onk.

"Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I,
"that it is allowable to fight a duel."

"Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you
on that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a
passage cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well
known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly
and unscrupulously addicted, are such as would lead people to
conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is
actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them
to say of him that he was a _hen_, and not a man--_gallina, et non
vir_; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the
appointed spot--not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting
a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the
person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His
action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly
indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's stepping into a
field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and
defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And thus the
gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact, it cannot be
called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed
to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
the gentleman never had.'"

The humorous irony of Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," plays like
the diffusive sheen of an aurora borealis over the whole surface of the
composition. It does not often deliver itself startlingly in sudden
discharges as of lightning. You need to school your sense somewhat, not
to miss a fine effect now and then. Consider the broadness and
coarseness in pleasantry, that, before Pascal, had been common, almost
universal, in controversy, and you will better understand what a
creative touch it was of genius, of feeling, and of taste, that brought
into literature the far more than Attic, the ineffable Christian,
purity of that wit and humor in the "Provincial Letters" which will make
these writings live as long as men anywhere continue to read the
productions of past ages. Erasmus, perhaps, came the nearest of all
modern predecessors to anticipating the purified pleasantry of Pascal.

It will be interestin