consequence at all; it seeming to me very unjust to go about to
subject public and established customs and institutions to the
weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy (for
private reason has but a private jurisdiction), and to attempt that
upon the divine, which no government will endure a man should do, upon
the civil laws; with which, though human reason has much more
commerce than with the other, yet are they sovereignly judged by
their own proper judges, and the extreme sufficiency serves only to
expound and set forth the law and custom received, and neither to
wrest it, nor to introduce anything of innovation. If, sometimes,
the divine providence has gone beyond the rules to which it has
necessarily bound and obliged us men, it is not to give us any
dispensation to do the same; those are master strokes of the divine
hand, which we are not to imitate, but to admire, and extraordinary
examples, marks of express and particular purposes, of the nature of
miracles, presented before us for manifestations of its
almightiness, equally above both our rules and force, which it would
be folly and impiety to attempt to represent and imitate; and that
we ought not to follow, but to contemplate with the greatest
reverence: acts of his personage, and not for us. Cotta very
opportunely declares: "Quum de religione agitur, Ti. Coruncanium, P.
Scipionem, P. Scaevolam pontifices maximos, non Zenonem, aut
Cleanthem, aut Chrysippum, sequor." God knows in the present quarrel
of our civil war, where there are a hundred articles to dash out and
to put in, great and very considerable, how many there are who can
truly boast they have exactly and perfectly weighed and understood the
grounds and reasons of the one and the other party; 'tis a number,
if they make any number, that would be able to give us very little
disturbance. But what becomes of all the rest, under what ensigns do
they march, in what quarter do they lie? Theirs have the same effect
with other weak and ill-applied medicines; they have only set the
humors they would purge more violently in work, stirred and
exasperated by the conflict, and left them still behind. The potion
was too weak to purge, but strong enough to weaken us; so that it does
not work, but we keep it still in our bodies, and reap nothing from
the operation but intestine gripes and dolors.

    So it is, nevertheless, that Fortune, still reserving her
authority in defiance of whatever we are able to do or say,
sometimes presents us with a necessity so urgent, that 'tis
requisite the laws should a little yield and give way; and when one
opposes the increase of an innovation that thus intrudes itself by
violence, to keep a man's self in so doing in all places and in all
things within bounds and rules against those who have the power, and
to whom all things are lawful that may any way serve to advance
their design, who have no other law nor rule but what serves best to
their own purpose, 'tis a dangerous obligation and an intolerable
inequality:

           "Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides,"

forasmuch as the ordinary discipline of a healthful state does not
provide against these extraordinary accidents; it presupposes a body
that supports itself in its principal members and offices, and a
common consent to its obedience and observation. A legitimate
proceeding is cold, heavy, and constrained, and not fit to make head
against a headstrong and unbridled proceeding. 'Tis known to be, to
this day, cast in the dish of those two great men, Octavius and
Cato, in the two civil wars of Sylla and Caesar, that they would
rather suffer their country to undergo the last extremities, than
relieve their fellow-citizens at the expense of its laws, or be guilty
of any innovation; for, in truth, in these last necessities, where
there is no other remedy, it would, peradventure, be more discreetly
done to stoop and yield a little to receive the blow, than, by
opposing without possibility of doing good, to give occasion to
violence to trample all under foot; and better to make the laws do
what they can when they cannot do what they would. After this manner
did he who suspended them for four-and-twenty hours, and he who, for
once, shifted a day in the calendar, and that other who of the month
of June made a second of May. The Lacedaemonians themselves, who
were so religious observers of the laws of their country, being
straitened by one of their own edicts, by which it was expressly
forbidden to choose the same man twice to be admiral; and on the other
side, their affairs necessarily requiring that Lysander should again
take upon him that command, they made one Aratus admiral, 'tis true,
but withal, Lysander went superintendent of the navy; and, by the same
subtlety, one of their ambassadors being sent to the Athenians to
obtain the revocation of some decree, and Pericles remonstrating to
him, that it was forbidden to take away the tablet wherein a law had
once been engrossed, he advised him to turn it only; that being not
forbidden; and Plutarch commends Philopoemen, that being born to
command, he knew how to do it, not only according to the laws but also
to overrule even the laws themselves, when the public necessity so
required.

                                 II.

                    OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN.

             To Madame Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson.

    I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so
decrepit or deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not,
nevertheless, if he were not totally besotted, and blinded with his
paternal affection, that he did not well enough discern his defects:
but that with all defaults, he was still his. Just so, I see better
than any other, that all I write here are but the idle of a man that
has only nibbled upon the outward crust of sciences in his nonage, and
only retained a general and formless image of them; who has got a
little snatch of everything, and nothing of the whole, a la