he does know it, boasts unjustly and let him say what he will, does a
thousand things of which his own conscience must necessarily accuse him.
I should willingly take Seneca's word on the experience he made upon the
like occasion, provided he would deal sincerely with me. The most
honourable mark of goodness in such a necessity is freely to confess both
one's own faults and those of others; with the power of its virtue to
stay one's inclination towards evil; unwillingly to follow this
propension; to hope better, to desire better. I perceive that in these
divisions wherein we are involved in France, every one labours to defend
his cause; but even the very best of them with dissimulation and
disguise: he who would write roundly of the true state of the quarrel,
would write rashly and wrongly. The most just party is at best but a
member of a decayed and worm-eaten body; but of such a body, the member
that is least affected calls itself sound, and with good reason,
forasmuch as our qualities have no title but in comparison; civil
innocence is measured according to times and places. Imagine this in
Xenophon, related as a fine commendation of Agesilaus: that, being
entreated by a neighbouring prince with whom he had formerly had war, to
permit him to pass through his country, he granted his request, giving
him free passage through Peloponnesus; and not only did not imprison or
poison him, being at his mercy, but courteously received him according to
the obligation of his promise, without doing him the least injury or
offence. To such ideas as theirs this were an act of no especial note;
elsewhere and in another age, the frankness and unanimity of such an
action would be thought wonderful; our monkeyish capets

[Capets, so called from their short capes, were the students of
Montaigne College at Paris, and were held in great contempt.]

would have laughed at it, so little does the Spartan innocence resemble