The laurels we began to plant in Guadaloupe do not thrive—­we have taken half the island, and despair of the other half which we are gone to take.  General Hobson is dead, and many of our men-it seems all climates are not equally good for conquest-Alexander and Caesar would have looked wretchedly after a yellow fever!  A hero that would have leaped a rampart, would perhaps have shuddered at the thought of being scalped.  Glory will be taken in its own way, and cannot reconcile itself to the untoward barbarism of America.  In short, if we don’t renounce expeditions, our history will be a journal of miscarriages.  What luck must a general have that escapes a flux, or being shot abroad—­or at home!  How fatal a war has this been!  From Pondicherry to Canada, from Russia to Senegal, the world has been a great bill of mortality?  The King of Prussia does not appear to have tapped his campaign yet—­he was slow last year; it is well if he concludes this as thunderingly as he did the last.  Our winter-politics are drawn to the dregs.  The King is gone to Kensington, and the Parliament is going out of town.  The ministers who don’t agree, will, I believe, let the war decide their squabbles too.  Mr. Pitt will take Canada and the cabinet-council together, or miscarry in both.  There are Dutch deputies here, who are likely to be here some time:  their negotiations are not of an epigrammatic nature. and we are in no hurry to decide on points which we cannot well give up, nor maintain without inconvenience.  But it is idle to describe what describes itself by not being concluded.

I have received yours of the 7th of last month, and fear you are quite in the right about a history of the house of Medici—­ yet it is pity it should not be written!(1030) You don’t, I know, want any spur to incite you to remember me and any commission with which I trouble you; and therefore you must not take it in that light, but as the consequence of my having just seen the Neapolitan book of Herculaneum, that I mention it to you again.  Though it is far from being finely engraved, yet there are bits in It that make me wish much to have it, and if you could procure it for me, I own I should be pleased.  Adieu! my dear Sir.

(1030) See ant`e, p. 483, letter 310.

488 Letter 314
To The Rev. Henry Zouch. 
Strawberry Hill, May 14, 1759.

Sir, You accuse me with so much delicacy and with so much seeming justice, that I must tell you the truth, cost me what it will.  It is in fact, I own, that I have been silent, not knowing what to say to you, or how not to say something about your desire that I would attend the affair of the navigation of Calder in Parliament.  In truth, I scarce ever do attend private business on solicitation.  If I attend, I cannot help forming an opinion, and when formed I do not care not to be guided by it, and at the same time it is very unpleasant to vote against a person whom one went to serve.  I know