taught us to follow and embrace virtue and prudence, but she has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology; we know how to decline virtue, if we know not how to love it; if we do not know what prudence is really, and in effect, and by experience, we have the etymology and meaning of the word by heart. We are not content to know the extraction, kindred, and alliances of our neighbours, we would moreover have them our friends, and will establish a correspondency and intelligence with them; but this education of ours has taught us the definitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, as so many surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further care of establishing any familiarity or intimacy between her and us; she has culled out for our initiary instruction, not such books as contain the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin; and by these fine words has instilled in our fancy the vainest humours of antiquity. A good education alters the judgment and manners; as it happened to Polemon,1 a young debauched Greek, who going by chance to hear one of Xenocrates's lectures, did not only observe the eloquence and learning of the professor, and not only brought away the knowledge of some fine matter, but a more manifest and a more solid profit, which was the sudden change and reformation of his former life. Who ever found such an effect of our discipline? Faciasne, quod olim Mutatus Polemon? ponas insignia morbi, Dicitur ex collo furtim carpsisse coronas, Postquam est impransi correptus voce magistri ? 2 "Canst thou, like Polemon reclaim'd, remove Another course, and grew a sober man? That seems to me to be the least contemptible condition of 1 Laertius, in Vita, iv. 16. 2 Horace, Sat. ii. 3, 253. The manners of men which, by its plainness and simplicity is seated in the lowest rank, and invites us to a the meaner sort of people more regumore regular conversation. I find the manners lar than those of the philosophers. and language of country people commonly better suited to the rule and prescription of true philosophy than those of our philosophers themselves. Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit. "The vulgar are so much the wiser, because they only know what is needful for them to know." The most remarkable men whom I have judged by outward appearances (for, to judge of them according to my own method, I must penetrate a great deal deeper), for war and military conduct, were the Duke of Guise, who died at Orleans, and the late Marshal Strozzi. For men of great ability, and no common virtue, Olivier and De l'Hospital, chancellors of France. Poetry too, in my opinion, has flourished in this age of ours; we have abundance of very good artificers in the trade;-Aurat,2 Beza, Buchanan, L'Hospital, Montdoré, and Turnebus; as to the French, I believe they have raised poetry to the highest pitch to which it can ever arrive; and in those parts of it wherein Ronsard and Du Bellay excel, I find them little inferior to the ancient perfection. Adrian Turnebus knew more, and knew what he did know better, than any man of his time, or long before him. The lives of the late Duke of Alva, and of our Constable De Montmorency, were both of them great and noble, and that had many rare turns of fortune; but the beauty and glory of the death of the last, in the sight of Paris and of his king, in their service, against his nearest relations, at the head of an 1 Lactant. Divin. Instit. iii. 5. 2 Or rather Dorat, of which Aurat(us) is merely the Latinized form. This learned poet, Joseph Scaliger informs us, wrote more than 50,000 verses-French, Greek, and Latin. 3 Pierre Montdoré, the least known of those here named, was master of requests, and librarian to the king. He is made mention of by L'Hospital in his Latin poems (page 91 and 521, ed. of 1825), and VOL. II. 27 by Saint-Marthe in his Eloges. The rigourists who reproach Montaigne for having cited the Calvinist Theodore de Beza might equally have been scandalized at his mentioning Montdoré; for this learned man, a master of Aristotle and a skilful mathematician, was persecuted in 1567, and driven from Orleans, his native place, for his attachment to the new opin ions. He retired to Sancerre, in Berri, where he died in 1571. army, victorious through his conduct, and by a bold stroke, in so extreme an old age, merits, methinks, to be recorded amongst the most remarkable events of our times; as also the constant virtue, sweetness of manners, and conscientious facility, of Monsieur de la Noue,1 in so great an injustice of armed parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, and robbery), wherein he always kept up the reputation of a great and experienced captain. I have taken a delight to publish in several places the hopes I have of Mary de Gournay le Jars,2 my adopted daughter, beloved by me with more than a paternal love, and treasured up in my solitude and retirement as one of the best