Yet since the perverse tempers of mankind, since oppression on one side, and ambition on the other, are sometimes the unavoidable occasions of war; that courage, that magnanimity, and resolution, which is born with you, cannot be too much commended.  And here it grieves me that I am scanted in the pleasure of dwelling on many of your actions; but [Greek:  aideomai Troas] is an expression which Tully often uses, when he would do what he dares not, and fears the censure of the Romans.

I have sometimes been forced to amplify on others; but here, where the subject is so fruitful that the harvest overcomes the reaper, I am shortened by my chain, and can only see what is forbidden me to reach, since it is not permitted me to commend you, according to the extent of my wishes, and much less is it in my power to make my commendations equal to your merits.  Yet in this frugality of your praises there are some things which I cannot omit without detracting from your character.  You have so formed your own education, as enables you to pay the debt you owe your country; or, more properly speaking, both your countries, because you were born, I may almost say, in purple, at the castle of Dublin, when your grandfather was Lord-Lieutenant, and have since been bred in the court of England.

If this address had been in verse, I might have called you, as Claudian calls Mercury, Numen commune, gemino faciens commercia mundo.  The better to satisfy this double obligation, you have early cultivated the genius you have to arms, that when the service of Britain or Ireland shall require your courage and your conduct, you may exert them both to the benefit of either country.  You began in the Cabinet what you afterwards practised in the Camp; and thus both Lucullas and Caesar (to omit a crowd of shining Romans) formed themselves to war by the study of history, and by the examples of the greatest captains, both of Greece and Italy, before their time.  I name those two commanders in particular, because they were better read in chronicle than any of the Roman leaders; and that Lucullus, in particular, having only the theory of war from books, was thought fit, without practice, to be sent into the field against the most formidable enemy of Rome.  Tully, indeed, was called the learned consul in derision; but then he was not born a soldier—­his head was turned another way; when he read the Tactics, he was thinking on the bar, which was his field of battle.  The knowledge of warfare is thrown away on a general who dares not make use of what he knows.  I commend it only in a man of courage and resolution:  in him it will direct his martial spirit, and teach him the way to the best victories,—­which are those which are least bloody, and which, though achieved by the hand, are managed by the head.  Science distinguishes a man of honour from one of those athletic brutes whom undeservedly we call heroes.  Cursed be the poet who first honoured with that name a mere