 



<f very choice Italian ;" and Lord D tells it in very plain English ! 



We may often find ourselves envying the possessions of others, and 

 sometimes inadvertently indulging a wish to change places with them 

 altogether ; but our self-love soon discovers some excuse to be off the 

 bargain we were ready to strike, and retracts (f vows made in haste, as 

 violent and void." We might make up our minds to the alteration in 

 every other particular ; but, when it comes to the point, there is sure to 

 be some trait or feature of character in the object of our admiration to 

 which we cannot reconcile ourselves some favourite quality or darling 

 foible of our own, with which we can by no means resolve to part. The 

 more enviable the situation of another, the more entirely to our taste, the 

 more reluctant we are to leave any part of ourselves behind that would 

 be so fully capable of appreciating all the exquisiteness of its new situation, 

 or not to enter into the possession of such an imaginary reversion of good 

 fortune with all our previous inclinations and sentiments. The outward 

 circumstances were fine : they only wanted a soul to enjoy them, and 

 that soul is our's (as the costly ring wants the peerless jewel to perfect 

 and set it off). The humble prayer and petition to sneak into visionary 

 felicity by personal adoption, or the surrender of our own personal pre- 

 tensions, always ends in a daring project of usurpation, and a determina- 

 tion to expel the actual proprietor, and supply his place so much more 

 worthily with our own identity not bating a single jot of it. Thus, in 

 passing through a fine collection of pictures, who has not envied the pri- 

 vilege of visiting it every day, and wished to be the owner ? But the 

 rising sigh is soon checked, and " the native hue of emulation is sicklied 

 o'er with the pale cast of thought," when we come to ask ourselves not 

 merely whether the owner has any taste at all for these splendid works, 

 and does not look upon them as so much expensive furniture, like his 

 chairs and tables but whether he has the same precise (and only true) taste 

 that we have whether he has the very same favourites that we have 

 whether he may not be so blind as to prefer a Vandyke to a Titian, a 

 Ruysdael to a Claude ; nay, whether he may not have other pursuits 



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