very mouth of danger, and of trance-like stupidities of inaction, and also of seeming courage, all caused by this strange passion.
And his conclusion from all this is, — and herein he truly shows himself bon naturaliste, — “The thing I am most afraid of is fear.”
A somewhat irrelevant sentence: ”Those who are in extreme dread … of being exiled …” brings vividly before us the fortunes of those days, the causes for fear, for “constant anguish,” of which we know nothing.
I AM not a good natural philosopher,[2] as the term is, and I do not well know by what authority fear acts in us; but I know this, that it is a strange passion, and physicians say that there is none which more quickly sweeps our judgement from its due place. In truth, I have seen many persons beside themselves with fear; and in the calmest minds it is beyond question that, while the attack lasts, it causes terrible bewilderments. I leave aside the common people, to whom it sometimes presents its grandsires come from their graves wrapped in their windingsheets, sometimes hobgoblins or imps or chimæras. But even among soldiers, where it should least of all find a place, how many times has it transformed a flock of sheep into a squadron of pikemen; reeds and rushes into men-at-arms and lancers; friends into foes, and the white cross into the red![3]
When Monsieur de Bourbon took Rome,[4] a standard-bearer, who was on guard at the gate of the quarter of St. Peter, was so terrified at the first alarum, that he rushed through a breach in a ruined wall, standard in hand, out of the city and straight to the enemy, thinking that he was going into the city; and at last, seeing the troop of Monsieur de Bourbon preparing to meet him, still thinking that it was a sortie on the part of those within the city, he came to himself, and, turning about, reëntered by the same breach through which he had gone forth more than three hundred
