untry. We are lost to ourselves, as well as
our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings,

"Out of my country and myself I go."

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent
themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recal them: but
we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us
birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of
my life in travelling abroad, if I could any where borrow another life
to spend afterwards at home!

_Hazlitt._

ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF[28]

"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po."

[Footnote 28: Written at Winterslow Hut, January 18th-19th, 1821.]

I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for
writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my
supper, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the
season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day
(the only thing that makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good
before me, and therefore I will attempt it. It is as well to do it at
once as to have it to do for a week to come.

If the writing on this subject is no easy task, the thing itself is a
harder one. It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of
others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own
thoughts. As I look from the window at the wide bare heath before me,
and through the misty moon-light air see the woods that wave over the
top of Winterslow,

"While Heav'n's chancel-vault is blind with sleet,"

my mind takes its flight through too long a series of years, supported
only by the patience of thought and secret yearnings after truth and
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the feeling I intend to
write about; but I do not know that this will enable me to convey it
more agreeably to the reader.

Lady G. in a letter to Miss Harriet Byron, assures her that "her
brother Sir Charles lived to himself:" and Lady L. soon after (for
Richardson was never tired of a good thing) repeats the same
observation; to which Miss Byron frequently returns in her answers to
both sisters--"For you know Sir Charles lives to himself," till at
length it passes into a proverb among the fair correspondents. This is
not, however, an example of what I understand by _living to
one's-self_, for Sir Charles Grandison was indeed always thinking of
himself; but by this