‘What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty, And to be lord of all the works of nature? To reign in the air from earth to highest sky; To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature; To taste whatever thing doth please the eye?— Who rests not pleased with such happiness, Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’ 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 taste and faculties—that has become a part of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by a thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would willingly 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 ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord D—— tells it in very plain English!