[395] Juvenal, Sat. iii. 1. 2.
'Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend.'
Johnson's London, 1. 3.
[396] It was published without the authors name.
[397] 'What have we acquired? What but … an island thrown aside from human use; … an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation.' Works, vi. 198.
[398] 'It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, "resign their lives, amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death." The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword.
Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless, and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.' Works, vi. 199.
[399] Johnson wrote of the Earl of Chatham:—'This surely is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall at last dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which Corneille allows to Richelieu.' Works, vi. 197.
[400] Ephesians, vi. 12. Johnson (Works, vi. 198) calls Junius 'one of the few writers of his despicable faction whose name does not disgrace the page of an opponent.' But he thus ends his attack;—'What, says Pope, must be the priest where a monkey is the god? What must be the drudge of a party of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townsend?' Ib p. 206.
[401] This softening was made in the later copies of the first edition. A second change seems to have been made. In the text, as given in Murphy's edition (1796, viii. 137), the last line of the passage stands:—'If he was sometimes wrong, he was often right.' Horace Walpole describes Grenville's 'plodding, methodic genius, which made him take the spirit of detail for ability.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 36. For the fine character that Burke drew of him see Payne's Burke, i. 122. There is, I think, a hit at Lord Bute's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir F. Dashwood (Lord Le Despencer), who was described as 'a man to whom a sum of five figures was an impenetrable secret.' Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 172, note. He himself said, 'People will point at me, and cry, "there goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared."' Ib p. 250.