duty of all good historians. They keep a record of important events; amongst the public happenings are comprised common rumours and opinions. It is their business to set down popular beliefs, not to square them. That part concerns theologians and philosophers, directors of consciences. Wherefore this friend of his, and like him a great man, says very wisely: Equidem plura transcribo quam credo; nam nec affirmare sustineo de quibus dubito, nec subducere quae accepi; this is very well said. (c) And this other: Haec neque affirmare, neque refellere operæ pretium est . . . famæ rerum standum est. And, writing in an age when belief in miracles was beginning to diminish, he says that none the less he does not choose to fail to insert in his annals, and give standing to, any thing accepted by so many men of worth and regarded with such reverence in ancient times.3 (b) Let them give us history more according to what they receive than to what they believe. I, who have unlimited power over the subjects that I treat, and am accountable for it to no one, do not, nevertheless, altogether believe myself about it; I often hazard sudden bursts of my mind, (c) which I distrust, and certain verbal refinements which I am inclined to shake off.5 (b) But I let them pass at a venture. (c) I see that some persons take pride in such things; it is not for me alone to judge of them. I present myself standing up and lying down, front and back, right and left, and in all my natural attitudes. (b) Men's minds, even if alike in strength, are not always alike in conformity and in taste.

6

This is what my memory of Tacitus presents to me in gross and with much uncertainty. All general judgements are weak and imperfect.

1 Indeed, I set down more than I believe; for I undertake neither to affirm matters about which I am in doubt nor to withdraw what I have accepted as true. - Quintus Curtius, IX, 1.

2 It is not worth the trouble either to affirm or to disprove these matters . . . we must abide by the tradition. - Livy, Í, Præfatio, and VIII, 6.

* See Idem, XLIII, 13-15.

Moi qui suis roy de la matiere que je traicte.

De quoi je secoue les oreilles.

• Application.

CHAPTER IX

OF VANITY!

SOME Curious questions are suggested by this Essay. It has a marked irregularity of form, and, as familiarity with it increases, it seems almost as if two outlines, two forms, may be distinguished in it. Two different dates are found in it, each as being the date of its writing.

Montaigne refers twice to the death of his father, which took place in 1568, as having occurred eighteen years before the time when he was writing, which would make that time 1586; and on another page he speaks of the death of Pibrac (1584) as recent. But he says: Je suis envielli de huit ans depuis mes premières publications. This would make the year 1588, as the first edition of the Essays was of 1580.

It may be said that perhaps this Essay was on the stocks for two years. The character of the opening pages is such that, written in the year of the publication of the edition of the Essays in which for the first time this Third Book appeared, they might serve almost as a preface to all the Essays.

These opening pages express Montaigne's recognition of the endlessness of his subject and of its (apparent) triviality, and uselessness (to the State), leading on to the remark that escrivaillerie is one sign of a nation's decadence.

But even worse than the folly of idle writing is his weakness, he says, in throwing every thing to the dogs when matters go badly; a despairing despondency that he expresses in one of those sentences of melancholy which, as the Saône with the Rhone, mingle with the large flow of his philosophy: Ce m'est faveur que la desolation de cet Estat se rencontre à la desolation de mon aage. He later fears that the trahison of his memory may be perceptible in these revasseries.

But, however imperfect his revasseries may be, laisse, lecteur, courir encore ce coup d'essay et ce troisiesme alongeail du reste des pieces de ma peinture. He gives his reasons why he does not correct his writings (in essentials), but only adds to them, and he thanks les honnestes hommes who have accepted his efforts with good-will.

Later he says: Je sens ce proffit inesperé de la publication de mes meurs, qu'elle me sert aucunement [that is, un peu] de regle, and he adds, with some tone of disappointment, that, besides this profit, he had hoped, in making himself known to the world, for another gain, the happiness of finding a friend.

1 It is to be observed that "vanity" has not here its ordinary significance, but is used rather in the sense of the "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," of the Preacher.

And still later: J'escris mon livre à peu d'hommes et à peu d'années; and this passage closes with a saddened sentence, to the effect that there will be no one by whom his memory will be cherished because of such affectionate and intimate knowledge of him as he had of his friend La Boëtie.

Interposed in these passages are others of a wholly different nature: page after page of cheerful garrulousness and conversational philosophy about his pleasure in travelling, merging into consideration of the wretched conditions of France; and his thought deepens, his voice strengthens, and the most serious questions of public importance are discussed with admirable vigour of intellect. He continues by describing his own personal position in the midst of the national troubles, and this leads him to the deeply interesting, much criticised, reflections on death. He then passes back to his travelling inclinations, and takes up the complaints brought against him for leaving his family, and for running the risk of dying away from home. He philosophises seriously on these points, so seriously that it carries him into reflections on the inconsistency between the moral laws that men lay down and their general conduct, the discussion of which forms an immense parenthesis of eight or ten pages, from Je voy souvent qu'on nous propose des images de vie to J'avois à dire que je veus mal à cette raison trouble feste, where he comes back to the subject of the captious difficulties raised by his friends.

