Britain is now the only country which holds the world in disturbance
and war; and instead of paying compliments to the excess of her
crimes, the Abbe would have appeared much more in character, had he
put to her, or to her monarch, this serious question--

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