mind may be communicated; but the actual effect of individual exertion
never can be transferred, with truth, to any other than its own original
cause. One person's child may be made the child of another person by
adoption, as among the Romans, or by the ancient Jewish mode of a wife
having children born to her upon her knees, by her handmaid. But these
were children in a different sense from that of nature. It was clearly
understood that they were not of the blood of their nominal parents. So
in literary children, an authour may give the profits and fame of his
composition to another man, but cannot make that other the real authour.
A Highland gentleman, a younger branch of a family, once consulted me if
he could not validly purchase the Chieftainship of his family, from the
Chief who was willing to sell it. I told him it was impossible for him
to acquire, by purchase, a right to be a different person from what he
really was; for that the right of Chieftainship attached to the blood of
primogeniture, and, therefore, was incapable of being transferred. I
added, that though Esau sold his birth-right, or the advantages
belonging to it, he still remained the first-born of his parents; and
that whatever agreement a Chief might make with any of the clan, the
Herald's Office could not admit of the metamorphosis, or with any
decency attest that the younger was the elder; but I did not convince
the worthy gentleman.

Johnson's papers in _The Adventurer_ are very similar to those of _The
Rambler_; but being rather more varied in their subjects, and being
mixed with essays by other writers, upon topicks more generally
attractive than even the most elegant ethical discourses, the sale of
the work, at first, was more extensive. Without meaning, however, to
depreciate _The Adventurer_, I must observe that as the value of _The
Rambler_ came, in the progress of time, to be better known, it grew upon
the publick estimation, and that its sale has far exceeded that of any