At Rome, where such disputes never arise, and where they judge those that take place elsewhere, they were much annoyed with quarrels on pure love. Cardinal Carpegne, who was the reporter of the affairs of the archbishop of Cambray, was ill, and suffered much in a part which is not more spared in cardinals than in other men. His surgeon bandaged him with fine linen, which is called cambrai (cambric) in Italy as in many other places. The cardinal cried out, when the surgeon pleaded that it was the finest cambrai: "What! more cambrai still? Is it not enough to have one's head fatigued with it?" Happy the disputes which end thus! Happy would man be if all the disputers of the world, if heresiarchs, submitted with so much moderation, such magnanimous mildness, as the great archbishop of Cambray, who had no desire to be an heresiarch! I know not whether he was right in wishing God to be loved for himself alone, but M. de Fénelon certainly deserved to be loved thus.
In purely literary disputes there is often as much snarling and party spirit as in more interesting quarrels. We should, if we could, renew the factions of the circus, which agitated the Roman Empire. Two rival actresses are capable of dividing a town. Men have all a secret fascination for faction. If we cannot cabal, pursue, and destroy one another for crowns, tiaras, and mitres, we fall upon one another for a dancer or a musician. Rameau had a violent party against him, who would have exterminated him; and he knew nothing of it. I had a violent party against me, and I knew it well.
WHYS (THE).
Why do we scarcely ever know the tenth part of the good we might do? Iris clear, that if a nation living between the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the sea, had employed, in ameliorating and embellishing the country, a tenth part of the money it lost in the war of 1741, and one-half of the men killed to no purpose in Germany, the state would have been more flourishing. Why was not this done? Why prefer a war, which Europe considered unjust, to the happy labors of peace, which would have produced the useful and the agreeable?
Why did Louis XIV., who had so much taste for great monuments, for new foundations, for the fine arts, lose eight hundred millions of our money in seeing his cuirassiers and his household swim across the Rhine in not taking Amsterdam; in stirring up nearly all Europe against him? What could he not have done with his eight hundred millions?
Why, when he reformed jurisprudence, did he reform it only by halves? Ought the numerous ancient customs, founded on the decretals and the canon law, to be still suffered to exist? Was it necessary that in the many causes called ecclesiastical, but which are in reality civil, appeal should be made to the bishop; from the bishop to the metropolitan; from the metropolitan to the primate; and from the primate to Rome, "ad apostolos"?—as if the apostles had of old been the judges of the Gauls "en dernier ressort."
Why, when Louis XIV. was outrageously insulted by Pope Alexander VII.—Chigi—did he amuse himself with sending into France for a legate, to make frivolous excuses, and with having a pyramid erected at Rome, the inscriptions over which concerned none but the watchmen of Rome—a pyramid which he soon after had abolished? Had it not been better to have abolished forever the simony by which every bishop and every abbot in Gaul pays to the Italian apostolic chamber the half of his revenue?
Why did the same monarch, when still more grievously insulted by Innocent XI.—Odescalchi—who took the part of the prince of Orange against him, content himself with having four propositions maintained in his universities, and refuse the prayers of the whole magistracy, who solicited an eternal rupture with the court of Rome?
Why, in making the laws, was it forgotten to place all the provinces of the kingdom under one uniform law, leaving in existence a hundred different customs, and a hundred and forty-four different measures?