by the worst of deformations; and advanced towards salvation by the most express causes that we have of most assured damnation; that by overthrowing government, the magistracy, and the laws, in whose protection God has placed him, by dismembering his good mother, and giving her limbs to be mangled by her old enemies, filling fraternal hearts with parricidal hatreds, calling devils and furies to his aid, he can assist the most holy sweetness and justice of the divine law.  Ambition, avarice, cruelty, and revenge have not sufficient natural impetuosity of their own; let us bait them with the glorious titles of justice and devotion.  There cannot a worse state of things be imagined than where wickedness comes to be legitimate, and assumes, with the magistrates’ permission, the cloak of virtue: 

          “Nihil in speciem fallacius, quam prava religio,
          ubi deorum numen prxtenditur sceleribus.”

     ["Nothing has a more deceiving face than false religion, where the
     divinity of the gods is obscured by crimes.”—­Livy, xxxix. 16.]

The extremest sort of injustice, according to Plato, is where that which is unjust should be reputed for just.

The common people then suffered very much, and not present damage only: 

“Undique totis
Usque adeo turbatur agris,”

["Such great disorders overtake our fields on every side.” 
—­Virgil, Eclog., i.  II.]

but future too; the living were to suffer, and so were they who were yet unborn; they stript them, and consequently myself, even of hope, taking from them all they had laid up in store to live on for many years: 

         “Quae nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere, perdunt;
          Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas . . . 
          Muris nulla fides, squalent populatibus agri.”

["What they cannot bear away, they spoil; and the wicked mob burn harmless houses; walls cannot secure their masters, and the fields are squalid with devastation.”  —­Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 35; Claudianus, In Eutyop., i. 244.]

Besides this shock, I suffered others:  I underwent the inconveniences that moderation brings along with it in such a disease:  I was robbed on all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a Ghibelline; one of my poets expresses this very well, but I know not where it is.

     ["So Tories called me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.”—­Pope, after Horace.]

The situation of my house, and my friendliness with my neighbours, presented me with one face; my life and my actions with another.  They did not lay formal accusations to my charge, for they had no foundation for so doing; I never hide my head from the laws, and whoever would have questioned me, would have done himself a greater prejudice than me; they were only mute suspicions that were whispered about, which never want appearance in so confused a mixture, no more than envious or idle heads.  I commonly myself lend a hand to injurious presumptions that fortune scatters abroad against me, by a way I have ever had of evading to justify, excuse, or explain myself; conceiving that it were to compromise my conscience to plead in its behalf: