individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent
eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste
or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be
disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices--made up
of likings and dislikings--the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies,
antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am
a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot
feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses
sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy
man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or _fellow_. I cannot
_like_ all people alike.[1]

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to
desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me--and in
truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There
is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding.
We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect
intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its
constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the
sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than
comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision
in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their
intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it.
They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She
presents no full front to them--a feature or side-face at the most.
Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost
they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure--and leave
it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down.
The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and
shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly.