The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.Wordsworth, William
General
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: For the First Time Collected, With Additions from Unpublished Manuscripts. In Three Volumes.
Wordsworth, William
English literature -- 19th century
contended, 'could only be attained by distinguished examples of
fortitude and constancy.' Where were the fortitude and constancy of the
teachers? When Sir Hew Dalrymple had been so busy in taking the measure
of his own weakness, and feeding his own fears, how came it to escape
him, that General Junot must also have had _his_ weaknesses and _his_
fears? Was it nothing to have been defeated in the open field, where he
himself had been the assailant? Was it nothing that so proud a man, the
servant of so proud a man, had stooped to send a General Officer to
treat concerning the evacuation of the country? Was the hatred and
abhorrence of the Portugueze and Spanish Nations nothing? the people of
a large metropolis under his eye--detesting him, and stung almost to
madness, nothing? The composition of his own army made up of men of
different nations and languages, and forced into the service,--was there
no cause of mistrust in this? And, finally, among the many unsound
places which, had his mind been as active in this sort of inquiry as Sir
Hew Dalrymple's was, he must have found in his constitution, could a bad
cause have been missed--a worse cause than ever confounded the mind of a
soldier when boldly pressed upon, or gave courage and animation to a
righteous assailant? But alas! in Sir Hew Dalrymple and his brethren, we
had Generals who had a power of sight only for the strength of their
enemies and their own weakness.
Let me not be misunderstood. While I am thus forced to repeat things,
which were uttered or thought of these men in reference to their
military conduct, as heads of that army, it is needless to add, that
their personal courage is in no wise implicated in the charge brought
against them. But, in the name of my countrymen, I do repeat these
accusations, and tax them with an utter want of _intellectual_
courage--of that higher quality, which is never found without one or
other of the three accompaniments, talents, genius, or
principle;--talents matured by experience, without which it cannot exist
at all; or the rapid insight of peculiar genius, by which the fitness of
an act may be instantly determined, and which will supply higher motives
than mere talents can furnish for encountering difficulty and danger,
and will suggest better resources for diminishing or overcoming them.
Thus, through the power of genius, this quality of intellectual courage
may exist in an eminent degree, though the moral character be greatly
perverted; as in those personages, who are so conspicuous in history,
conquerors and usurpers, the Alexanders, the Caesars, and Cromwells; and
in that other class still more perverted, remorseless and energetic
minds, the Catilines and Borgias, whom poets have denominated 'bold, bad
men.' But, though a course of depravity will neither preclude nor
destroy this quality, nay, in certain circumstances will give it a
peculiar promptness and hardihood of decision, it is not on this account
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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