Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439, page 29 by Various Authors
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y his noble instincts against such critics. His was indeed a happy fate: the only fault ever advanced by friend or foe against his public life, was an excess of generosity towards his vanquished enemies!' His sense of the comic is amusingly evidenced by the story of his ruse during a dearth in the same siege. Tradition reports, that only one animal, a hog, was left alive in the town, and that more than half starved. In the afternoon, Blake, feeling that in their depression a laugh would do the defenders as much good as a dinner, had the hog carried to all the posts and whipped, so that its screams, heard in many places, might make the enemy suppose that fresh supplies had somehow been obtained. According to his biographer, never man had finer sense of sarcasm, or used that weapon with greater effect--loving to find expression for its scorn and merriment in the satires of Horace and Juvenal; and thus in some degree relieving the stern fervour of Puritan piety with the more easy graces of ancient scholarship.
The moral aspects of his character appear in this memoir in an admirable light. If he did not stand so high as some others in public notoriety, it was mainly because, to stand higher than he did, he must plant his feet on a bad eminence. His patriotism was as pure as Cromwell's was selfish. Mr Dixon alludes to the strong points of contrast, as well as of resemblance, between the two men. Both, he says, were sincerely religious, undauntedly brave, fertile in expedients, irresistible in action. Born in the same year, they began and almost closed their lives at the same time. Both were country gentlemen of moderate fortune; both were of middle age when the revolution came. Without previous knowledge or professional training, both attained to the highest honours of the respective services. But there the parallel ends. Anxious only for the glory and interest of his country, Blake took little or no care of his personal aggrandisement. His contempt for money, his impatience with the mere vani