ivated and unoccupied, cannot be considered without giving rise
to a great number of pleasing ideas, and bewildering the imagination
in delightful prospects; and therefore, whatever speculations they may
produce in those who have confined themselves to political studies,
naturally fixed the attention, and excited the applause, of a poet.
The politician, when he considers men driven into other countries for
shelter, and obliged to retire to forests and deserts, and pass their
lives and fix their posterity in the remotest corners of the world to
avoid those hardships which they suffer or fear in their native place,
may very properly inquire why the legislature does not provide a remedy
for these miseries rather than encourage an escape from them. He may
conclude that the flight of every honest man is a loss to the community;
that those who are unhappy without guilt ought to be relieved; and the
life which is overburthened by accidental calamities set at ease by
the care of the public; and that those who have by misconduct forfeited
their claim to favour ought rather to be made useful to the society
which they have injured than be driven from it. But the poet is employed
in a more pleasing undertaking than that of proposing laws which,
however just or expedient, will never be made; or endeavouring to reduce
to rational schemes of government societies which were formed by chance,
and are conducted by the private passions of those who preside in them.
He guides the unhappy fugitive, from want and persecution, to plenty,
quiet, and security, and seats him in scenes of peaceful solitude and
undisturbed repose.

Savage has not forgotten, amidst the pleasing sentiments which this
prospect of retirement suggested to him, to censure those crimes which
have been generally committed by the discoverers of new regions, and
to expose the enormous wickedness of making war upon barbarous nations
because they cannot resist, and of invading countries because they
are fruitful; of extending navigation only to propagate vice; and of
visiting distant lands only to lay them waste. He has asserted the
natural equality of mankind, and endeavoured to suppress that pride
which inclines men to imagine that right is the consequence of power.
His description of the various miseries which force men to seek for
refuge in distant countries affords another instance of his proficiency
in the important and extensive study of human life; and the tenderness