Eager to
persuade the world of her power, she considered destruction as the
minister of greatness, and conceived that the glory of a nation like
that of an [American] Indian, lay in the number of its scalps and
the miseries which it inflicts.
* Whitehead's New Year's ode for 1776.
*(2) Ode at the installation of Lord North, for Chancellor of the
University of Oxford.
Fire, sword and want, as far as the arms of Britain could extend
them, have been spread with wanton cruelty along the coast of America;
and while you, remote from the scene of suffering, had nothing to lose
and as little to dread, the information reached you like a tale of
antiquity, in which the distance of time defaces the conception, and
changes the severest sorrows into conversable amusement.
This makes the second paper, addressed perhaps in vain, to the
people of England. That advice should be taken wherever example has
failed, or precept be regarded where warning is ridiculed, is like a
picture of hope resting on despair: but when time shall stamp with
universal currency the facts you have long encountered with a laugh,
and the irresistible evidence of accumulated losses, like the
handwriting on the wall, shall add terror to distress, you will
then, in a conflict of suffering, learn to sympathize with others by
feeling for yourselves.
The triumphant appearance of the combined fleets in the channel
and at your harbor's mouth, and the expedition of Captain Paul
Jones, on the western and eastern coasts of England and Scotland,
will, by placing you in the condition of an endangered country, read
to you a stronger lecture on the calamities of invasion, and bring
to your minds a truer picture of promiscuous distress, than the most
finished rhetoric can describe or the keenest imagination conceive.
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