Excerpt from The Retired Lieutenant and the Battle of Loncarty, Vol. 1 of 2: Poems Nevertheless, this is still an enlightened age taste for the exalted kinds of literature, which have ever tended to elevate the nations who cherished them, has forsaken us, and eminent talents in almost all the high arts are fast disappearing: but, what then? We have every coal porter ready to start as a legislator, and every pavier as a minister of state. The feats achieved by the Diffusers of Knowledge in this way have, indeed, been Herculean: but those philo Sophers, in the ardour of their philanthropy, in the heat of their desires to improve the condition of society. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.