He was the most genuine and the most wicked of pacifists.

He did not want any more wars.

He had tortured and beggared all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.
The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course, to the national policy of the first William Pitt.

He was the kind of man whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.
He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet.

He was of the Erastian Whigs, sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was ultimately a religious war.