The masses of men in all countries are much the same.

If there are greater comforts in the hardy North, Providence bestows a fertile earth and a glorious heaven, and a mind susceptible to enjoyment as flowers to light, on the voluptuous indulgence of the Italian, or the contented apathy of the Hindoo.

In the mighty organization of good and evil, what can we vain individuals effect?
They who labour most, how doubtful is their reputation! Who shall say whether Voltaire or Napoleon, Cromwell or Caesar, Walpole or Pitt, has done most good or most evil?
It is a question casuists may dispute on.

Some of us think that poets have been the delight and the lights of men; another school of philosophy has treated them as the corrupters of the species,--panderers to the false glory of war, to the effeminacies of taste, to the pampering of the passions above the reason.

Nay, even those who have effected inventions that change the face of the earth--the printing-press, gunpowder, the steam-engine,--men hailed as benefactors by the unthinking herd, or the would-be sages,--have introduced ills unknown before, adulterating and often counterbalancing the good.