"You certainly advise me well. You have pointed out the only way where there can be no disappointment, and comfort that will never fail us, carrying men steadily and cheerfully in their journey, and a place of rest at the end. Nobody can be more persuaded of it than I am; but situation, example, the current of things, and our natural weakness, draw me away with the herd, and only leave me just strength enough to resist the worst degree of our iniquities. There are times when men fret at trifles and quarrel with their toothpicks. In one of these ill-habits I exclaim against the present condition, and think it is the worst of all; but coolly and temperately it is plainly the best. Where there is most employment and least vice, there one should wish to be. There is a meanness and a baseness not to endure with patience the little inconveniences we are subject to; and to know no happiness but in one spot, and that in ease, in luxury, in idleness, seems to deserve our contempt. There are young men amongst us that have great revenues and high military stations, that repine at three months' service with their regiments if they go fifty miles from home. Soup and _venaison_ and turtle are their supreme delight and joy,--an effeminate race of coxcombs, the future leaders of our armies, defenders and protectors of our great and free nation! "You bid me avoid Fort William, because you believe it still worse than this place. That will not be my reason for wishing to avoid it; but the change of conversation; the fear of becoming a mere ruffian; and of imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander, or, giving way insensibly to the temptations of power, till I become proud, insolent and intolerable;--these considerations will make me wish to leave the regiment before the next winter, and always if it could be so after eight months duty; that by frequenting men above myself I may know my true condition, and by discoursing with the other sex may learn some civility and mildness of carriage, but never pay the price of the last improvement with the loss of reason. Better be a savage of some use than a gentle, amorous puppy, obnoxious to all the world. One of the wildest of wild clans is a worthier being than a perfect Philander." Wolfe, it must be owned, does not write well. He has reason to envy, as he does, the grace of the female style. He is not only ungrammatical, which, in a familiar letter, is a matter of very small consequence, but somewhat stilted. Perhaps it was like the "Madam," the fashion of the Johnsonian era. Yet beneath the buckram you always feel that there is a heart. Persons even of the same profession are cast in very different moulds; and the mould of Wolfe was as different as possible from that of the Iron Duke.