they pretend to.  They beat up a little game peradventure—­and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down.  The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting:  waxing, and again waning.  Their conversation is accordingly.  They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth.  They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath—­but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement.  They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e’en bring it to market in the green ear.  They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full developement.  They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it.  Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely.  The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan.  His Minerva is born in panoply.  You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth—­if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work.  You never catch his mind in an undress.  He never hints or suggests any thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness.  He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it.  His riches are always about him.  He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not.  You cannot cry halves to any thing that he finds.  He does not find, but bring.  You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.  His understanding is always at its meridian—­you never see the first dawn, the early streaks.—­He has no falterings of self-suspicion.  Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary.  The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him.  Is he orthodox—­he has no doubts.  Is he an infidel—­he has none either.  Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him.  You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument.  He always keeps the path.  You cannot make excursions with him—­for he sets you right.  His taste never fluctuates.  His morality never abates.  He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions.  There can be but a right and a wrong.  His conversation is as a book.  His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath.  You must speak upon the square with him.  He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy’s country.  “A healthy book!”—­said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle,—­“did I catch rightly what you said?  I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book.”  Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions