ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 17. 

IX. Of Vanity

CHAPTER IX

OF VANITY

There is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of it sovainly. That which divinity has so divinely expressed to us--["Vanityof vanities: all is vanity. "--Eccles. , i. 2. ]--ought to be carefully andcontinually meditated by men of understanding. Who does not see that Ihave taken a road, in which, incessantly and without labour, I shallproceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world? I can giveno account of my life by my actions; fortune has placed them too low: Imust do it by my fancies. And yet I have seen a gentleman who onlycommunicated his life by the workings of his belly: you might see on hispremises a show of a row of basins of seven or eight days' standing; itwas his study, his discourse; all other talk stank in his nostrils. Here, but not so nauseous, are the excrements of an old mind, sometimesthick, sometimes thin, and always indigested. And when shall I have donerepresenting the continual agitation and mutation of my thoughts, as theycome into my head, seeing that Diomedes wrote six thousand books upon thesole subject of grammar?

 [It was not Diomedes, but Didymus the grammarian, who, as Seneca (Ep. , 88) tells us, wrote four not six thousand books on questions of vain literature, which was the principal study of the ancient grammarian. --Coste. But the number is probably exaggerated, and for books we should doubtless read pamphlets or essays. ]

What, then, ought prating to produce, since prattling and the firstbeginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load ofvolumes? So many words for words only. O Pythagoras, why didst not thouallay this tempest? They accused one Galba of old for living idly; hemade answer, "That every one ought to give account of his actions, butnot of his home. " He was mistaken, for justice also takes cognisance ofthose who glean after the reaper. 

But there should be some restraint of law against foolish and impertinentscribblers, as well as against vagabonds and idle persons; which if therewere, both I and a hundred others would be banished from the reach of ourpeople. I do not speak this in jest: scribbling seems to be a symptom ofa disordered and licentious age. When did we write so much as since ourtroubles? when the Romans so much, as upon the point of ruin? Besidesthat, the refining of wits does not make people wiser in a government:this idle employment springs from this, that every one applies himselfnegligently to the duty of his vocation, and is easily debauched from it. The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution ofevery individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power; theweaker sort contribute folly, vanity, and idleness; of these I am one. It seems as if it were the season for vain things, when the hurtfuloppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do but what signifiesnothing is a kind of commendation. 'Tis my comfort, that I shall be oneof the last who shall be called in question; and whilst the greateroffenders are being brought to account, I shall have leisure to amend:for it would, methinks, be against reason to punish littleinconveniences, whilst we are infested with the greater. As thephysician Philotimus said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who he perceived, both by his complexion and his breath, had an ulcerin his lungs: "Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails. "--[Plutarch, How we may distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend. ]

And yet I saw, some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have invery great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when therewas neither law nor justice, nor magistrate who performed his office, nomore than there is now, publish I know not what pitiful reformationsabout cloths, cookery, and law chicanery. Those are amusements wherewithto feed a people that are ill-used, to show that they are not totallyforgotten. Those others do the same, who insist upon prohibitingparticular ways of speaking, dances, and games, to a people totallyabandoned to all sorts of execrable vices. 'Tis no time to bathe andcleanse one's self, when one is seized by a violent fever; it was for theSpartans alone to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they werejust upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of theirlife. 

For my part, I have that worse custom, that if my slipper go awry, I letmy shirt and my cloak do so too; I scorn to mend myself by halves. 

When I am in a bad plight, I fasten upon the mischief; I abandon myselfthrough despair; I let myself go towards the precipice, and, as they say, "throw the helve after the hatchet"; I am obstinate in growing worse, andthink myself no longer worth my own care; I am either well or illthroughout. 'T is a favour to me, that the desolation of this kingdomfalls out in the desolation of my age: I better suffer that my ill bemultiplied, than if my well had been disturbed. --[That, being ill, Ishould grow worse, than that, being well, I should grow ill. ]--The wordsI utter in mishap are words of anger: my courage sets up its bristles, instead of letting them down; and, contrary to others, I am more devoutin good than in evil fortune, according to the precept of Xenophon, ifnot according to his reason; and am more ready to turn up my eyes toheaven to return thanks, than to crave. I am more solicitous to improvemy health, when I am well, than to restore it when I am sick;prosperities are the same discipline and instruction to me thatadversities and rods are to others. As if good fortune were a thinginconsistent with good conscience, men never grow good but in evilfortune. Good fortune is to me a singular spur to modesty andmoderation: an entreaty wins, a threat checks me; favour makes me bend, fear stiffens me. 

Amongst human conditions this is common enough: to be better pleased withforeign things than with our own, and to love innovation and change:

 "Ipsa dies ideo nos grato perluit haustu, Quod permutatis hora recurrit equis:"

 ["The light of day itself shines more pleasantly upon us because it changes its horses every hour. " Spoke of a water hour-glass, adds Cotton. ]

I have my share. Those who follow the other extreme, of being quitesatisfied and pleased with and in themselves, of valuing what they haveabove all the rest, and of concluding no beauty can be greater than whatthey see, if they are not wiser than we, are really more happy; I do notenvy their wisdom, but their good fortune. 

