Unlike in spirit was Matthew Robinson, a contemporary friend of America, whose able and elaborate tracts[460] in successive editions are now forgotten, except so far as revived by the notice of Professor Smyth.[461] His vindication of the Colonies, at the time of the Boston Port Bill, was complete, without the harshness of Tucker, and he did not hesitate to present the impossibility of conquering them. “What expectation or probability,” he asks, “can there be of sending from hence armies capable to conquer and subdue so great a force of men defending and defended by such a continent?”[462] Then, while depicting English mastery of the sea, he says: “We may do whatever a fleet can. Very true; but it cannot sail all over North America.”[463] The productions of this enlightened author cannot have been without effect. Doubtless they helped the final acknowledgment of independence. When will the “Old Mortality” appear, to discover and restore his monument? The able annotator of Lord Bacon was too sweeping, when he said that on the great American question all England was wrong, “except _one_ man.” Robinson was as right as the Dean, and there were others also. The “Monthly Review,” in an article on the Dean’s appeal for separation, said: “This, however, is not a new idea. It has frequently occurred to others.”[464] Even Soame Jenyns, a life-long member of Parliament, essayist, poet, defender of Christianity, while upholding the right to tax the Colonies, is said to have accepted the idea of “total separation”:-- “Let all who view th’ instructive scene, And patronize the plan, Give thanks to Gloucester’s honest Dean, For, Tucker, thou’rt the man.”[465]