doggrel rhymes;
the painter shall himself vanish into an imaginary landscape; and the
physician shall want food more than his patients do physic. In short,
without self-love, instead of beautiful, you shall think yourself an old
beldam of fourscore; instead of youthful, you shall seem just dropping
into the grave; instead of eloquent, a mere stammerer; and in lieu of
gende and complaisant, you shall appear like a downright country clown;
it being so necessary that every one should think well of himself before
he can expect the good opinion of others. Finally, when it is the main
and essential part of happiness to desire to be no other than what we
already are; this expedient is again wholly owing to self-love, which so
flushes men with a good conceit of their own, that no one repents of his
shape, of his wit, of his education, or of his country; so as the dirty
half-drowned Hollander would not remove into the pleasant plains of
Italy, the rude Thracian would not change his boggy soil for the best
seat in Athens, nor the brutish Scythian quit his thorny deserts to
become an inhabitant of the Fortunate Islands. And oh the incomparable
contrivance of nature, who has ordered all things in so even a method
that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she
makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former
defects, and makes all even. To enlarge farther, I may well presume to
aver, that there are no considerable exploits performed, no useful arts
invented, but what I am the respective author and manager of: as first,
what is more lofty and heroical than war? and yet, what is more foolish
than for some petty, trivial affront, to take such a revenge as both
sides shall be sure to be losers, and where the quarrel must be decided
at the price of so many limbs and lives? And when they come to an
engagement, what service can be done by such pale-faced students, as
by drudging at the oars of wisdom, have spent all their strength and
activity? No, the only use is of blunt sturdy fellows that have little
of wit, and so the more of resolution: except you would make a soldier
of such another Demosthenes as threw down his arms when he came within
sight of the enemy, and lost that credit in the camp which he gained in
the pulpit.

But counsel, deliberation, and advice (say you), are very necessary
for the management of war: very true, but not such counsel as shall be
prescribed by the strict rules of wi