_Sept._ 16, 1779.
I have received your letter by Colonel Floyd, and shall be surprised
indeed if Caesar does not find his own purple a little rumpled, as well
as his brother's mantle. But how astonished was I at finding that you
did not mention the dreadful eruption of Vesuvius. Surely you had not
heard of it! What are kings and their popguns to that wrath of Nature!
How Sesostris, at the head of an army of nations, would have fallen
prostrate to earth before a column of blazing embers eleven thousand
feet high! I am impatient to hear more, as you are of the little
conflict of us pigmies. Three days after my last set out, we received
accounts of D'Estaing's success against Byron and Barrington, and of the
capture of Grenada. I do not love to send first reports, which are
rarely authentic. The subsequent narrative of the engagement is more
favourable. It allows the victory to the enemy, but makes their loss of
men much the more considerable. Of ships we lost but one, taken after
the fight as going into port to refit. Sir Charles Hardy and
D'Orvilliers have not met; the latter is at Brest, the former at
Portsmouth. I never penetrated an inch into what is to be; and into some
distant parts of our history, I mean the Eastern, I have never liked to
look. I believe it an infamous scene; you know I have always thought it
so; and the Marattas are a nation of banditti very proper to scourge the
heroes of Europe, who go so far to plunder and put themselves into their
way. Nature gave to mankind a beautiful world, and larger than it could
occupy,--for, as to the eruption of Goths and Vandals occasioned by
excess of population, I very much doubt it; and mankind prefers
deforming the ready Paradise, to improving and enjoying it. Ambition and
mischief, which one should not think were natural appetites, seem almost
as much so as the impulse to propagation; and those pious rogues, the
clergy, preach against what Nature forces us to practise (or she could
not carry on her system), and not twice in a century say a syllable
against the Lust of Destruction! Oh! one is lost in moralising, as one
is in astronomy! In the ordinance and preservation of the great
universal system one sees the Divine Artificer, but our intellects are
too bounded to comprehend anything more.
Lord Temple is dead by an accident. I never had any esteem for his
abilities or character. He had grown up in the bask of Lord Chatham's
glory, and had the folly to mistake half the rays for his own. The world
was not such a dupe; and his last years discovered a selfish
restlessness, and discovered to him, too, that no mortal regarded him
but himself.
The Lucans are in my neighbourhood, and talk with much affection of you.
Adieu!
_CHANCES OF WAR WITH HOLLAND--HIS FATHER'S POLICY--POPE--CHARACTER OF
BOLINGBROKE._