ons; but all the authors of Benares and Siam
agree that mankind lived an infinity of centuries before having the
intelligence to make laws; and they prove it by an unanswerable reason,
which is that even to-day when everyone plumes himself on his
intelligence, no way has been found of making a score of passably good
laws.

It is indeed still an insoluble question in India whether republics were
established before or after monarchies, whether confusion appeared more
horrible to mankind than despotism. I do not know what happened in order
of time; but in that of nature it must be agreed that all men being born
equal, violence and adroitness made the first masters, the laws made the
last.

_MEN OF LETTERS_

In our barbarous times, when the Franks, the Germans, the Bretons, the
Lombards, the Spanish Muzarabs, knew not how either to read or write,
there were instituted schools, universities, composed almost entirely of
ecclesiastics who, knowing nothing but their own jargon, taught this
jargon to those who wished to learn it; the academies came only a long
time afterwards; they despised the foolishness of the schools, but did
not always dare to rise against them, because there are foolishnesses
that are respected provided that they concern respectable things.

The men of letters who have rendered the greatest services to the small
number of thinking beings spread over the world, are the isolated
writers, the true scholars shut in their studies, who have neither
argued on the benches of the universities, nor told half-truths in the
academies; and almost all of them have been persecuted. Our wretched
species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always
throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Montesquieu says that the Scythians rent their slaves' eyes, so that
they might be less distracted while they were churning their butter;
that is just how the inquisition functions, and in the land where this
monster reigns almost everybody is blind. In England people have had two
eyes for more than two hundred years; the French are starting to open
one eye; but sometimes there are men in power who do not want the people
to have even this one eye open.

These poor persons in power are like Doctor Balouard of the Italian
Comedy, who does not want to be served by anyone but the dolt
Harlequin, and who is afraid of having too shrewd a valet.

Compose some odes in praise of My Lord Superbus Fadus, s