134 O/i Disagreeable People. Auc;. 



not give you a moment's rest. Every thing goes wrong with them. They 

 complain of a head-ache or the weather. They take up a book, and lay 

 it down again venture an opinion, and retract it before they have half 

 done offer to serve you, and prevent some one else from doing it. If you 

 dine with them at a tavern, in order to be more at your ease, the fish is too 

 little done the sauce is not the right one ; they ask for a sort of wine 

 which they think is not to be had, or if it is, after some trouble, procured, 

 do not touch it ; they give the waiter fifty contradictory orders, and are 

 restless and sit on thorns the whole of dinner-time. All this is owing to a 

 want of robust health, and of a strong spirit of enjoyment ; it is a fasti- 

 dious habit of mind, produced by a valetudinary habit of body : they are 

 out of sorts with every thing, and of course their ill -humour and captious- 

 ness communicates itself to you, who are as little delighted with them as 

 they are with other things. Another sort of people, equally objectionable 

 with this helpless class, who are disconcerted by a shower of rain or stop- 

 ped by an insect's wing, are those who, in the opposite spirit, will have 

 every thing their own way, and carry all before them who cannot brook 

 the slightest shadow of opposition who are always in the heat of an argu- 

 ment who knit their brows and clench their teeth in some speculative 

 discussion, as if they were engaged in a personal quarrel and who, though 

 successful over almost every competitor, seem still to resent the very offer 

 of resistance to their supposed authority, and are as angry as if they had 

 sustained some premeditated injury. There is an impatience of temper 

 and an intolerance of opinion in this that conciliates neither our affection 

 nor esteem. To such persons nothing appears of any moment but the 

 indulgence of a domineering intellectual superiority to the disregard and 

 discomfiture of their own and every body else's comfort. Mounted on an 

 abstract proposition, they trample on every courtesey and decency of beha- 

 viour; and though, perhaps, they do not intend the gross personalities 

 they are guilty of, yet they cannot be acquitted of a w r ant of due consider- 

 ation for others, and of an intolerable egotism in the support of truth and 

 justice. You may hear one of these Quixotic declaimers pleading the 

 cause of humanity in a voice of thunder, or expatiating on the beauty of 

 a Guido with features distorted with rage and scorn. This is not a very 

 amiable or edifying spectacle. 



There are persons who cannot make friends. Who are they ? Those 

 who cannot be friends. It is not the want of understanding or good-nature, 

 of entertaining or useful qualities, that you complain of : on the contrary, 

 they have probably many points of attraction ; but they have one that 

 neutralizes all these they care nothing about you, and are neither the 

 better nor worse for what you think of them. They manifest no joy at 

 your approach ; and when you leave them, it is with a feeling that they 

 can do just as well without you. This is not sullenness, nor indifference, 

 nor absence of mind ; but they are intent solely on their own thoughts, and 

 you are merely one of the subjects they exercise them upon. They live 

 in society as in a solitude ; and, however their brain \vorks, their pulso 

 beats neither faster nor slower for the common accidents of life. There is, 

 therefore, something cold and repulsive in the air that is about them like 

 that of marble. In a word, they are modern philosophers; and the 

 modern philosopher is what the pedant was of old a being who lives in a 

 world of his own, and has no correspondence with this. It is not that such 

 persons have not done you services you acknowledge it ; it is not that 

 they have said severe things of you you submit to it as a necessary evil : 



