body that is not much the worse for it; there was fire before, and now ’tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, not the evil.  I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels, “That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.”  If they tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and that their manners are no better than ours:  I first reply, that it is hard to be believed;

“Tam multa:  scelerum facies!”

     ["There are so many forms of crime.”—­Virgil, Georg., i. 506.]

secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much as our own.

I will not here omit, that I never mutiny so much against France, that I am not perfectly friends with Paris; that city has ever had my heart from my infancy, and it has fallen out, as of excellent things, that the more beautiful cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this still wins upon my affection.  I love her for herself, and more in her own native being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquired embellishments.  I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes.  I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in variety and diversity of commodities:  the glory of France, and one of the most noble ornaments of the world.  May God drive our divisions far from her.  Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all other violences.  I give her caution that, of all sorts of people, those will be the worst that shall set her in discord; I have no fear for her, but of herself, and, certainly, I have as much fear for her as for any other part of the kingdom.  Whilst she shall continue, I shall never want a retreat, where I may stand at bay, sufficient to make me amends for parting with any other retreat.

Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my own humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties whatever.  I am not much taken with the sweetness of a native air:  acquaintance wholly new and wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and fortuitous ones with Four neighbours:  friendships that are purely of our own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication of climate or of blood oblige us.  Nature has placed us in the world free and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other rivers of the world.  What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of