gdom. Nevertheless, amongst the good men of that party (for I do not
speak of those who only make a pretence of it, either to execute their
own particular revenges or to gratify their avarice, or to conciliate the
favour of princes, but of those who engage in the quarrel out of true
zeal to religion and a holy desire to maintain the peace and government
of their country), of these, I say, we see many whom passion transports
beyond the bounds of reason, and sometimes inspires with counsels that
are unjust and violent, and, moreover, rash.

It is certain that in those first times, when our religion began to gain
authority with the laws, zeal armed many against all sorts of pagan
books, by which the learned suffered an exceeding great loss, a disorder
that I conceive to have done more prejudice to letters than all the
flames of the barbarians. Of this Cornelius Tacitus is a very good
testimony; for though the Emperor Tacitus, his kinsman, had, by express
order, furnished all the libraries in the world with it, nevertheless one
entire copy could not escape the curious examination of those who desired
to abolish it for only five or six idle clauses that were contrary to our
belief.

They had also the trick easily to lend undue praises to all the emperors
who made for us, and universally to condemn all the actions of those who
were adversaries, as is evidently manifest in the Emperor Julian,
surnamed the Apostate,

[The character of the Emperor Julian was censured, when Montaigne
was at Rome in 1581, by the Master of the Sacred Palace, who,
however, as Montaigne tells us in his journal (ii. 35), referred it
to his conscience to alter what he should think in bad taste. This
Montaigne did not do, and this chapter supplied Voltaire with the
greater part of the praises he bestowed upon the Emperor.--Leclerc.]

who was, in truth, a very great and rare man, a man in whose soul
philosophy was imprinted in the best characters, by which he professed to
govern all his actions; and, in truth, there is no sort of virtue of
which he has not left behind him very notable examples: in chastity (of
which the whole of his life gave manifest proof) we read the same of him
that was said of Alexander and Scipio, that being in the flower of his
age, for he was slain by the Parthians at one-and-thirty, of a great many
very beautiful captives, he would not so much as look upon one. As to
his justice, he took him