. 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 circumspection and confine.' The
incognito of an inn is one of its striking privileges--'lord of one's
self, uncumbered 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 sweetbreads, 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 common-places 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, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in a boat between me and the twilight--at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in
this way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read _Paul and
Virginia,