The Patriot and the Apostate's Daugther. Thy father too, though now secure, Will nobly do, or nobly die. Tell him that we this oath have sworn- And Hellas' sons will yet be free- Apostate from his Country's creed- And kiss the hand that bids him bleed. With terms so rude that filial ear- Hail'd her revolt with joy elate- And spurn'd the mean advice he gave, And thought to bind me thus a slave. O'er the wild visions of the past By sighs and he to mix in slaughter: A bullet fix'd the patriot's doom— And grief cut down the Apostate's daughter. 195 FAREWELL TO AIRDRIE. ALONE beneath the cloud of night, Though doom'd her fond suit to deny, Though mantled o'er with winter's snow, "Forget me not"* when Helen sings, PERSONAL IDENTITY. "Imperial Cæsar, dead and turn'd to clay, HAMLET. Ir was a great stretch of imagination that led Shakspeare to this point of philosophy. For though the physical verity is set down "with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it," yet is the morality profound for the period at which our divine bard" wrote. To follow the clay of "the world's great master" till it mends a cranny in some wretched hut inhabited by one of the canaille,-to "trace the noble dust of Alexander till it is found stopping a bunghole," was a most rare and unlooked-for reach of precocious democracy in the "queene's servante," amounting almost to a prophecy of those notions which give such uneasiness to the Allied Sovereigns, and which have stamped the age we live in with an indelible stain of disloyalty. Accordingly we of the latter time are prone to read the passage with much complacency, and to derive no small pleasure from the notion, that, let the mighty ones hector and storm as they will," to this complexion they must come at last." That the dead should be reduced "to such vile uses," is a truth which, in reference to ourselves, is not painful: for, though some of us are very shy of a dissecting-room, join loudly in the outcry against resurrection-men, and would willingly hang a surgeon for his endeavours to discover and cure our inward diseases, yet very few trouble our heads to look farther into affairs, and inquire after the fate of the constituent parts of our bodies, when nature has played the anatomist with us, and, in spite of all our care, has resolved into its elements that charming combination of earths and gases, our noble selves." * A short ballad written by H. P., on presenting to a young lady, the little blue flower called Myosoles, Mouse-ear, Scorpion grass, or "Forget me not." But the case will not, perhaps, be precisely the same, when the reader comes to know that this dissolution, of which we think so little hereafter, is actually going on daily and hourly," here on this bank and shoal of time,”—and in our living bodies; and that there is no one capable of perusing these pages, who has not already been decomposed and re-formed so often, and changed over and over again so completely, that there is not a single particle of the original body he received from his mother remaining, by which he could in a court of justice prove his filiation, or lay claim to a property in his own person. Such, however, is the truth; and a truth so firmly demonstrated upon the surest basis of physiology, that the only doubt among the learned rests upon the exact time it takes for the soul to get rid of its old clothes, and manufacture for itself an entirely new suit. On this abstruse point the opinion to which I am the most inclined is that which fixes on forty days for an entire revolution of our corporeal structure; and to this belief I am the rather led, inasmuch as it coincides precisely with the duration of Lent. For as the Catholic church, in determining upon this period of annual fasting and mortification, had an eye to the total eradication of the lusts of the flesh, it is to be presumed that she limited the consumption of cod and haddock to the exact time necessary for such a metamorphosis. Insomuch, that I do not hesitate to declare my conviction, that if the rule were observed in all its pristine stricthess,—if we abstained rigidly from beef and mutton on every day of the week throughout Lent, we should by Easter Sunday arrive at such a pitch of picatory perfection, as not to have a single grain of peccant quadrupedal matter upon our bones ;-no, nor in our bones either. "We are," says a French writer, "really and physically like a river, the waters of which pass in a continued stream. The river is the same in its bed, in its banks, its source and its mouth, in every particular which is not the river itself; but in that which constitutes its essencethe water-it is undergoing an incessant change, so as to be absolutely exempt from all identity." Richerand prefers comparing the human body, in this particular to the ship of the Argonauts; but a more familiar, and therefore more intelligible image of the truth, is to be found in the farfamed stockings of Sir John Collyer, which, having once been woollen, were at length mended till they became converted thread by thread into entire silk. The only point in which the comparison fails is, that we, on the contrary, begin life as silk stockings, and are gradually mended down to the coarsest yarn hose: a melancholy truth; and I for one most heartily wish it were otherwise. This discovery, like all other innovations, will be found to affect humanity in a vast variety of ways. Some interests it will cross most provokingly; and the parties thus affected will, no doubt, be the first to deny the position, and to cry blasphemy against any person sufficiently imbued with the principles of the French school to uphold it. With other interests it will perhaps coincide; and these parties will as assuredly find that it is "part and parcel of the law of the land :" and both parties will be equally right; for, What's the worth of any thing But so much money as 'twill bring? To those rovers in love who are perpetually railing against the "toujours perdrix," and who complain with Sir John Brute that man and wife are one flesh, it must be a great consolation to know that, without the risk either of Doctors' Commons or of standing in a white sheet, they may have a new wife nearly once a month; and that, although the minister with his cabalistical forms may (in the language of the British Critic) transmute" two human beings into one matrimonial