This greedy humour of new and unknown things helps to nourish in me thedesire of travel; but a great many more circumstances contribute to it;I am very willing to quit the government of my house. There is, Iconfess, a kind of convenience in commanding, though it were but in abarn, and in being obeyed by one's people; but 'tis too uniform andlanguid a pleasure, and is, moreover, of necessity mixed with a thousandvexatious thoughts: one while the poverty and the oppression of yourtenants: another, quarrels amongst neighbours: another, the trespassesthey make upon you afflict you;

 "Aut verberatae grandine vineae, Fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas Culpante, nunc torrentia agros Sidera, nunc hyemes iniquas. "

 ["Or hail-smitten vines and the deceptive farm; now trees damaged by the rains, or years of dearth, now summer's heat burning up the petals, now destructive winters. "--Horatius, Od. , iii. I, 29. ]

and that God scarce in six months sends a season wherein your bailiff cando his business as he should; but that if it serves the vines, it spoilsthe meadows:

 "Aut nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol, Aut subiti perimunt imbres, gelidoeque pruinae, Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant;"

 ["Either the scorching sun burns up your fields, or sudden rains or frosts destroy your harvests, or a violent wind carries away all before it. "--Lucretius, V. 216. ]

to which may be added the new and neat-made shoe of the man of old, thathurts your foot, [Leclerc maliciously suggests that this is a sly hit at Montaigne's wife, the man of old being the person mentioned in Plutarch's Life of Paulus Emilius, c. 3, who, when his friends reproached him for repudiating his wife, whose various merits they extolled, pointed to his shoe, and said, "That looks a nice well-made shoe to you; but I alone know where it pinches. "]

and that a stranger does not understand how much it costs you, and whatyou contribute to maintain that show of order that is seen in yourfamily, and that peradventure you buy too dear. 

I came late to the government of a house: they whom nature sent into theworld before me long eased me of that trouble; so that I had alreadytaken another bent more suitable to my humour. Yet, for so much as Ihave seen, 'tis an employment more troublesome than hard; whoever iscapable of anything else, will easily do this. Had I a mind to be rich, that way would seem too long; I had served my kings, a more profitabletraffic than any other. Since I pretend to nothing but the reputation ofhaving got nothing or dissipated nothing, conformably to the rest of mylife, improper either to do good or ill of any moment, and that I onlydesire to pass on, I can do it, thanks be to God, without any greatendeavour. At the worst, evermore prevent poverty by lessening yourexpense; 'tis that which I make my great concern, and doubt not but to doit before I shall be compelled. As to the rest, I have sufficientlysettled my thoughts to live upon less than I have, and live contentedly:

 "Non aestimatione census, verum victu atque cultu, terminantur pecunix modus. "

 ["'Tis not by the value of possessions, but by our daily subsistence and tillage, that our riches are truly estimated. " --Cicero, Paradox, vi. 3. ]

My real need does not so wholly take up all I have, that Fortune has notwhereon to fasten her teeth without biting to the quick. My presence, heedless and ignorant as it is, does me great service in my domesticaffairs; I employ myself in them, but it goes against the hair, findingthat I have this in my house, that though I burn my candle at one end bymyself, the other is not spared. 

Journeys do me no harm but only by their expense, which is great, andmore than I am well able to bear, being always wont to travel with notonly a necessary, but a handsome equipage; I must make them so muchshorter and fewer; I spend therein but the froth, and what I havereserved for such uses, delaying and deferring my motion till that beready. I will not that the pleasure of going abroad spoil the pleasureof being retired at home; on the contrary, I intend they shall nourishand favour one another. Fortune has assisted me in this, that since myprincipal profession in this life was to live at ease, and rather idlythan busily, she has deprived me of the necessity of growing rich toprovide for the multitude of my heirs. If there be not enough for one, of that whereof I had so plentifully enough, at his peril be it: hisimprudence will not deserve that I should wish him any more. And everyone, according to the example of Phocion, provides sufficiently for hischildren who so provides for them as to leave them as much as was lefthim. I should by no means like Crates' way. He left his money in thehands of a banker with this condition--that if his children were fools, he should then give it to them; if wise, he should then distribute it tothe most foolish of the people; as if fools, for being less capable ofliving without riches, were more capable of using them. 

At all events, the damage occasioned by my absence seems not to deserve, so long as I am able to support it, that I should waive the occasions ofdiverting myself by that troublesome assistance. 

There is always something that goes amiss. The affairs, one while of onehouse, and then of another, tear you to pieces; you pry into everythingtoo near; your perspicacity hurts you here, as well as in other things. I steal away from occasions of vexing myself, and turn from the knowledgeof things that go amiss; and yet I cannot so order it, but that everyhour I jostle against something or other that displeases me; and thetricks that they most conceal from me, are those that I the soonest cometo know; some there are that, not to make matters worse, a man musthimself help to conceal. Vain vexations; vain sometimes, but alwaysvexations. The smallest and slightest impediments are the most piercing:and as little letters most tire the eyes, so do little affairs mostdisturb us. The rout of little ills more offend than one, how greatsoever. By how much domestic thorns are numerous and slight, by so muchthey prick deeper and without warning, easily surprising us when least wesuspect them. 

 [Now Homer shews us clearly enough how surprise gives the advantage; who represents Ulysses weeping at the death of his dog; and not weeping at the tears of his mother; the first accident, trivial as it was, got the better of him, coming upon him quite unexpectedly; he sustained the second, though more potent, because he was prepared for it. 'Tis light occasions that humble our lives. ]

I am no philosopher; evils oppress me according to their weight, and theyweigh as much according to the form as the matter, and very often more. If I have therein more perspicacity than the vulgar, I have also morepatience; in short, they weigh with me, if they do not hurt me. Life isa tender thing, and easily molested. Since my age has made me grow morepensive and morose, "Nemo enim resistit sibi, cum caeperit impelli, "

 ["For no man resists himself when he has begun to be driven forward. "--Seneca, Ep. , 13. ]

for the most trivial cause imaginable, I irritate that humour, whichafterwards nourishes and exasperates itself of its own motion; attractingand heaping up matter upon matter whereon to feed:

 "Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat:"

 ["The ever falling drop hollows out a stone. "--Lucretius, i. 314. ]

these continual tricklings consume and ulcerate me. Ordinaryinconveniences are never light; they are continual and inseparable, especially when they spring from the members of a family, continual andinseparable. When I consider my affairs at distance and in gross, Ifind, because perhaps my memory is none of the best, that they have goneon hitherto improving beyond my reason or expectation; my revenue seemsgreater than it is; its prosperity betrays me: but when I pry morenarrowly into the business, and see how all things go:

 "Tum vero in curas animum diducimus omnes;"

 ["Indeed we lead the mind into all sorts of cares. " --AEneid, v. 720. ]

