' _Parl. Hist_. xxix. 343.
[579] Gray's Elegy. Mrs. Piozzi maintained that 'mercy was totally
abolished by French maxims; for, if all men are equal, mercy is no
more.' Piozzi's _Synonymy_, i. 370. Johnson, in 1740, described
slavery as 'the most calamitous estate in human life,' a state 'which
has always been found so destructive to virtue, that in many languages a
slave and a thief are expressed by the same word.' _Works_, v. 265-6.
Nineteen years later he wrote of the discoveries of the
Portuguese:--'Much knowledge has been acquired, and much cruelty been
committed; the belief of religion has been very little propagated, and
its laws have been outrageously and enormously violated.' _Ib_. p. 219.
Horace Walpole wrote, on July 9, 1754, (_Letters_, ii. 394), 'I was
reading t'other day the _Life of Colonel Codrington_. He left a large
estate for the propagation of the Gospel, and ordered that three hundred
negroes should constantly be employed upon it. Did one ever hear a more
truly Christian charity than keeping up a perpetuity of three hundred
slaves to look after the Gospel's estate?' Churchill, in _Gotham_,
published in 1764 (_Poems_, ii.
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