What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never
answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no
common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and
the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider
that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that
understanding may make its appearance, and depart, that it may blaze and
expire.--April 15, 1756.[14]

Difference of opinion respecting the American war did not separate him
from Burke and Fox; and when the nation was afterwards divided by the
struggle between the court and populace on one side and the aristocracy
on the other, though his principles determined him to that party in
which he found the person though perhaps not the interests of his
sovereign, yet his affections continued with the great leader in the
House of Commons, who was opposed to it. "I am," said he, "for the King
against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt. The King is my master; but I
do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend;" and to Burke, when he was a
candidate for a seat in the new Parliament, he wished, as he told him
with a smile, "all the success that an honest man could wish him." Even
towards Wilkes his asperity was softened down into good humour by their
meeting together over a plentiful table at the house of Dilly the
bookseller.

When he had offended any by contradiction or rudeness, it was seldom
long before he sought to be reconciled and forgiven. But though his
private enmities were easily appeased, yet where he considered the cause
of truth to be concerned, his resentment was vehement and unrelenting.
That imposture, particularly, which he with good reason supposed
Macpherson to have practised on the world with respect to the poems of
Ossian, provoked him to vengeance, such as the occasion seemed hardly to