I have a thousand things to desire and to fear. To give them quite over, is very easy for me to do: but to look after them without trouble, isvery hard. 'Tis a miserable thing to be in a place where everything yousee employs and concerns you; and I fancy that I more cheerfully enjoythe pleasures of another man's house, and with greater and a purerrelish, than those of my own. Diogenes answered according to my humourhim who asked him what sort of wine he liked the best: "That of another, "said he. --[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 54. ]

My father took a delight in building at Montaigne, where he was born; andin all the government of domestic affairs I love to follow his exampleand rules, and I shall engage those who are to succeed me, as much as inme lies, to do the same. Could I do better for him, I would; and amproud that his will is still performing and acting by me. God forbidthat in my hands I should ever suffer any image of life, that I am ableto render to so good a father, to fail. And wherever I have taken inhand to strengthen some old foundations of walls, and to repair someruinous buildings, in earnest I have done it more out of respect to hisdesign, than my own satisfaction; and am angry at myself that I have notproceeded further to finish the beginnings he left in his house, and somuch the more because I am very likely to be the last possessor of myrace, and to give the last hand to it. For, as to my own particularapplication, neither the pleasure of building, which they say is sobewitching, nor hunting, nor gardens, nor the other pleasures of aretired life, can much amuse me. And 'tis what I am angry at myself for, as I am for all other opinions that are incommodious to me; which I wouldnot so much care to have vigorous and learned, as I would have them easyand convenient for life, they are true and sound enough, if they areuseful and pleasing. Such as hear me declare my ignorance in husbandry, whisper in my ear that it is disdain, and that I neglect to know itsinstruments, its seasons, its order, how they dress my vines, how theygraft, and to know the names and forms of herbs and fruits, and thepreparing the meat on which I live, the names and prices of the stuffs Iwear, because, say they; I have set my heart upon some higher knowledge;they kill me in saying so. It is not disdain; it is folly, and ratherstupidity than glory; I had rather be a good horseman than a goodlogician:

 "Quin to aliquid saltem potius, quorum indiget usus, Viminibus mollique paras detexere junco. "

 ["'Dost thou not rather do something which is required, and make osier and reed basket. "--Virgil, Eclog. , ii. 71. ]

We occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal causes andconducts, which will very well carry on themselves without our care; andleave our own business at random, and Michael much more our concern thanman. Now I am, indeed, for the most part at home; but I would be therebetter pleased than anywhere else:

 "Sit meae sedes utinam senectae, Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum, Militiaeque. "

 ["Let my old age have a fixed seat; let there be a limit to fatigues from the sea, journeys, warfare. "--Horace, Od. , ii. 6, 6. ]

I know not whether or no I shall bring it about. I could wish that, instead of some other member of his succession, my father had resigned tome the passionate affection he had in his old age to his householdaffairs; he was happy in that he could accommodate his desires to hisfortune, and satisfy himself with what he had; political philosophy mayto much purpose condemn the meanness and sterility of my employment, if Ican once come to relish it, as he did. I am of opinion that the mosthonourable calling is to serve the public, and to be useful to many, "Fructus enim ingenii et virtutis, omnisque praestantiae, tum maximus capitur, quum in proximum quemque confertur:"

 ["For the greatest enjoyment of evil and virtue, and of all excellence, is experienced when they are conferred on some one nearest. "--Cicero, De Amicil. , c. ]

for myself, I disclaim it; partly out of conscience (for where I see theweight that lies upon such employments, I perceive also the little meansI have to supply it; and Plato, a master in all political governmenthimself, nevertheless took care to abstain from it), and partly out ofcowardice. I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle;only-to live an excusable life, and such as may neither be a burden tomyself nor to any other. 

Never did any man more fully and feebly suffer himself to be governed bya third person than I should do, had I any one to whom to entrust myself. One of my wishes at this time should be, to have a son-in-law that knewhandsomely how to cherish my old age, and to rock it asleep; into whosehands I might deposit, in full sovereignty, the management and use of allmy goods, that he might dispose of them as I do, and get by them what Iget, provided that he on his part were truly acknowledging, and a friend. But we live in a world where loyalty of one's own children is unknown. 

He who has the charge of my purse in his travels, has it purely andwithout control; he could cheat me thoroughly, if he came to reckoning;and, if he is not a devil, I oblige him to deal faithfully with me by soentire a trust:

 "Multi fallere do cuerunt, dum timent falli; et aliis jus peccandi suspicando fecerunt. "

 ["Many have taught others to deceive, while they fear to be deceived, and, by suspecting them, have given them a title to do ill. "--Seneca, Epist. , 3. ]

The most common security I take of my people is ignorance; I neverpresume any to be vicious till I have first found them so; and repose themost confidence in the younger sort, that I think are least spoiled byill example. I had rather be told at two months' end that I have spentfour hundred crowns, than to have my ears battered every night withthree, five, seven: and I have been, in this way, as little robbed asanother. It is true, I am willing enough not to see it; I, in some sort, purposely, harbour a kind of perplexed, uncertain knowledge of my money:up to a certain point, I am content to doubt. One must leave a littleroom for the infidelity or indiscretion of a servant; if you have leftenough, in gross, to do your business, let the overplus of Fortune'sliberality run a little more freely at her mercy; 'tis the gleaner'sportion. After all, I do not so much value the fidelity of my people asI contemn their injury. What a mean and ridiculous thing it is for a manto study his money, to delight in handling and telling it over and overagain! 'Tis by this avarice makes its approaches. 