parts of my own being; I have no regard to any thing in this world but her. If a man may presage from her youth, her soul will one day be capable of very great things; and, amongst others, of the perfection of that sacred friendship, to which we do not read that any of her sex could ever yet arrive; the sincerity and solidity of her manners are already sufficient for it; her affection towards me more than superabundant, and such as that there is nothing more to be wished, if not that the apprehension she has of my end, from the five and fifty years I had reached when she knew me, might not so much afflict her. The judgment she made of my first Essays, being a woman so young, and in this age, and alone in her own place; and the notable vehemence wherewith she loved and desired me, upon the sole esteem she had of me, before she ever saw my face, are things very worthy of consideration. 1A celebrated Calvinist hero, whose political and military discourses were printed in 1587. See the article Gournay in Bayle's Dictionary, where you will find that this young lady's opinion of the first Essays of Montaigne gave the occasion for this adoption, long before she ever saw Montaigne. A passage which Bayle quotes from M. Pasquier, in the note A, contains some remarkable particulars of this adoption: "Montaigne," says Pasquier," having in 1588 made a long stay at Paris, Mademoiselle le Jars came thither, on purpose to see him; and she and her mother carried him to their house at Gournay, where he spent two months in two or three visits, and met with as hearty a welcome as he could desire; and, finally, this virtuous lady, being informed of Montaigne's death, crossed almost through the whole kingdom of France with passports, as well from her own desire as by invitation from Montaigne's widow and daughter, to mix her tears with theirs, whose sorrows were boundless. Other virtues have little or no credit in this age; but valour is become popular by our civil wars; and in this we have souls great even to perfection, and in so great number that the choice is impossible to be made. This is all of the extraordinarily uncommon preeminence that has hitherto arrived at my knowledge. CHAPTER XVIII. OF GIVING THE LIE. speaks so often of work. WELL but, some one will say to me, this design of making a man's self the subject of his writings were Why Montaigne excusable in rare and famous men, who by himself in this their reputation had given others a curiosity to be fully informed of them. It is true, I confess it, and know very well, that tradesmen will scarce lift their eyes from their work to look at an ordinary man, when they will forsake their business and their shops to stare at an eminent person when he comes to town. It misbecomes any other to give his own character, but such a one who has qualities worthy of imitation, and whose life and opinions may serve for examples. Cæsar and Xenophon had whereon to found their narrations, in the greatness of their own performances, a just and solid foundation; and it were also to be wished that we had the journal papers of Alexander the Great, the commentaries that Augustus, Cato, Sylla, Brutus, and others, left of their actions; men love and study the representations of such men, even in copper and marble. This remonstrance is very true; but it very little concerns me: Non recito cuiquam, nisi amicis, idque rogatus; 'I seldom do rehearse, and when I do We have too many that rehearsers are, In baths, the forum, and the public square." I do not here form a statue to erect in the most eminent square of a city, in the church, or any public place; Non equidem hoc studeo, bullatis ut mihi nugis Pagina turgescat, Secreti loquimur; 2 "I study not to make my pages swell With mighty trifles-private things I tell ;" 'tis for the corner of some library, and to entertain a neighbour, a kinsman, or a friend, that has a mind to renew his acquaintance and familiarity with me in this image I have made of myself. Others have been encouraged to speak of themselves, because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation. I judge freely of the actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are nothing; I do not find so much good in myself as that I can't tell of it without blushing. What contentment would it be to me to hear any thus relate to me the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my ancestors! How attentively should I listen to it! Truly it would be a bad nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and arms. I preserve a bit of writing, a seal, a prayer-book, a particular sword, that has been used by them; and have not thrown the long staves my father generally carried in his hand out of my closet: Paterna vestis, et annulus, tanto carior est posteris, quanto erga 1 Hor. Sat. i. 4, 73. Instead of coactus, taigne has substituted rogatus, which as Horace has it in the first verse, Mon- more exactly expresses his thought. 2 Pers. v. 19. |