For I have always borne that laudable
partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis[79] with
so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties
and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and
beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavor,
in those many discourses I had with that monarch, although it
unfortunately failed of success.
But great allowances should be given to a king who lives wholly secluded
from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether
unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other
nations: the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices,
and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer
countries of Europe are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if
so remote a prince's notions of virtue and vice were to be offered as a
standard for all mankind.
To confirm what I have now said, and farther to show the miserable
effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage which
will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into
his majesty's favor, I told him of an invention discovered between three
and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder into a heap, on
which the smallest spark of fire falling would kindle the whole in a
moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in
the air together with a noise and agitation greater than thunder.
Pages:
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185