In eighteen years that I have had my estate in my, own hands, I couldnever prevail with myself either to read over my deeds or examine myprincipal affairs, which ought, of necessity, to pass under my knowledgeand inspection. 'Tis not a philosophical disdain of worldly andtransitory things; my taste is not purified to that degree, and I valuethem at as great a rate, at least, as they are worth; but 'tis, in truth, an inexcusable and childish laziness and negligence. What would I notrather do than read a contract? or than, as a slave to my own business, tumble over those dusty writings? or, which is worse, those of anotherman, as so many do nowadays, to get money? I grudge nothing but care andtrouble, and endeavour nothing so much, as to be careless and at ease. I had been much fitter, I believe, could it have been without obligationand servitude, to have lived upon another man's fortune than my own: and, indeed, I do not know, when I examine it nearer, whether, according to myhumour, what I have to suffer from my affairs and servants, has not in itsomething more abject, troublesome, and tormenting than there would be inserving a man better born than myself, who would govern me with a gentlerein, and a little at my own case:

 "Servitus obedientia est fracti animi et abjecti, arbitrio carentis suo. "

 ["Servitude is the obedience of a subdued and abject mind, wanting its own free will. "--Cicero, Paradox, V. I. ]

Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty, only torid himself of the inconveniences and cares of his house. This is what Iwould not do; I hate poverty equally with pain; but I could be content tochange the kind of life I live for another that was humbler and lesschargeable. 

When absent from home, I divest myself of all these thoughts, and shouldbe less concerned for the ruin of a tower, than I am, when present, atthe fall of a tile. My mind is easily composed at distance, but suffersas much as that of the meanest peasant when I am at home; the reins of mybridle being wrongly put on, or a strap flapping against my leg, willkeep me out of humour a day together. I raise my courage, well enoughagainst inconveniences: lift up my eyes I cannot:

 "Sensus, o superi, sensus. "

 ["The senses, O ye gods, the senses. "]

I am at home responsible for whatever goes amiss. Few masters (I speakof those of medium condition such as mine), and if there be any such, they are more happy, can rely so much upon another, but that the greatestpart of the burden will lie upon their own shoulders. This takes muchfrom my grace in entertaining visitors, so that I have, peradventure, detained some rather out of expectation of a good dinner, than by my ownbehaviour; and lose much of the pleasure I ought to reap at my own housefrom the visitation and assembling of my friends. The most ridiculouscarriage of a gentleman in his own house, is to see him bustling aboutthe business of the place, whispering one servant, and looking an angrylook at another: it ought insensibly to slide along, and to represent anordinary current; and I think it unhandsome to talk much to our guests oftheir entertainment, whether by way of bragging or excuse. I love orderand cleanliness--

 "Et cantharus et lanx Ostendunt mihi me"--

 ["The dishes and the glasses shew me my own reflection. " --Horace, Ep. , i. 5, 23]

more than abundance; and at home have an exact regard to necessity, little to outward show. If a footman falls to cuffs at another man'shouse, or stumble and throw a dish before him as he is carrying it up, you only laugh and make a jest on't; you sleep whilst the master of thehouse is arranging a bill of fare with his steward for your morrow'sentertainment. I speak according as I do myself; quite appreciating, nevertheless, good husbandry in general, and how pleasant quiet andprosperous household management, carried regularly on, is to somenatures; and not wishing to fasten my own errors and inconveniences tothe thing; nor to give Plato the lie, who looks upon it as the mostpleasant employment to every one to do his particular affairs withoutwrong to another. 

When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself, and the laying outmy money; which is disposed of by one single precept; too many things arerequired to the raking it together; in that I understand nothing; inspending, I understand a little, and how to give some show to my expense, which is indeed its principal use; but I rely too ambitiously upon it, which renders it unequal and difform, and, moreover, immoderate in boththe one and the other aspect; if it makes a show, if it serve the turn, I indiscreetly let it run; and as indiscreetly tie up my purse-strings, if it does not shine, and does not please me. Whatever it be, whetherart or nature, that imprints in us the condition of living by referenceto others, it does us much more harm than good; we deprive ourselves ofour own utilities, to accommodate appearances to the common opinion:we care not so much what our being is, as to us and in reality, as whatit is to the public observation. Even the properties of the mind, andwisdom itself, seem fruitless to us, if only enjoyed by ourselves, and ifit produce not itself to the view and approbation of others. There is asort of men whose gold runs in streams underground imperceptibly; othersexpose it all in plates and branches; so that to the one a liard is wortha crown, and to the others the inverse: the world esteeming its use andvalue, according to the show. All over-nice solicitude about richessmells of avarice: even the very disposing of it, with a too systematicand artificial liberality, is not worth a painful superintendence andsolicitude: he, that will order his expense to just so much, makes it toopinched and narrow. The keeping or spending are, of themselves, indifferent things, and receive no colour of good or ill, but accordingto the application of the will. 

The other cause that tempts me out to these journeys is, inaptitude forthe present manners in our state. I could easily console myself for thiscorruption in regard to the public interest:

 "Pejoraque saecula ferri Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa Nomen, et a nullo posuit natura metallo;"

 ["And, worse than the iron ages, for whose crimes there is no similitude in any of Nature's metals. "--Juvenal, xiii. 28. ]

but not to my own. I am, in particular, too much oppressed by them: for, in my neighbourhood, we are, of late, by the long licence of our civilwars, grown old in so riotous a form of state, "Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas, "

 ["Where wrong and right have changed places. " --Virgil, Georg. , i. 504. ]

that in earnest, 'tis a wonder how it can subsist:

 "Armati terram exercent, semperque recentes Convectare juvat praedas; et vivere rapto. "

 ["Men plough, girt with arms; ever delighting in fresh robberies, and living by rapine. "--AEneid, vii. 748. ]

In fine, I see by our example, that the society of men is maintained andheld together, at what price soever; in what condition soever they areplaced, they still close and stick together, both moving and in heaps; asill united bodies, that, shuffled together without order, find ofthemselves a means to unite and settle, often better than they could havebeen disposed by art. King Philip mustered up a rabble of the mostwicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them alltogether into a city he had caused to be built for that purpose, whichbore their name: I believe that they, even from vices themselves, erecteda government amongst them, and a commodious and just society. I see, notone action, or three, or a hundred, but manners, in common and receiveduse, so ferocious, especially in inhumanity and treachery, which are tome the worst of all vices, that I have not the heart to think of themwithout horror; and almost as much admire as I detest them: the exerciseof these signal villainies carries with it as great signs of vigour andforce of soul, as of error and disorder. Necessity reconciles and bringsmen together; and this accidental connection afterwards forms itself intolaws: for there have been such, as savage as any human opinion couldconceive, who, nevertheless, have maintained their body with as muchhealth and length of life as any Plato or Aristotle could invent. Andcertainly, all these descriptions of polities, feigned by art, are foundto be ridiculous and unfit to be put in practice. 

These great and tedious debates about the best form of society, and themost commodious rules to bind us, are debates only proper for theexercise of our wits; as in the arts there are several subjects whichhave their being in agitation and controversy, and have no life butthere. Such an idea of government might be of some value in a new world;but we take a world already made, and formed to certain customs; we donot beget it, as Pyrrha or Cadmus did. By what means soever we may havethe privilege to redress and reform it anew, we can hardly writhe it fromits wonted bent, but we shall break all. Solon being asked whether hehad established the best laws he could for the Athenians; "Yes, " said he, "of those they would have received. " Varro excuses himself after thesame manner: "that if he were to begin to write of religion, he would saywhat he believed; but seeing it was already received, he would writerather according to use than nature. "

Not according to opinion, but in truth and reality, the best and mostexcellent government for every nation is that under which it ismaintained: its form and essential convenience depend upon custom. We are apt to be displeased at the present condition; but I, nevertheless, maintain that to desire command in a few--[an oligarchy. ]--in a republic, or another sort of government in monarchy than thatalready established, is both vice and folly:

 "Ayme l'estat, tel que to le veois estre S'il est royal ayme la royaute; S'il est de peu, ou biers communaute, Ayme l'aussi; car Dieu t'y a faict naistre. "

 ["Love the government, such as you see it to be. If it be royal, love royalty; if it is a republic of any sort, still love it; for God himself created thee therein. "]

So wrote the good Monsieur de Pibrac, whom we have lately lost, a man ofso excellent a wit, such sound opinions, and such gentle manners. Thisloss, and that at the same time we have had of Monsieur de Foix, are ofso great importance to the crown, that I do not know whether there isanother couple in France worthy to supply the places of these two Gasconsin sincerity and wisdom in the council of our kings. They were bothvariously great men, and certainly, according to the age, rare and great, each of them in his kind: but what destiny was it that placed them inthese times, men so remote from and so disproportioned to our corruptionand intestine tumults?

Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation: change only givesform to injustice and tyranny. When any piece is loosened, it may beproper to stay it; one may take care that the alteration and corruptionnatural to all things do not carry us too far from our beginnings andprinciples: but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to changethe foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do, who to makeclean, efface; who reform particular defects by an universal confusion, and cure diseases by death:

 "Non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi. "

 ["Not so desirous of changing as of overthrowing things. " --Cicero, De Offic. , ii. I. ]

The world is unapt to be cured; and so impatient of anything that pressesit, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself at what pricesoever. We see by a thousand examples, that it ordinarily cures itselfto its cost. The discharge of a present evil is no cure, if there be nota general amendment of condition. The surgeon's end is not only to cutaway the dead flesh; that is but the progress of his cure; he has a care, over and above, to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh, and to restore the member to its due state. Whoever only proposes tohimself to remove that which offends him, falls short: for good does notnecessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as ithappened to Caesar's murderers, who brought the republic to such a pass, that they had reason to repent the meddling with the matter. The samehas since happened to several others, even down to our own times: theFrench, my contemporaries, know it well enough. All great mutationsshake and disorder a state. 

Whoever would look direct at a cure, and well consider of it before hebegan, would be very willing to withdraw his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notableexample. His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates;he being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means oneday to shut up the Senators in the palace; and calling the peopletogether in the market-place, there told them that the day was now comewherein at full liberty they might revenge themselves on the tyrants bywhom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone andunarmed, at his mercy. He then advised that they should call these out, one by one, by lot, and should individually determine as to each, causingwhatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this proviso, that they should, at the same time, depute some honest man in the placeof him who was condemned, to the end there might be no vacancy in theSenate. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator but a great cryof universal dislike was raised up against him. "I see, " says Pacuvius, "that we must put him out; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a goodone in his room. " Immediately there was a profound silence, every onebeing at a stand whom to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices againsthim, an hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many justreasons why he should not stand. These contradictory humours growinghot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being asmuch disagreement in the election of the new, as consent in the puttingout of the old. In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly:every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest andbest known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new anduntried. 

Seeing how miserably we are agitated (for what have we not done!)

 "Eheu! cicatricum, et sceleris pudet, Fratrumque: quid nos dura refugimus AEtas? quid intactum nefasti Liquimus? Unde manus inventus Metu Deorum continuit? quibus Pepercit aris. "

 ["Alas! our crimes and our fratricides are a shame to us! What crime does this bad age shrink from? What wickedness have we left undone? What youth is restrained from evil by the fear of the gods? What altar is spared?"--Horace, Od. , i. 33, 35]

I do not presently conclude, "Ipsa si velit Salus, Servare prorsus non potest hanc familiam;"

 ["If the goddess Salus herself wish to save this family, she absolutely cannot"--Terence, Adelph. , iv. 7, 43. ]

we are not, peradventure, at our last gasp. The conservation of statesis a thing that, in all likelihood, surpasses our understanding;--a civilgovernment is, as Plato says, a mighty and puissant thing, and hard to bedissolved; it often continues against mortal and intestine diseases, against the injury of unjust laws, against tyranny, the corruption andignorance of magistrates, the licence and sedition of the people. In allour fortunes, we compare ourselves to what is above us, and still looktowards those who are better: but let us measure ourselves with what isbelow us: there is no condition so miserable wherein a man may not find athousand examples that will administer consolation. 'Tis our vice thatwe more unwillingly look upon what is above, than willingly upon what isbelow; and Solon was used to say, that "whoever would make a heap of allthe ills together, there is no one who would not rather choose to bearaway the ills he has than to come to an equal division with all other menfrom that heap, and take his share. " Our government is, indeed, verysick, but there have been others more sick without dying. The gods playat ball with us and bandy us every way:

