one perfection is required, toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled, on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced, for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors, for their wisdom. As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains[1] wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be, the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
CHAP. VII.
NOTHING but an extreme love of truth, could have hindered me from concealing this part of my
- ↑ Instead of 'wringed,' it should have been, 'wrung.'
