In Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative, the memoir Edward Porter Alexander wrote before editing and softening it into Fighting for the Confederacy, whose (unnumbered) pages look like this:
an observation:
A military lesson is to be learned from the result, to wit, that dangers lurk in excess of enterprise as well as in its deficiency.
Then, in looking for the source of a line Alexander cites, “Hope told a flattering tale,” I found it attributed variously to John Wolcott (9 May 1738 – 14 January 1819), also Wolcot, writing as Peter Pindar, who in this amusing anecdote from Anecdotes for the Steamboat & Railroad: Selected from the Best Authors (1853), becomes Walcot:
