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intention to meddle with any subjects, of complaint, except such as are material to the forming a right judgment of the trials made and proposed) a second voyage to the West Indies was agreed to in the latter end of the year 1762, which agreement was
like that opprobrium of history, Hanno the Carthaginian, had more respect for their own opinions than the good of their country; who were openly opposed to the success of the Mechanics; and who refused him to name a check on the computations, after the first voyage, although the commonest sense of equity called for it: so that Goldsmith's stricture on Pope's sentiment—
might have been successfully refuted here;[subnote 1] for they were not honest pothouse cobblers, or carters, who paid so little regard to meum and tuum, but literary men, in holy orders, whose private passions and propensities were so self-ended, that many a man in the lowest grade of society might have been found fit to be deemed a nobler work of God, according to the Poets standard.—But never was genius seen contending with despotic power engrafted on ignorance (an ignorance of mechanics certainly) more remarkably than in the consummate effrontery of James Earl of Morton, and its consequences. A singular retribution may be thought to have overtaken him, by the revolting particulars brought to light above sixty years after his sands were run out, which were the principal source of these memoirs. It is enough to teach the proudest of the proud more circumspection, lest at any time they totally frustrate the homage they covet from the mouths of men, especiallyAn honest man's the noblest work of God,—
- ↑ It is contended, in the Vicar of Wakefield, that an ignorant peasant, however honest, cannot be deemed so noble a work of God as a Newton.—Without interfering with the argument, may it not be said that the instance of Newton is neutralised by that of Bacon,
The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind?
