Grim's Hall

A Good Review:

Dalrymple gets a positive review here. He has a way of turning a phrase, so as to both praise the person of, yet totally dissent from the view of, an ideological opponent:

[J. S. Mill] was inclined to suppose, as many thinkers are, that most people either were or could become with sufficient education, like himself. In a way this does him honor, for he modestly supposed also that his own gifts were neither great nor exceptional, but this led him to imagine what is not very probable, that there would come a time when most people would be as deeply concerned with the moral foundations of human conduct as he. This in turn suggests that his knowledge of human beings in walks of life different from his own was not very extensive.

That's a brutal charge -- 'Mill was too ignorant of humanity to write about human nature' -- but delivered in a manner befitting a gentleman. We'd do well to emulate that courtesy.