Some years ago I passed through the territory of a sovereign prince who, as a courtesy and to abate my incredulity, did me the favour to let me see, in his presence and in private, ten or twelve prisoners of this sort, and amongst them an old woman, a true witch in ugliness and deformity, very famous and of great influence for many years in that profession. I heard both testimony and free confessions, and saw I know not what painless mark upon that wretched old woman; and I investigated and talked my fill, giving to this matter the soundest attention I could and I am not a man who allows his judgement to be strangled by prejudice. In the end, and in all conscience, I should have decreed for them hellebore rather than hemlock. (c) Captisque res magis mentibus quam consceleratis similis visa. (b) Justice has its own proper way of treating such maladies. As for the contradictory opinions and arguments which worthy men have placed before me, both there and often elsewhere, I have not heard any that hold me, or that do not admit of a solution always more probable than their conclusions. To be sure, it is true that those testimonies and arguments which are based (c) on experience and (b) on fact, those I do not unravel—indeed, they have no end to take hold of; I often cut them as Alexander cut his knot. After all, it is placing a very high value on one's conjectures to cause a man to be burned alive because of them. (c) We are told of divers instances resembling what Prestantius says of his father, that, having fallen into a slumber much more profound than a sound sleep, he imagined that he was a mare and served the soldiers as a sumpter beast; and what he imagined, he was.2 If what witches dream be thus materialised, if dreams can sometimes be thus embodied in facts, still I do not believe that our imagination is therefore in the keeping of men's justice.3 (b) This I say as one who is neither a judge nor a counsellor of kings, and who deems himself very far from worthy to be so, but as a man of the common sort, born and devoted to 1 The case seemed more like a deranged mind than a criminal one. - Livy, VIII, 18. 2 See St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, XVIII, 18. 3 Que nostre volonté en fust tenue à la justice. 1 obedience to public welfare, both by his deeds and by his words. He who should make account of my idle fancies to the prejudice of the pettiest law, or belief, or custom of his village, would greatly wrong himself, and me not less. (c) For in what I say I warrant no assurance other than that it is what at that time I had in my thought a disorderly and vacillating thought. I speak of every thing as matter for talk, and of nothing as matter for advice; nec me pudet ut istos fateri nescire quod nesciam.2 (b) I should not be so bold in speaking if I claimed to be believed, and this was what I answered a great man who complained of the severity and contentiousness of my counsels. "Because you feel your mind bent and prepared in one direction, put before you the other, with all the care I can, to enlighten your judgement, not to compel it. God guides the thoughts of your heart and will provide your choice. I am not so presumptuous as to desire even that my opinions should be impelling in a matter of such importance; my fortune has not prepared them for such potent and high decisions." In truth, I have not only a great number of traits, but also many opinions which I should be willing that my son, if I had one, should dislike. What if the most truthful opinions be not always the most advantageous for man, whose composition is so irregular! I A propos, ou hors de propos, il n'importe, on dict en Italie en commun proverbe, que celuy-là ne cognoit pas Venus en sa parfaicte douceur qui n'a couché avec la boiteuse. La fortune ou quelque particulier accident ont mis il y a long temps ce mot en la bouche du peuple, et se dit des masles comme des femelles; car la royne des Amazones respondit au Scyte qui la convioit à l'amour: Αριστα χωλὸς οἰφεῖ le boiteux le faict le mieux. En cette republique feminine, pour fuir la domination des masles, elles les stropioient des l'enfance, bras, jambes, et autres membres qui leur donnoient avantage sur elles, et se servoient d'eux à ce seule 1 C'est par maniere de devis que je parle de tout, et de rien par maniere d'advis. 2 Nor am I ashamed, as they are, to confess that I do not know what I do not know. - Cicero, Tusc. Disp., I, 25. • Des complexions. ment à quoy nous nous servons d'elles par deçà. J'eusse dict que le mouvement detraqué de la boiteuse apportast quelque nouveau plaisir à la besongne et quelque pointe de douceur à ceux qui l'essayent; mais je viens d'apprendre que mesme la philosophie ancienne en a decidé:1 elle dict que les jambes et cuisses des boiteuses ne recevant, à cause de leur imperfection, l'aliment qui leur est deu, il en advient que les parties genitales qui sont au dessus sont plus plaines, plus nourries et vigoureuses; ou bien que, ce defaut empeschant l'exercice, ceux qui en sont entachez dissipent moins leurs forces et en viennent plus entiers aux jeux de Venus; qui est aussi la raison pourquoy les Grecs descrioient les tisserandes d'estre plus chaudes que les autres femmes, à cause du mestier sedentaire qu'elles font, sans grand exercice du corps. Dequoy ne pouvons-nous raisonner à ce prix là? De celles ici je pourrois aussi dire que ce tremoussement, que leur ouvrage leur donne ainsin assises, les esveille et sollicite, comme faict les dames le crolement et tremblement de leurs coches. Do not these examples confirm what I said at the beginning, that our reasonings often anticipate the fact and that the extent of their