ranger takes his
hue and character from the time and place; he is a part of the
furniture and costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or from the West
Riding of Yorkshire, so much the better. I do not even try to
sympathise with him, and he breaks no squares. I associate nothing
with my travelling companion but present objects and passing events.
In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself.
But a friend reminds one of other things, rips up old grievances, and
destroys the abstraction of the scene. He comes in ungraciously
between us and our imaginary character. Something is dropped in the
course of conversation that gives a hint of your profession and
pursuits; or from having some one with you that knows the less sublime
portions of your history, it seems that other people do. You are no
longer a citizen of the world: but your "unhoused free condition is
put into circumscription and confine." The _incognito_ of an inn is
one of its striking privileges--"lord of one's-self, uncumber'd with a
name." Oh! it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of
public opinion--to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting
personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature
of the moment, clear of all ties--to hold to the universe only by a
dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the
evening--and no longer seeking for applause and meeting with contempt,
to be known by no other title than _the Gentleman in the parlour_! One
may take one's choice of all characters in this romantic state of
uncertainty as to one's real pretensions, and become indefinitely
respectable and negatively right-worshipful. We baffle prejudice and
disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be
objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more
those hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world: an inn
restores us to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I
have certainly spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I
have been left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some
metaphysical problem, as once at Witham-common, where I found out the
proof that likeness is not a case of the association of ideas--at
other times, when there have been pictures in the room, as at St.
Neot's, (I think it was) where I first met with Gribelin's engravings
of the Cartoons, into which I entered at once, and at a little inn on
the borders of Wales, w