but amid his grammatical, literary, and historical discussions-every phrase and idea interpreted being illustrated from classical authorities- he speaks his mind with astonishing courage concerning the qualities and faults of kings and judges, States and societies. He bids monarchs remember that their best guardians are not armies or treasuries, but the fidelity of friends and the love of subjects. Arrogance may be natural in a prince, but it does not therefore cease to be an evil. A sovereign may ravage like a wild beast, but his reign will be robbery and oppression, and the robber is ever the enemy of man. Cruelty makes a king execrable; and he will be loved only as he imitates the gentleness of God. And so clemency is true humanity; it is a heroic virtue, hard to practise, yet without it we cannot be men. And he uses it to qualify the Stoic ethics; pity is not to him a disease of the soul, it is a sign and condition of health; no good man is without pity; the Athenians did well when they built an altar to this virtue. Cicero and even Juvenal teach us that it is a vice not to be able to weep. And the doctrine becomes in Calvin's hands social; man pitiful to men will be sensible of their rights and his own duties. Conscience is necessary for us, but his good name is necessary to our neighbour; and we must not so follow our conscience as to injure his good name. We ought so to follow nature that others may see the reason in the nature that we follow. He can be humorous, and laughs at the ridiculous ceremonies which accompanied the apotheosis of Caesar, or at the soothsayers who prophesied without smiling; but he is usually serious and grave, criticising Seneca for speaking of Fortune instead of God, and the Stoics for doctrines which make human nature good, yet isolate the good man from mankind. The ethics of the Stoics he loved, but not their metaphysics; their moral individualism and their forensic morality he admired, but the defects of their social and collective ideals he deplored and condemned. The humanist is alive with moral and political enthusiasm, but the Reformer is not yet born.
The events of the next few months are obscure, but we know enough to see how forces, internal and external, were working towards change. In the second half of 1532 and the earlier half of 1533 Calvin was in Orleans, studying, teaching, practising the law, and acting in the University as Proctor for the Picard nation; then he went to Noyon, and in October he was once more in Paris. The capital was agitated; Francis was absent, and his sister, Margaret of Navarre, held her Court there, favouring the new doctrines, encouraging the preachers, the chief among them being her own almoner, Gérard Roussel. Two letters of Calvin to Francis Daniel belong to this date and place; and in them we find a changed note. One speaks of "the troublous times," and the other narrates two events: first, it describes a play "pungent with gall and vinegar," which the students had performed in the College of Navarre to satirise the Queen; and secondly, the action of certain factious
