before a Caledonian.  Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it.  Remember you are upon your oath.  I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****.  After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)—­when he very gravely assured me, that “he had considerable respect for my character and talents” (so he was pleased to say), “but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions.”  The misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him.—­Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth—­which nobody doubts.  They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it.  They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation.  I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son—­when four of them started up at once to inform me, that “that was impossible, because he was dead.”  An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.  Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.[2] The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking.  I wonder if they ever tire one another!—­In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns.  I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it.  But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him.  The latter he imputes to your “imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses;” and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.—­Thomson they seem to have forgotten.  Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis.—­peak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume’s History compared with his Continuation of it.  What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker?

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews.  They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage.  They date beyond the pyramids.  But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation.  I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues.  Old prejudices cling about me.  I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln.  Centuries of injury, contempt, and