re born, I may almost say, in purple, at the castle of
Dublin, when your grandfather was Lord-Lieutenant, and have since been
bred in the court of England.

If this address had been in verse, I might have called you, as Claudian
calls Mercury, _Numen commune, gemino faciens commercia mundo_. The
better to satisfy this double obligation, you have early cultivated the
genius you have to arms, that when the service of Britain or Ireland
shall require your courage and your conduct, you may exert them both to
the benefit of either country. You began in the Cabinet what you
afterwards practised in the Camp; and thus both Lucullas and Caesar (to
omit a crowd of shining Romans) formed themselves to war by the study of
history, and by the examples of the greatest captains, both of Greece
and Italy, before their time. I name those two commanders in particular,
because they were better read in chronicle than any of the Roman
leaders; and that Lucullus, in particular, having only the theory of war
from books, was thought fit, without practice, to be sent into the field
against the most formidable enemy of Rome. Tully, indeed, was called the
learned consul in derision; but then he was not born a soldier--his head
was turned another way; when he read the Tactics, he was thinking on the
bar, which was his field of battle. The knowledge of warfare is thrown
away on a general who dares not make use of what he knows. I commend it
only in a man of courage and resolution: in him it will direct his
martial spirit, and teach him the way to the best victories,--which are
those which are least bloody, and which, though achieved by the hand,
are managed by the head. Science distinguishes a man of honour from one
of those athletic brutes whom undeservedly we call heroes. Cursed be the
poet who first honoured with that name a mere Ajax, a man-killing idiot!
The Ulysses of Ovid upbraids his ignorance, that he understood not the
shield for which he pleaded: there was engraven on it plans of cities
and maps of countries which Ajax could not comprehend, but looked on
them as stupidly as his fellow-beast, the lion. But on the other side,
your Grace has given yourself the education of his rival; you have
studied every spot of ground in Flanders, which for these ten years past
has been the scene of battles and of sieges. No wonder if you performed
your part with such applause on a theatre which you understood so well.

If I designed this for a poetical