We would sooner be miserable after our own fashion than happy after theirs. It is not happiness, then, in the abstract, which we seek, that can be addressed as
For which we wish to live or dare to die,’
but a happiness suited to our tastes and faculties—that has become a part of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by a thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would willingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible pretences held out to him. The most humiliating punishment inflicted in ancient fable is the change of sex: not that it was any degradation in itself—but that it must occasion a total derangement of the moral economy and confusion of the sense of personal propriety. The thing is said to have happened au sens contraire, in our time. The story is to be met with in ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord D—— tells it in very plain English! ( 'On Personal Identity' from 'Winterslow/Essays and Characters Written There' )
What does Hazlitt mean by propriety here? It would be fair to describe him as libertine so not I think conventional behaviour rather that which is contrary to a natural disposition in the untransed condition. The au sens contraire possibly refers to the catamite or punk of Lord D’s story. I have an Oxford dictionary from 1971 that defines with crisp high table concision :
Catamite: (n) Sodomite’s minion. (f. L. catamitus f. Gk. Ganamides, cup-bearer of Zeus)
N.B. Not the current definition.
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