Are there not miseries enough in the world, too difficult to be encountered and too pointed to be borne, without studying to enlarge the list and arming it with new destruction?  Is life so very long, that it is necessary, nay even a duty, to shake the sand, and hasten out the period of duration?  Is the path so elegantly smooth, so decked on every side, and carpeted with joys, that wretchedness is wanting to enrich it as a soil?  Go ask thine aching heart, when sorrow from a thousand causes wounds it, go, ask thy sickened self when every medicine fails, whether this be the case or not?

Quitting my remarks on this head, I proceed to another, in which the Abbe has let loose a vein of ill-nature, and, what is still worse, of injustice.

After caviling at the treaty, he goes on to characterize the several parties combined in the war.—­“Is it possible,” says the Abbe, “that a strict union should long subsist amongst confederates of characters so opposite as the hasty, light, disdainful Frenchman, the jealous, haughty, sly, slow, circumspect Spaniard, and the American, who is secretly snatching looks at the mother country, and would rejoice, were they compatible with his independence, at the disasters of his allies?”

To draw foolish portraits of each other, is a mode of attack and reprisal, which the greater part of mankind are fond of indulging.  The serious philosopher should be above it, more especially in cases from which no possible good can arise, and mischief may, and where no received provocation can palliate the offense.—­The Abbe might have invented a difference of character for every country in the world, and they in return might find others for him, till in the war of wit all real character is lost.  The pleasantry of one nation or the gravity of another may, by a little penciling, be distorted into whimsical features, and the painter becomes so much laughed at as the painting.

But why did not the Abbe look a little deeper, and bring forth the excellencies of the several parties?  Why did he not dwell with pleasure on that greatness of character, that superiority of heart, which has marked the conduct of France in her conquests, and which has forced an acknowledgment even from Britain.

There is one line, at least (and many others might be discovered), in which the confederates unite; which is, that of a rival eminence in their treatment of their enemies.  Spain, in her conquest of Minorca and the Bahama Islands, confirms this remark.  America has been invariable in her lenity from the beginning of the war, notwithstanding the high provocations she has experienced?  It is England only who has been insolent and cruel.

But why must America be charged with a crime undeserved by her conduct, more so by her principles, and which, if a fact, would be fatal to her honour?  I mean the want of attachment to her allies, or rejoicing in their disasters.  She, it is true, has been assiduous in showing to the world that she was not the aggressor toward England; and that the quarrel was not of her seeking, or, at that time, even of her wishing.  But to draw inferences from her justification, to stab her character by, and I see nothing else from which they can be supposed to be drawn, is unkind and unjust.