He observes, that the virtue of the most exemplary prince that ever swayed a sceptre “can never warm or illuminate the body of his people, if foul mirrors are placed so near him as to refract and dissipate the rays at their first emanation."[99] Without observing upon the propriety of this metaphor, or asking how mirrors come to have lost their old quality of reflecting, and to have acquired that of refracting, and dissipating rays, and how far their foulness will account for this change; the remark itself is common and true:  no less true, and equally surprising from him, is that which immediately precedes it:  “It is in vain to endeavor to check the progress of irreligion and licentiousness, by punishing such crimes in one individual, if others equally culpable are rewarded with the honors and emoluments of the state."[100] I am not in the secret of the author’s manner of writing; but it appears to me, that he must intend these reflections as a satire upon the administration of his happy years.  Were over the honors and emoluments of the state more lavishly squandered upon persons scandalous in their lives than during that period?  In these scandalous lives, was there anything more scandalous than the mode of punishing one culpable individual?  In that individual, is anything more culpable than his having been seduced by the example of some of those very persons by whom he was thus persecuted?

The author is so eager to attack others, that he provides but indifferently for his own defence.  I believe, without going beyond the page I have now before me, he is very sensible, that I have sufficient matter of further, and, if possible, of heavier charge against his friends, upon his own principle.  But it is because the advantage is too great, that I decline making use of it.  I wish the author had not thought that all methods are lawful in party.  Above all he ought to have taken care not to wound his enemies through the sides of his country.  This he has done, by making that monstrous and overcharged picture of the distresses of our situation.  No wonder that he, who finds this country in the same condition with that of France at the time of Henry the Fourth, could also find a resemblance between his political friend and the Duke of Sully.  As to those personal resemblances, people will often judge of them from their affections:  they may imagine in these clouds whatsoever figures they please; but what is the conformation of that eye which can discover a resemblance of this country and these times to those with which the author compares them?  France, a country just recovered out of twenty-five years of the most cruel and desolating civil war that perhaps was ever known.  The kingdom, under the veil of momentary quiet, full of the most atrocious political, operating upon the most furious fanatical factions.  Some pretenders even to the crown; and those who did not pretend to the whole, aimed at the partition of the monarchy.  There