It is very noticeable in these pages that in no Essay does Montaigne lay such stress on the necessity of careful and subtle attention on the part of his reader. In one passage he speaks of the mistakes that have occurred in the printing of the Essays:

Ne te prens point à moy, lecteur, de [ fautes] qui se coulent icy par la fantasie ou inadvertance d'autruy; chaque main, chaque ouvrier, y apporte les siennes. . . . Où ils rompent du tout [that is, tout-à-fait] le sens, je m'en donne peu de peine, car aumoins, ils me deschargent; mais où ils en substituent un faux, comme ils font si souvent, et me destournent à leur conception, ils me perdent. Toutesfois, quand la sentence n'est forte à ma mesure, un honneste homme la doit refuser pour mienne.

T

HERE is perchance no more express vanity_than to write of it so vainly. That which the Deity has thereon so divinely said to us should be carefully and constantly thought of by men of understanding. Who does not see that I have entered on a road by which without pause and without toil I may travel, as long as there are ink and paper in the world? I can not keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune makes them too humble; I keep it by my thoughts. In like manner I once saw a gentleman who made known his life only by the operation of his bowels; you might see at his house, on

exhibition, a row of pots of seven or eight days' use; it was his study, his conversation; every other subject had a bad smell to him. In these pages are found, a little more decently, the voidings of an old mind, now hard, now lax, and always undigested. And when shall I have done setting forth the continual motion and mutation of my thoughts, whatever matter they fall upon, since Diomedes wrote six thousand books on the sole subject of grammar?1 What may not careless talk give birth to, when the stammering and imperfect speech of early ages stuffed the world with such a horrible mass of volumes! So many words about mere words! O Pythagoras, would that thou couldst have conjured to silence this tempest!2 One Galba in ancient times was blamed because he lived in idleness; he answered that every man should render an account of his actions, not of his inaction. He was mistaken; for justice takes cognisance of, and censures, those who work not.

But there should be some legal restraint of stupid and useless writers, as there is of vagabonds and loiterers; I and a hundred other writers would then be cast out from the hands of our people. I am not jesting: scribbling seems to be a symptom of an age of excess; when did we ever write so much as since our public disturbances? And when did the Romans write so much as at the time of their downfall? Moreover, the bettering of men's minds is not one with the bettering of the government; this idle kind of working is due to this, that every one goes laxly about the business of his calling and wanders away from it. The corruption of the age is made up by the special contribution of each one of us; some furnish treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to the degree of their

4

1 Montaigne evidently took this from Bodin, Methodus, etc., who confused a certain Diomedes, who lived about the sixth century A.D., with "Didymus grammaticus," of whom Seneca speaks (Epistle 88) as having written 4000 volumes.

2 Pythagoras imposed on his disciples a silence of five years.

The original source of the last clause is Suetonius (Life of Galba), who gives the saying to the Emperor Galba. Montaigne evidently took it at second hand from some book where the first clause had been added and the personage not clearly indicated.

4

L'affinement des esprits, ce n'en est pas l'assagissement en une police.

power; the weaker bring to it dulness, trifling,1 idleness of whom I am one. It would seem as if it were the season for trifling things when harmful ones press upon us. At a time when to do evil is so common, to do only what is useless is, as it were, praiseworthy. I am of good cheer because I shall be amongst the last upon whom there will be occasion to lay hands. While the more prominent [sinners] are being attended to, I shall have time to mend my ways; for it seems to me that it would be contrary to reason to proceed against petty unsuitablenesses when we are infested by great ones. And the physician Philotimus said, when a man presented him his finger to dress, who, by his face and his breath, he perceived had an ulcer on the lung, "My friend, now is not the time to concern yourself about your nails."2 However, I saw some years ago I may here- that a person whose memory I hold in peculiar regard thought well to publish at the height of our great disasters, when neither law, nor justice, nor magistracy performed its functions any more than to-day, certain trivial reforms concerning apparel, cookery, and legal pettifogging. Such are matters with which a misguided people is occupied and fed, to show that it is not entirely forgotten. These others do likewise, who insist on urgently prohibiting certain forms of speech, dances, and games, to a people given over to all sorts of execrable vices; it is no time to bathe and cleanse oneself when one is attacked by a violent fever. (c) It is for the Spartans alone to comb and curl their hair at the moment that they are about to throw themselves headlong into some extreme risk of life.3

say

(b) As for myself, I have this other worse habit: if I have a slipper carelessly put on, I am careless also about my shirt and my cloak; I scorn to amend myself by halves. When I am in a bad plight, I desperately aid the evil; I give myself up, from despair, and let myself go toward my overthrow, (c) and, as they say, cast the helve after the hatchet. (b) I insist that things are getting worse and worse, and think myself no longer worth my care; either all well 2 See Plutarch, Of Hearing.

1 Vanité.

See Herodotus, VII, 209. 4 Cappe: a short cloak with a hood.