prepossession

“Has he so!—Then I know nothing of Mr. Elton. No, my dear little modest Harriet, depend upon it the picture will not be in Bond-street till just before he mounts his horse to-morrow. It is his companion all this evening, his solace, his delight. It opens his designs to his family, it introduces you among them, it diffuses through the party those pleasantest feelings of our nature, eager curiosity and warm prepossession. How cheerful, how animated, how suspicious, how busy their imaginations all are!”

“As to her younger daughters, she could not take upon her to say—she could not positively answer—but she did not know of any prepossession; her eldest daughter, she must just mention—she felt it incumbent on her to hint, was likely to be very soon engaged.”

The words of the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt capture their zeal best: In the Middle Ages, “human consciousness . . . lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues.”

As Stan eats a burger at a restaurant near his downtown Manhattan apartment on a recent Friday afternoon, he shows little of the prepossession of a man whose actions are about to viewed and scrutinized by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Should you, therefore, behold another with the eye of prepossession, at least, regard Eliza as a sister, and give her a portion accordingly.