Page:Gallant exploits of Lord Dundee.pdf/10

10 they exerted in striking out the original thoughts which nature suggested, not in languidly repeating those which they had learned from other people.

They valued themselves, without undervaluing other nations. They loved to quit their own country to see and to hear, adopted easily the manners of others, and were attentive and insinuating wherever they went: But they loved more to return home, to repeat what they had observed; and, among other things, to relate with astonishment, that they had been in the midst of great societies, where every individual made his sense of independence to consist in keeping at a distance from another. Yet they did not think themselves entitled to hate or despise the manners of strangers, because these differed from their own. For they revered the great qualities of other nations; and only made their failings the subject of an inoffensive merriment among themselves.

When strangers came amongst them, they received them, not with a ceremony which forbids a second visit, not with a coldness which causes repentance of the first, not with an embarrassment which leaves the landlord and his guest in equal, misery, but with the most pleasing of all politeness, the simplicity and cordiality of affection to human-kind; proud to give that hospitality which they had not received, and to humble the persons who had thought of them with contempt, by showing how little they deserved it.

Having been driven from the low countries of Scotland by invasion, they, from time immemorial, thought themselves entitled to make reprisals upon the property of their invaders; but they touched not that of each other: So that, in the same men, there appeared, to those who did not look into the causes of things, a strange mixture of vice and of virtue: