Such are a few of the results of a single principle, a rule to which there is no exception, which holds equally good in the organic as in the inorganic world. Even the blood-vessels of the body are subject to this law--the sides of all vessels below the level of the heart enduring an additional outward pressure of half an ounce for every inch in height, which at the toes would amount to somewhere about two pounds. When a person stands erect in a bath, the pressure on all parts of the body is not equal; it is greater upon the legs than upon the trunk; the former are pressed upward, and hence in part the difficulty experienced in standing upon the bottom in deep water.
DISAGREEABLE PEOPLE.--Some persons are of so teazing and fidgetty a turn of mind, that they do not give you a moment’s rest. Everything goes wrong with them. They complain of a headache 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 fastidious habit of mind, produced by a valetudinary habit of body: they are out of sorts with everything, and of course their ill-humour and captiousness 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 heaven’s rain, or stopped 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 argument, unless where they disdain your understanding so much as not to condescend to argue with you--who knit their brows and roll their eyes 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 everybody else’s comfort. Mounted on an abstract proposition, they trample on every courtesy and decency of behaviour; and though, perhaps, they do not intend the gross personalities they are guilty of, yet they cannot be acquitted of a want of due consideration for others, and of an intolerable egotism in the support of truth and justice. You may hear one of these impetuous 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.--_Hazlitt’s Table-Talk._