l not say much of friendship as giving an insight into character,
because it is often founded on mutual infirmities and prejudices.
Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we
see only as much as we please of one another's characters afterwards.
Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than
professed enemies. They cool, indeed, in time, part, and retain only a
rankling grudge of past errors and oversights. Their testimony in the
latter case is not quite free from suspicion.

One would think that near relations, who live constantly together, and
always have done so, must be pretty well acquainted with one another's
characters. They are nearly in the dark about it. Familiarity confounds
all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power
of judging. We have no opinion on the subject, any more than of one
another's faces. The Penates, the household gods, are veiled. We do not
see the features of those we love, nor do we clearly distinguish their
virtues or their vices. We take them as they are found in the lump,--by
weight, and not by measure. We know all about the individuals, their
sentiments, history, manners, words, actions, everything; but we know
all these too much as facts, as inveterate, habitual impressions,
as clothed with too many associations, as sanctified with too many
affections, as woven too much into the web of our hearts, to be able to
pick out the different threads, to cast up the items of the debtor and
creditor account, or to refer them to any general standard of right and
wrong. Our impressions with respect to them are too strong, too real,
too much _sui generis,_ to be capable of a comparison with anything
but themselves. We hardly inquire whether those for whom we are thus
interested, and to whom we are thus knit, are _better_ or _worse_ than
others--the question is a kind of profanation--all we know is, they are
_more_ to us than any one else can be. Our sentiments of this kind are
rooted and grow in us, and we cannot eradicate them by voluntary means.
Besides, our judgments are bespoke, our interests take part with our
blood. If any doubt arises, if the veil of our implicit confidence is
drawn aside by any accident for a moment, the shock is too great, like
that of a dislocated limb, and we recoil on our habitual impressions
again. Let not that veil ever be rent entirely asunder, so that those
images may be left bare of reverential awe