 "Enimvero Dii nos homines quasi pilas habent. "

The stars fatally destined the state of Rome for an example of what theycould do in this kind: in it are comprised all the forms and adventuresthat concern a state: all that order or disorder, good or evil fortune, can do. Who, then, can despair of his condition, seeing the shocks andcommotions wherewith Rome was tumbled and tossed, and yet withstood themall? If the extent of dominion be the health of a state (which I by nomeans think it is, and Isocrates pleases me when he instructs Nicoclesnot to envy princes who have large dominions, but those who know how topreserve those which have fallen into their hands), that of Rome wasnever so sound, as when it was most sick. The worst of her forms was themost fortunate; one can hardly discern any image of government under thefirst emperors; it is the most horrible and tumultuous confusion that canbe imagined; it endured it, notwithstanding, and therein continued, preserving not a monarchy limited within its own bounds, but so manynations so differing, so remote, so disaffected, so confusedly commanded, and so unjustly conquered:

 "Nec gentibus ullis Commodat in populum, terra pelagique potentem, Invidiam fortuna suam. "

 ["Fortune never gave it to any nation to satisfy its hatred against the people, masters of the seas and of the earth. "--Lucan, i. 32. ]

Everything that totters does not fall. The contexture of so great a bodyholds by more nails than one; it holds even by its antiquity, like oldbuildings, from which the foundations are worn away by time, withoutrough-cast or mortar, which yet live and support themselves by their ownweight:

 "Nec jam validis radicibus haerens, Pondere tuta suo est. "

Moreover, it is not rightly to go to work, to examine only the flank andthe foss, to judge of the security of a place; we must observe which wayapproaches can be made to it, and in what condition the assailant is: fewvessels sink with their own weight, and without some exterior violence. Now, let us everyway cast our eyes; everything about us totters; in allthe great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that are known tous, if you will but look, you will there see evident menace of alterationand ruin:

 "Et sua sunt illis incommoda; parque per omnes Tempestas. "

 ["They all share in the mischief; the tempest rages everywhere. "--AEneid, ii. ]

Astrologers may very well, as they do, warn us of great revolutions andimminent mutations: their prophecies are present and palpable, they neednot go to heaven to foretell this. There is not only consolation to beextracted from this universal combination of ills and menaces, but, moreover, some hopes of the continuation of our state, forasmuch as, naturally, nothing falls where all falls: universal sickness isparticular health: conformity is antagonistic to dissolution. For mypart, I despair not, and fancy that I discover ways to save us:

 "Deus haec fortasse benigna Reducet in sedem vice. "

 ["The deity will perchance by a favourable turn restore us to our former position. "--Horace, Epod. , xiii. 7. ]

Who knows but that God will have it happen, as in human bodies that purgeand restore themselves to a better state by long and grievous maladies, which render them more entire and perfect health than that they took fromthem? That which weighs the most with me is, that in reckoning thesymptoms of our ill, I see as many natural ones, and that Heaven sendsus, and properly its own, as of those that our disorder and humanimprudence contribute to it. The very stars seem to declare that we havealready continued long enough, and beyond the ordinary term. This alsoafflicts me, that the mischief which nearest threatens us, is not analteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation anddivulsion, which is the most extreme of our fears. 

I, moreover, fear, in these fantasies of mine, the treachery of mymemory, lest, by inadvertence, it should make me write the same thingtwice. I hate to examine myself, and never review, but very unwillingly, what has once escaped my pen. I here set down nothing new. These arecommon thoughts, and having, peradventure, conceived them an hundredtimes, I am afraid I have set them down somewhere else already. Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer; but 'tisruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory show. I donot love over-insisting, even in the most profitable things, as inSeneca; and the usage of his stoical school displeases me, to repeat, upon every subject, at full length and width the principles andpresuppositions that serve in general, and always to realledge anewcommon and universal reasons. 

My memory grows cruelly worse every day:

 "Pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos, Arente fauce traxerim;"

 ["As if my dry throat had drunk seducing cups of Lethaean oblivion. "--Horace, Epod. , xiv. 3. ]

I must be fain for the time to come (for hitherto, thanks be to God, nothing has happened much amiss), whereas others seek time andopportunity to think of what they have to say, to avoid all preparation, for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which I must insist. Tobe tied and bound to a thing puts me quite out, and to depend upon soweak an instrument as my memory. I never read this following story thatI am not offended at it with a personal and natural resentment:Lyncestes, accused of conspiracy against Alexander, the day that he wasbrought out before the army, according to the custom, to be heard as towhat he could say for himself, had learned a studied speech, of which, hesitating and stammering, he pronounced some words. Whilst growing moreand more perplexed, whilst struggling with his memory, and trying torecollect what he had to say, the soldiers nearest to him charged theirpikes against him and killed him, looking upon him as convict; hisconfusion and silence served them for a confession; for having had somuch leisure to prepare himself in prison, they concluded that it was nothis memory that failed him, but that his conscience tied up his tongueand stopped his mouth. And, truly, well said; the place, the assembly, the expectation, astound a man, even when he has but the ambition tospeak well; what can a man do when 'tis an harangue upon which his lifedepends?

