LXIX. Queen Brunequilda of France is execrated by nearly all sorts of authors as the worst woman the world ever knew. The wickednesses they attribute to her are innumerable and enormous; an unbridled lust, which attended her from her early youth till she attained the age of seventy-one; a furious ambition, to which she sacrificed all obligations, both human and divine; an outrageous cruelty, which sacrificed as victims to her resentment or ambition infinite numbers of innocent people, by poison or the dagger, and among them some of royal race. Who could imagine that any one would venture to stand up in defence of a woman, the relation of whose conduct has stained the page of all histories, which speak of her, with blood? Notwithstanding this, there appears an evidence on her behalf, whose testimony, if you give it the credit his merit and character intitle him to, will avert the force of the accusation, and cause it to vanish in smoke. This is the great Gregory, who, in two letters he wrote to that queen, covers her with eulogiums, and goes so far in one of them, as to congratulate the French nation upon the happiness of being governed by a queen, who was an illustrious pattern of all kinds of virtues: _Præ aliis gentibus gentem Francorum asserimus felicem, quæ sic bonis omnibus præditam meruit habere reginam._ (lib. 1. epist. 8.) It is proper to observe, that the date of these letters, is posterior some years to the perpetration of most of the iniquities with which Brunequilda is charged. SECT. XXXIII. _Mahomet._ LXX. It is so currently asserted by all our writers, that the false prophet Mahomet was of low extraction, that the truth of it has come to be believed in all Christian countries, as an historical dogma. But the Arabic authors unanimously agree, that he was descended from the Corasinan family, which was one of the most noble and ancient of Mecca. It is true, that these may be mistaken; but then they are the only people who could know any thing of the matter.