I could, and I am not a man to suffer my judgment to
be made captive by prepossession. In the end, and in all conscience, I
should rather have prescribed them hellebore than hemlock;

"Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa;"

["The thing was rather to be attributed to madness, than malice."
("The thing seemed to resemble minds possessed rather than guilty.")
--Livy, viii, 18.]

justice has its corrections proper for such maladies. As to the
oppositions and arguments that worthy men have made to me, both there,
and often in other places, I have met with none that have convinced me,
and that have not admitted a more likely solution than their conclusions.
It is true, indeed, that the proofs and reasons that are founded upon
experience and fact, I do not go about to untie, neither have they any
end; I often cut them, as Alexander did the Gordian knot. After all,
'tis setting a man's conjectures at a very high price upon them to cause
a man to be roasted alive.

We are told by several examples, as Praestantius of his father, that
being more profoundly, asleep than men usually are, he fancied himself
to be a mare, and that he served the soldiers for a sumpter; and what
he fancied himself to be, he really proved. If sorcerers dream so
materially; if dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with
effects, still I cannot believe that therefore our will should be
accountable to justice; which I say as one who am neither judge nor privy
councillor, and who think myself by many degrees unworthy so to be, but a
man of the common sort, born and avowed to the obedience of the public
reason, both in its words and acts. He who should record my idle talk as
being to the prejudice of the pettiest law, opinion, or custom of his
parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me much more; for, in
what I say, I warrant no other certainty, but that 'tis what I had then
in my thought, a tumultuous and wavering thought. All I say is by way of
discourse, and nothing by way of advice:

"Nec me pudet, ut istos fateri nescire, quod nesciam;"

["Neither am I ashamed, as they are, to confess my ignorance of what
I do not know."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.]

I should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed; and so I
told a great man, who complained of the tartness and contentiousness of
my exhortations. Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on on