For my part, the very being tied to what I am to say is enough to looseme from it. When I wholly commit and refer myself to my memory, I lay somuch stress upon it that it sinks under me: it grows dismayed with theburden. So much as I trust to it, so much do I put myself out of my ownpower, even to the finding it difficult to keep my own countenance; andhave been sometimes very much put to it to conceal the slavery wherein Iwas engaged; whereas my design is to manifest, in speaking, a perfectcalmness both of face and accent, and casual and unpremeditated motions, as rising from present occasions, choosing rather to say nothing topurpose than to show that I came prepared to speak well, a thingespecially unbecoming a man of my profession, and of too great obligationon him who cannot retain much. The preparation begets a great deal moreexpectation than it will satisfy. A man often strips himself to hisdoublet to leap no farther than he would have done in his gown:

 "Nihil est his, qui placere volunt, turn adversarium, quam expectatio. "

 ["Nothing is so adverse to those who make it their business to please as expectation"--Cicero, Acad. , ii. 4]

It is recorded of the orator Curio, that when he proposed the division ofhis oration into three or four parts, or three or four arguments orreasons, it often happened either that he forgot some one, or added oneor two more. I have always avoided falling into this inconvenience, having ever hated these promises and prescriptions, not only out ofdistrust of my memory, but also because this method relishes too much ofthe artist:

 "Simpliciora militares decent. "

 ["Simplicity becomes warriors. "--Quintilian, Instit. Orat. , xi. I. ]

'Tis enough that I have promised to myself never again to take upon meto speak in a place of respect, for as to speaking, when a man reads hisspeech, besides that it is very absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage tothose who naturally could give it a grace by action; and to rely upon themercy of my present invention, I would much less do it; 'tis heavy andperplexed, and such as would never furnish me in sudden and importantnecessities. 

Permit, reader, this essay its course also, and this third sitting tofinish the rest of my picture: I add, but I correct not. First, becauseI conceive that a man having once parted with his labours to the world, he has no further right to them; let him do better if he can, in some newundertaking, but not adulterate what he has already sold. Of suchdealers nothing should be bought till after they are dead. Let them wellconsider what they do before they, produce it to the light who hastensthem? My book is always the same, saving that upon every new edition(that the buyer may not go away quite empty) I take the liberty to add(as 'tis but an ill jointed marqueterie) some supernumerary emblem; it isbut overweight, that does not disfigure the primitive form of the essays, but, by a little artful subtlety, gives a kind of particular value toevery one of those that follow. Thence, however, will easily happen sometransposition of chronology, my stories taking place according to theiropportuneness, not always according to their age. 

Secondly, because as to what concerns myself, I fear to lose by change:my understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too. I donot much less suspect my fancies for being the second or the third, thanfor being the first, or present, or past; we often correct ourselves asfoolishly as we do others. I am grown older by a great many years sincemy first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubtwhether I am grown an inch the wiser. I now, and I anon, are two severalpersons; but whether better, I cannot determine. It were a fine thing tobe old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but 'tis a drunken, stumbling, reeling, infirm motion: like that of reeds, which the aircasually waves to and fro at pleasure. Antiochus had in his youthstrongly written in favour of the Academy; in his old age he wrote asmuch against it; would not, which of these two soever I should follow, bestill Antiochus? After having established the uncertainty, to go aboutto establish the certainty of human opinions, was it not to establishdoubt, and not certainty, and to promise, that had he had yet another ageto live, he would be always upon terms of altering his judgment, not somuch for the better, as for something else?

The public favour has given me a little more confidence than I expected;but what I 'most fear is, lest I should glut the world with my writings;I had rather, of the two, pique my reader than tire him, as a learned manof my time has done. Praise is always pleasing, let it come from whom, or upon what account it will; yet ought a man to understand why he iscommended, that he may know how to keep up the same reputation still:imperfections themselves may get commendation. The vulgar and commonestimation is seldom happy in hitting; and I am much mistaken if, amongstthe writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gainedthe popular applause. For my part, I return my thanks to thosegood-natured men who are pleased to take my weak endeavours in good part;the faults of the workmanship are nowhere so apparent as in a matterwhich of itself has no recommendation. Blame not me, reader, for thosethat slip in here by the fancy or inadvertency of others; every hand, every artisan, contribute their own materials; I neither concern myselfwith orthography (and only care to have it after the old way) norpointing, being very inexpert both in the one and the other. Where theywholly break the sense, I am very little concerned, for they at leastdischarge me; but where they substitute a false one, as they so often do, and wrest me to their conception, they ruin me. When the sentence, nevertheless, is not strong enough for my proportion, a civil personought to reject it as spurious, and none of mine. Whoever shall know howlazy I am, and how indulgent to my own humour, will easily believe that Ihad rather write as many more essays, than be tied to revise these overagain for so childish a correction. 

I said elsewhere, that being planted in the very centre of this newreligion, I am not only deprived of any great familiarity with men ofother kind of manners than my own, and of other opinions, by which theyhold together, as by a tie that supersedes all other obligations; butmoreover I do not live without danger, amongst men to whom all things areequally lawful, and of whom the most part cannot offend the laws morethan they have already done; from which the extremist degree of licenceproceeds. All the particular being summed up together, I do not find oneman of my country, who pays so dear for the defence of our laws both inloss and damages (as the lawyers say) as myself; and some there are whovapour and brag of their zeal and constancy, that if things were justlyweighed, do much less than I. My house, as one that has ever been openand free to all comers, and civil to all (for I could never persuademyself to make it a garrison of war, war being a thing that I prefer tosee as remote as may be), has sufficiently merited popular kindness, andso that it would be a hard matter justly to insult over me upon my owndunghill; and I look upon it as a wonderful and exemplary thing that ityet continues a virgin from blood and plunder during so long a storm, andso many neighbouring revolutions and tumults. For to confess the truth, it had been possible enough for a man of my complexion to have shakenhands with any one constant and continued form whatever; but the contraryinvasions and incursions, alternations and vicissitudes of fortune roundabout me, have hitherto more exasperated than calmed and mollified thetemper of the country, and involved me, over and over again, withinvincible difficulties and dangers. 

