my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and
gave to every point a more favorable turn, by many degrees, than the
strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable
partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis[79] with
so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties
and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and
beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavor,
in 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 farther 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 farther into
his majesty's favor, I told him of an invention discovered between three
and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder into a heap, on
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,