LETTER CXXVII. Rica to Ibben, at Smyrna.

A THOUSAND times thou hast heard talk of the famous king of Sweden; he was besieging a place, in the kingdom of Norway; as he was visiting the trenches, with only one engineer, he received a shot in his head which killed him. They immediately arrested his prime minister Baron Gortz. ^†352, the states assembled, and condemned him to lose his head. He was accused of a very great crime; namely, of calumniating the nation, and depriving them of the confidence of their king: an offence that in my opinion merits a thousand deaths. For in short it is a bad action to blacken the lowest subjects in the mind of their king; what is it then to traduce a whole nation, and to deprive them of the goodwill of him whom providence hath made choice of to render them happy? I would have men speak to kings, as the angels spoke to our holy prophet. Thou knowest that, in the sacred banquets, where the Lord of Lords descends from the most sublime

throne in the world, to communicate himself to his slaves, I made a severe law to myself, to restrain an unruly tongue. They never heard me utter a single word that might have been disagreeable to the meanest of his subjects. Though I happened to lose my sobriety, I never lost my honesty; and in that trial of our fidelity, I ventured my life, but never my virtue. I know not how it happens, but there is scarcely a king so bad, but his minister is still worse; if he commits a bad action, he is almost always prompted to it: insomuch, that the ambition of princes is never so dangerous, as the baseness of soul in his counsellors. But can you comprehend, that a man, who was a minister but yesterday, who may be deprived of his place tomorrow, can become in a moment an enemy to himself, his friends, his country, and to the people who are to be born of those whom he is about to oppress? A prince hath passions; the minister works upon them: it is by their means that he directs his ministry; he hath no other aim, nor will he observe any other. The courtiers mislead him by their flattery, and he flatters him more dangerously by his counsels, by the designs he inspires him with, and by the maxims he proposes to him.

Paris, the 25th of the moon Saphar,
1719.