HARLEY (with great gravity).--"Do you believe in Mesmerism?"

AUDLEY.--"Certainly not."

HARLEY.--"If it were in the power of an animal magnetizer to get me out
of my own skin into somebody's else! That's my fancy! I am so tired of
myself,--so tired! I have run through all my ideas,--know every one of
them by heart. When some pretentious impostor of an idea perks itself up
and says, 'Look at me,--I 'm a new acquaintance,' I just give it a nod,
and say 'Not at all, you have only got a new coat on; you are the same
old wretch that has bored me these last twenty years; get away.' But if
one could be in a new skin, if I could be for half-an-hour your tall
porter, or one of your eminent matter-of-fact men, I should then really
travel into a new world.' Every man's brain must be a world in itself,
eh? If I could but make a parochial settlement even in yours, Audley,--
run over all your thoughts and sensations. Upon my life, I 'll go and
talk to that French mesmerizer about it."

[If, at the date in which Lord L'Estrange held this conversation
with Mr. Egerton, Alfred de Musset had written his comedies, we
should suspect that his lordship had plagiarized from one of them
the whimsical idea that he here vents upon Audley. In repeating it,
the author at least cannot escape from the charge of obligation to a
writer whose humour is sufficiently opulent to justify the loan.]

AUDLEY (who does not seem to like the notion of having his thoughts and
sensations rummaged, even by his friend, and even in fancy)--"Pooh, pooh,
pooh! Do talk like a man of sense."