Now, the laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they are laws; ’tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose.  They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors.  There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws.  Whoever obeys them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought.  Our French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their dispensation and execution:  the command is so perplexed and inconstant, that it in some sort excuses alike disobedience and defect in the interpretation, the administration and the observation of it.  What fruit then soever we may extract from experience, that will little advantage our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us, and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need.  I study myself more than any other subject; ’tis my metaphysic, my physic: 

              “Quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum: 
               Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit:  unde coactis
               Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit
               Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet
               Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua;
               Sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces....”

["What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world? whence rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she? how is it that her horns are contracted and reopen? whence do winds prevail on the main? what does the east wind court with its blasts? and whence are the clouds perpetually supplied with water? is a day to come which may undermine the world?”—­Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]

“Quaerite, quos agitat mundi labor.”

     ["Ask whom the cares of the world trouble”—­Lucan, i. 417.]

In this universality, I suffer myself to be ignorantly and negligently led by the general law of the world:  I shall know it well enough when I feel it; my learning cannot make it alter its course; it will not change itself for me; ’tis folly to hope it, and a greater folly to concern one’s self about it, seeing it is necessarily alike public and common.  The goodness and capacity of the governor ought absolutely to discharge us of all care of the government:  philosophical inquisitions and contemplations serve for no other use but to increase our curiosity.  The philosophers; with great reason, send us back to the rules of nature; but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a subject.  As she has given us