those many
discourses I had with that monarch, although it unfortunately failed of
success.

But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded
from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted
with the manners and customs that most prevail in other nations: the want
of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain
narrowness of thinking, from which we, and the politer countries of
Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a
prince's notions of virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard for
all mankind.

To confirm what I have now said, and further to show the miserable
effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage, which
will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself further into
his majesty's favour, I told him of "an invention, discovered between
three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap
of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a
moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in
the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That
a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or
iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with
such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That
the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of
an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down
ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when
linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide
hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we
often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged
them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up
the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on
every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I knew the
ingredients very well, which were cheap and common; I understood the
manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make
those tubes, of a size proportionable to all other things in his
majesty's kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long;
twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of
powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town