I would have the advantage on our side; but if it be not, I shall not run mad.  I am heartily for the right party; but I do not want to be taken notice of as an especial enemy to others, and beyond the general quarrel.  I marvellously challenge this vicious form of opinion:  “He is of the League because he admires the graciousness of Monsieur de Guise; he is astonished at the King of Navarre’s energy, therefore he is a Huguenot; he finds this to say of the manners of the king, he is therefore seditious in his heart.”  And I did not grant to the magistrate himself that he did well in condemning a book because it had placed a heretic —­[Theodore de Beza.]—­amongst the best poets of the time.  Shall we not dare to say of a thief that he has a handsome leg?  If a woman be a strumpet, must it needs follow that she has a foul smell?  Did they in the wisest ages revoke the proud title of Capitolinus they had before conferred on Marcus Manlius as conservator of religion and the public liberty, and stifle the memory of his liberality, his feats of arms, and military recompenses granted to his valour, because he, afterwards aspired to the sovereignty, to the prejudice of the laws of his country?  If we take a hatred against an advocate, he will not be allowed the next day to be eloquent.  I have elsewhere spoken of the zeal that pushed on worthy men to the like faults.  For my part, I can say, “Such an one does this thing ill, and another thing virtuously and well.”  So in the prognostication or sinister events of affairs they would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead, and that our persuasion and judgment should subserve not truth, but to the project of our desires.  I should rather incline towards the other extreme; so much I fear being suborned by my desire; to which may be added that I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish.

I have in my time seen wonders in the indiscreet and prodigious facility of people in suffering their hopes and belief to be led and governed, which way best pleased and served their leaders, despite a hundred mistakes one upon another, despite mere dreams and phantasms.  I no more wonder at those who have been blinded and seduced by the fooleries of Apollonius and Mahomet.  Their sense and understanding are absolutely taken away by their passion; their discretion has no more any other choice than that which smiles upon them and encourages their cause.  I had principally observed this in the beginning of our intestine distempers; that other, which has sprung up since, in imitating, has surpassed it; by which I am satisfied that it is a quality inseparable from popular errors; after the first, that rolls, opinions drive on one another like waves with the wind:  a man is not a member of the body, if it be in his power to forsake it, and if he do not roll the common way.  But, doubtless, they wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud; I have ever been against that practice:  ’tis only fit to work upon weak heads; for the sound, there are surer and more honest ways to keep up their courage and to excuse adverse accidents.