text:  How often in this journal have we been obliged to draw upon these blockheads and disperse them sword in hand! How gentlemen (we have said to them in substance ) if you must play the fool as alarmists can you find no likelier towers for menacing Calcutta with thunder storms than those of arctic St Petersburg; between which cities lies an interspace equal to both tropics? We remember as applicable to this case a striking taunt reported by Dampier that when one bucanier on the west coast of Peru was sailing away from the oppression of another to some East Indian port with a weak crew in a crazy vessel the ruffian from whom he fled told him at parting that by the time he saw green fields again the boys in his vessel would be greyheaded