_D._ E., here is B. trying to persuade me I am not myself. _E._ Sometimes you are not. _D._ But he says that I never am.—Or is it only that I am not to be so? _B._ Nay, I hope ‘thou art to continue, thou naughty varlet’— ‘Here and hereafter, if the last may be!’ You have been yourself (nobody like you) for the last forty years of your life: you would not prematurely stuff the next twenty into the account, till you have had them fairly out? _D._ Not for the world, I have too great an affection for them. _B._ Yet I think you would have less if you did not look forward to pass them among old books, old friends, old haunts. If you were cut off from all these, you would be less anxious about what was left of yourself. _D._ I would rather be the _Wandering Jew_ than not be at all. _B._ Or you would not be the person I always took you for. _D._ Does not this willingness to be the Wandering Jew rather than nobody, seem to indicate that there is an abstract attachment to self, to the bare idea of existence, independently of circumstances or habit? _B._ It must be a very loose and straggling one. You mix up some of your old recollections and favourite notions with your self elect, and indulge them in your new character, or you would trouble yourself very little about it. If you do not come in in some shape or other, it is merely saying that you would be sorry if the Wandering Jew were to disappear from the earth, however strictly he may have hitherto maintained his _incognito_. _D._ There is something in that; and as well as I remember there is a curious but exceedingly mystical illustration of this point in an original Essay of yours which I have read and spoken to you about. _B._ I believe there is; but A—— is tired of making objections, and I of answering them to no purpose. _D._ I have the book in the closet, and if you like, we will turn to the place. It is after that burst of enthusiastic recollection (the only one in the book) that Southey said at the time was something between the manner of Milton’s prose-works and Jeremy Taylor. _B._ Ah! I as little thought then that I should ever be set down as a florid prose-writer as that he would become poet-laureat! _J. D._ here took the volume from his brother, and read the following passage from it.