As many pictures as have been given of my father, how like him soever
in different airs and attitudes,—not one, or all of them, can ever help
the reader to any kind of preconception of how my father would think,
speak, or act, upon any untried occasion or occurrence of life.—There
was that infinitude of oddities in him, and of chances along with it,
by which handle he would take a thing,—it baffled, Sir, all
calculations.——The truth was, his road lay so very far on one side,
from that wherein most men travelled,—that every object before him
presented a face and section of itself to his eye, altogether different
from the plan and elevation of it seen by the rest of mankind.—In other
words, ’twas a different object, and in course was differently
considered:
This is the true reason, that my dear _Jenny_ and I, as well as all the
world besides us, have such eternal squabbles about nothing.—She looks
at her outside,—I, at her in—. How is it possible we should agree about
her value?