How little can we exult in any intellectual powers or literary entertainments, when we see the fate of poor Collins. I knew him a few years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs.--March 8, 1754. Poor dear Collins. Let me know whether you think it would give him pleasure that I should write to him. I have often been near his state, and therefore have it in great commisseration. * * * What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance, and depart, that it may blaze and expire.--April 15, 1756.[14] Difference of opinion respecting the American war did not separate him from Burke and Fox; and when the nation was afterwards divided by the struggle between the court and populace on one side and the aristocracy on the other, though his principles determined him to that party in which he found the person though perhaps not the interests of his sovereign, yet his affections continued with the great leader in the House of Commons, who was opposed to it. "I am," said he, "for the King against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt. The King is my master; but I do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend;" and to Burke, when he was a candidate for a seat in the new Parliament, he wished, as he told him with a smile, "all the success that an honest man could wish him." Even towards Wilkes his asperity was softened down into good humour by their meeting together over a plentiful table at the house of Dilly the bookseller. When he had offended any by contradiction or rudeness, it was seldom long before he sought to be reconciled and forgiven. But though his private enmities were easily appeased, yet where he considered the cause of truth to be concerned, his resentment was vehement and unrelenting. That imposture, particularly, which he with good reason supposed Macpherson to have practised on the world with respect to the poems of Ossian, provoked him to vengeance, such as the occasion seemed hardly to demand.