jurisdiction is so boundless that they pass judgement and exert themselves in vacuity itself and about non-existent things? Besides the flexibility of our invention in devising explanations of all sorts of dreams, our imagination is equally ready to receive false impressions from very frivolous tokens; car, par la seule authorité de l'usage ancien et publique de ce mot, je me suis autresfois faict à croire avoir receu plus de plaisir d'une femme de ce qu'elle n'estoit pas droicte, et mis cela au compte de ses graces. Torquato Tasso, in the comparison that he makes of Italy and France, says that he noticed this: that our legs are more slender than those of Italian gentlemen; and he attributes the cause to our being constantly on horseback; 2 which is the very thing from which Suetonius draws a wholly different conclusion; for he says, on the contrary, that Germanicus had increased the size of his legs by con1 See Aristotle, Problems, X, problem 26. 2 See Tasso, Paragon dell'Italia alla Francia. stant use of the same exercise.1 There is nothing so pliant and vagrant as our understanding; it is like the shoe of Theramenes, fitted for both feet; 2 whilst it is two-fold and various, subject-matters likewise are two-fold and various. "Give me a drachma of silver," said a cynic philosopher to Antigonus. "That is not the present of a king," he answered. "Give me then a talent." "That is not the present for a cynic." Seu plures calor ille vias et cæca relaxat Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas; Acrior, aut Boreæ penetrabile frigus adurat.1 Ogni medaglia ha il suo riverso. That is why Clitomachus said of old that Carneades had outdone the labours of Hercules because he had eradicated from men acquiescence, that is, false opinions and rashness in judging. This so vigorous conceit of Carneades sprang in my opinion from the impudence of those who in old days made profession of knowledge, and from their immoderate presumption. Æsop was put up for sale, with two other slaves. The buyer enquired of the first of these what he knew how to do; and he, to make himself valued, promised wonders — that he knew this and that; the second answered as much or more for himself. When it came Æsop's turn, and he also was asked what he knew how to do, "Nothing," he said, "for these others have taken possession of every thing; they know every thing." Thus has it come about in the school of philosophy: the arrogance of those who attributed to the 1 See Suetonius, Life of Caligula. 7 2 See Plutarch, Political Precepts; Erasmus, Adages (cothurno versatilior). See Plutarch, Of False Shame; Seneca, De Beneficiis, II, 17. • Whether the heat opens many passages and hidden pores, by which the moisture may come into the young plants, or hardens the ground and contracts the gaping channels, so that fine rains may not injure it, or the keen power of the fierce-burning sun or the piercing cold of Boreas blast it. - Virgil, Georgics, I, 89. ' Every medallion has its reverse side. — Italian proverb. • See Cicero, Academica, II, 34. 7 Monts et merveilles. human mind capacity for all things gave occasion in others, from disdain and opposition, to the opinion that it is capable of nothing. The latter maintain the same extreme opinion of ignorance that the former maintain of knowledge, so that we can not deny that man is immoderate throughout, and that nothing stays him but necessity and inability to go further. CHAPTER XII OF PHYSIOGNOMY In this Essay, as in some others, the reason for the title does not appear till toward the end: the word "physiognomy" does not occur for some thirty pages. It always interests me to trace out the possible origin of this seeming unfitness of the title, and in this case I find the following explanation. It is evident that Montaigne's thoughts were at this moment much occupied by Socrates, and, lover of beauty that he was, in thinking of him he had felt over and over again how much he regretted that Socrates had "a figure and face so ill favoured and so unfitting the beauty of his soul"; and thus being led to consider what and how much the physiognomy means, he thought it a good subject for an Essay. But, the title being written, it was of the soul of Socrates that he began to think more than of his body, and for some pages he discourses admirably on him and his philosophy. The character of this philosophy leads Montaigne to comment on what he has been observing lately in the peasants - les pauvres gens — around him; and from this the transition is natural to a long account of nos troubles the civil war and the plague and his own share of them. Sainte-Beuve, in writing of this Essay (Causeries de Lundi, IV, 93), says: "The consolation that Montaigne here offers to himself and to others is as lofty and as beautiful as human consolation, without prayer, can be." On another page he remarks: "All this chapter is fine, touching, fitting, giving evidence both of a noble stoical elevation and of the easy and kindly nature that Montaigne by good right said had been given him by birth and education." A valuable and forever timely part of the Essay is the praise that follows of simplicity, of keeping close to nature, to simple and natural conditions of feeling, of which Socrates's address to his judges, "of unimaginable loftiness, true, frank, and just," is a perfect example. These pages deserve immortality. They are chiefly concerned with our feelings about death, but they are of large outlook and inclusion. From these high moral thoughts, Montaigne slips easily into remarks on the simplicity of the style of Socrates, and from these to half-jesting about the ornamentation of his own style from a superabundance of |