han indifferent, Dick's enthusiasm for his chief never
faltered, and in every line from Addison's pen, Steele found a
master-stroke. By the time Dick had come to that part of the poem, wherein
the bard describes as blandly as though he were recording a dance at the
Opera, or a harmless bout of bucolic cudgelling at a village fair, that
bloody and ruthless part of our campaign, with the remembrance whereof
every soldier who bore a part in it must sicken with shame--when we were
ordered to ravage and lay waste the Elector's country; and with fire and
murder, slaughter and crime, a great part of his dominions was overrun:
when Dick came to the lines--

In vengeance roused the soldier fills his hand
With sword and fire, and ravages the land.
In crackling flames a thousand harvests burn,
A thousand villages to ashes turn.
To the thick woods the woolly flocks retreat,
And mixed with bellowing herds confusedly bleat.
Their trembling lords the common shade partake,
And cries of infants found in every brake.
The listening soldier fixed in sorrow stands,
Loath to obey his leader's just commands.
The leader grieves, by generous pity swayed,
To see his just commands so well obeyed:

by this time wine and friendship had brought poor Dick to a perfectly
maudlin state, and he hiccuped out the last line with a tenderness that
set one of his auditors a-laughing.

"I admire the licence of you poets," says Esmond to Mr. Addison. (Dick,
after reading of the verses, was fain to go off, insisting on kissing his
two dear friends before his departure, and reeling away with his periwig
over his eyes.) "I admire your art: the murder of the campaign is done to
military music, like a battle at the Opera, and the virgins shriek in
harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march into their villages. Do you
know what a scene it was" (by this time, perhaps, the wine had warmed Mr.
Esmond's head too),--"what a triumph you are celebrating? what scenes of
shame and horror were enacted, over which the commander's genius presided,
as calm as though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of the
'listening soldier fixed in sorrow', the 'leader's grief swayed by
generous pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks
than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered one or
the other with equal alacrity. I was ashamed of my trade when I saw those
horrors perpetrated, whic