animal,” yet it is quite beyond his power to bind a man for any duration to the same woman. So far, indeed, from the wicked knight's having cause to dread the kissing himself in his lady, he cannot at the end of forty days be sure of himself in his own proper person. To those, on the contrary, who have a high esteem for themselves, and look down upon the rest of mankind as on an inferior caste, it must be the very devil and all to learn, that in forty days they must part with the bright object of their incessant adoration; and not only that some of their own divine particles" may pass into a cauliflower or a cabbage-or, what is worse still, into the bodies of those they so heartily despise-but that they themselves may, in all probability, be polluted and contaminated by receiving in exchange some of the cast-off elements of others, and so fraternize in a worse than Mezentian embrace with the objects of their high disdain. To the prisoner and bondsman it must be a delightful revelation to be told that his habeas corpus is so near at hand; that no hard-hearted creditor, no obdurate gaoler, can retain a single particle about him in custody for more than forty days; and that while they attack the form and shadow only of the outward man, the substance, ere two revolutions of the moon, must fade from their grasp, to wander in all the frolic of unlimited freedom through every element of nature. Should the knowledge of this truth be widely disseminated through society, it can scarcely be doubted that it will form an available plea of error persona. Who, indeed, will be able in surety of conscience to swear to "the prisoner at the bar," if forty days shall have elapsed between the commission of the crime and the day of trial? O vanity of human justice! the thief who stole the jewels escapes, and a wretch, neither in mind nor body the same individual, swings in his stead: while the fine gentleman that figures at court with stars, garters, and medals, has nothing in common with " the Great Captain" who won the battle and conquered the peace! To the advocates for Negro Slavery this physical fact is invaluable, as an unassailable rock upon which they may build an irrefragable argument in favour of their right to the persons of their victims. Allowing all that nature, Christianity, and common sense have advanced in favour of the slave's original right to his own body, must it not be at once conceded, that, after forty days' bondage, that right will completely evaporate; the body having become so much animalized meat and drink, the undisputed goods and chattels of the master, worked up merely into a more valuable form, and as much at the service of the proprietor as a steam-engine constructed at his own proper charges and with his own iron and timber? This continued flux of our corporeal being, this metensomatosis, (as Plato would have called it, had Plato known any thing of the matter,) which is perpetually going on with such incessant activity, is accompanied by a similar change in our passions, feelings, reflections, voli tions, and all the other habits of our intellectual being and I pray you, reader, if you be an inquisitor, or a taker of the altitude of other men's consciences in any shape whatever, to observe, that I do not say that these facts stand to each other in any degree in the relation of cause and effect. I have no wish to bring down on my head a disputer, armed with a volume of polemics to attack me, because he may fancy my orthodoxy an inch or two below the standard measure. Leaving, therefore, this ticklish question to be settled by the anatomists and the divines who are equally competent to decide, the one knowing as much about the matter as the other, I content myself with noting the fact, that the two sets of phenomena run together pari passu, like two well-trained horses in a curricle; and that, as fast as we are flinging overboard our old selves, and taking in fresh cargoes of fleshly personality, we are likewise discharging an infinity of whims, caprices, tastes and distastes, opinions, prejudices, facts, and fables, and stowing away others in their place to the full as absurd, mischievous, or useless as the earliest freights of our youth and inexperience. Many of us, I am sure, there are who wonder what in the name of Heaven is gone with the Greek and Latin which cost our fathers so much money, and ourselves (I mean our former selves) so many stripes in our quondam behinds. Can it be that some ill-advised absorbent has asported it in a lump of medullary matter, or an artery overlaid it with a quantity of unflogged and unharassed cerebral substance? This, however, as I have already said, I leave to others deeper in transcendentals than myself, the Kants and the Cants of the land. For me it is truth enough to know that gone it is, strophes and systems, Asclepiads and Glyconics, prosody and grammar, and all; leaving scarcely enough behind to puzzle the country gentlemen readers of the Magazine from time to time with an odd quotation, abstracted from my common-place book. Yes! gone it is, into that valley Ove mirabilmente era ridutto Ciò che si perde, o per nostro difetto Ariosto, Canto 34, Stanza 73. And with it are gone "Love's young dream," the abstract pleasure of existence, the sweets of novel-reading, the charm of reverie, the delights of the Nouvelle Heloise, the bright image of Susan Truefaith, (and divers other images; to wit, three thousand four hundred and fifty-four, as a special pleader would lay the count ;) and, worse than all, a hearty appetite and a sound sleep. In the place of these valuable commodities, what have I acquired? Much caution and more ennui, much respect for money and more discontent, an increasing sympathy with the caustic severity of Byron and Voltaire, and more toleration for the dry arguments of less profane writers, a growing partiality for the pleasures of the table, and a closer intimacy with doctors and apothecaries. Alas! alas! what changes are here! The "purple light of love” replaced by a pair of spectacles, and the fire of youth by fleecy hosiery and the glow of a gouty foot; the heart-aches of passion superseded by the heart-burns of indigestion, and the thrills of desire by the twinges of the liver! When I try to forget for a moment these growing ills, by mixing in society, and take my part in the old glee of "Oh no, |