I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship.  I venerate the Quaker principles.  It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path.  When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom.  But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) “to live with them.”  I am all over sophisticated—­with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy.  I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without.  I should starve at their primitive banquet.  My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited

  To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people.  They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves.  They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head.  They stand in a manner upon their veracity.  A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath.  The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth—­the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse.  As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant.  Something less than truth satisfies.  It is common to hear a person say, “You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath.”  Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth—­oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required.  A Quaker knows none of this distinction.  His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of life.  He looks to them, naturally, with more severity.  You can have of him no more than his word.  He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption.  He knows that his syllables are weighed—­and how far a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this