I escape, 'tis true, but am troubled that it is more by chance, andsomething of my own prudence, than by justice; and am not satisfied to beout of the protection of the laws, and under any other safeguard thantheirs. As matters stand, I live, above one half, by the favour ofothers, which is an untoward obligation. I do not like to owe my safetyeither to the generosity or affection of great persons, who allow me mylegality and my liberty, or to the obliging manners of my predecessors, or my own: for what if I were another kind of man? If my deportment, andthe frankness of my conversation or relationship, oblige my neighbours, 'tis that that they should acquit themselves of obligation in onlypermitting me to live, and they may say, "We allow him the free libertyof having divine service read in his own private chapel, when it isinterdicted in all churches round about, and allow him the use of hisgoods and his life, as one who protects our wives and cattle in time ofneed. " For my house has for many descents shared in the reputation ofLycurgus the Athenian, who was the general depository and guardian of thepurses of his fellow-citizens. Now I am clearly of opinion that a manshould live by right and by authority, and not either by recompense orfavour. How many gallant men have rather chosen to lose their lives thanto be debtors for them? I hate to subject myself to any sort ofobligation, but above all, to that which binds me by the duty of honour. I think nothing so dear as what has been given me, and this because mywill lies at pawn under the title of gratitude, and more willingly acceptof services that are to be sold; I feel that for the last I give nothingbut money, but for the other I give myself. 

The knot that binds me by the laws of courtesy binds me more than that ofcivil constraint; I am much more at ease when bound by a scrivener, thanby myself. Is it not reason that my conscience should be much moreengaged when men simply rely upon it? In a bond, my faith owes nothing, because it has nothing lent it; let them trust to the security they havetaken without me. I had much rather break the wall of a prison and thelaws themselves than my own word. I am nice, even to superstition, inkeeping my promises, and, therefore, upon all occasions have a care tomake them uncertain and conditional. To those of no great moment, I addthe jealousy of my own rule, to make them weight; it wracks and oppressesme with its own interest. Even in actions wholly my own and free, if Ionce say a thing, I conceive that I have bound myself, and thatdelivering it to the knowledge of another, I have positively enjoined itmy own performance. Methinks I promise it, if I but say it: andtherefore am not apt to say much of that kind. The sentence that I passupon myself is more severe than that of a judge, who only considers thecommon obligation; but my conscience looks upon it with a more severe andpenetrating eye. I lag in those duties to which I should be compelled ifI did not go:

 "Hoc ipsum ita justum est, quod recte fit, si est voluntarium. "

 ["This itself is so far just, that it is rightly done, if it is voluntary. "--Cicero, De Offic. , i. 9. ]

If the action has not some splendour of liberty, it has neither grace norhonour:

 "Quod vos jus cogit, vix voluntate impetrent:"

 ["That which the laws compel us to do, we scarcely do with a will. " --Terence, Adelph. , iii. 3, 44. ]

where necessity draws me, I love to let my will take its own course:

 "Quia quicquid imperio cogitur, exigenti magis, quam praestanti, acceptum refertur. "

 ["For whatever is compelled by power, is more imputed to him that exacts than to him that performs. "--Valerius Maximus, ii. 2, 6. ]

I know some who follow this rule, even to injustice; who will sooner givethan restore, sooner lend than pay, and will do them the least good towhom they are most obliged. I don't go so far as that, but I'm not faroff. 

I so much love to disengage and disobligate myself, that I have sometimeslooked upon ingratitudes, affronts, and indignities which I have receivedfrom those to whom either by nature or accident I was bound in some wayof friendship, as an advantage to me; taking this occasion of theirill-usage, for an acquaintance and discharge of so much of my debt. Andthough I still continue to pay them all the external offices of publicreason, I, notwithstanding, find a great saving in doing that upon theaccount of justice which I did upon the score of affection, and am alittle eased of the attention and solicitude of my inward will:

 "Est prudentis sustinere, ut currum, sic impetum benevolentia;"

 ["'Tis the part of a wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the impetus of friendship, as upon that of his horse. " --Cicero, De Amicit. , c. 17. ]

'tis in me, too urging and pressing where I take; at least, for a man wholoves not to be strained at all. And this husbanding my friendshipserves me for a sort of consolation in the imperfections of those in whomI am concerned. I am very sorry they are not such as I could wish theywere, but then I also am spared somewhat of my application and engagementtowards them. I approve of a man who is the less fond of his child forhaving a scald head, or for being crooked; and not only when he isill-conditioned, but also when he is of unhappy disposition, and imperfectin his limbs (God himself has abated so much from his value and naturalestimation), provided he carry himself in this coldness of affection withmoderation and exact justice: proximity, with me, lessens not defects, but rather aggravates them. 

After all, according to what I understand in the science of benefit andacknowledgment, which is a subtle science, and of great use, I know noperson whatever more free and less indebted than I am at this hour. WhatI do owe is simply to foreign obligations and benefits; as to anythingelse, no man is more absolutely clear:

 "Nec sunt mihi nota potentum Munera. "

 ["The gifts of great men are unknown to me. "--AEneid, xii. 529. ]

Princes give me a great deal if they take nothing from me; and do me goodenough if they do me no harm; that's all I ask from them. O how am Iobliged to God, that he has been pleased I should immediately receivefrom his bounty all I have, and specially reserved all my obligation tohimself. How earnestly do I beg of his holy compassion that I may neverowe essential thanks to any one. O happy liberty wherein I have thus farlived. May it continue with me to the last. I endeavour to have noexpress need of any one:

 "In me omnis spec est mihi. "

 ["All my hope is in myself. "--Terence, Adelph. , iii. 5, 9. ]

'Tis what every one may do in himself, but more easily they whom God hasplaced in a condition exempt from natural and urgent necessities. It isa wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, inwhom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficientlysure. 

I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part, defective and borrowed. I fortify myself both in courage, which is thestrongest assistant, and also in fortune, therein wherewith to satisfymyself, though everything else should forsake me. Hippias of Elis notonly furnished himself with knowledge, that he might, at need, cheerfullyretire from all other company to enjoy the Muses: nor only with theknowledge of philosophy, to teach his soul to be contented with itself, and bravely to subsist without outward conveniences, when fate would haveit so; he was, moreover, so careful as to learn to cook, to shavehimself, to make his own clothes, his own shoes and drawers, to providefor all his necessities in himself, and to wean himself from theassistance of others. A man more freely and cheerfully enjoys borrowedconveniences, when it is not an enjoyment forced and constrained by need;and when he has, in his own will and fortune, the means to live withoutthem. I know myself very well; but 'tis hard for me to imagine any sopure liberality of any one towards me, any so frank and free hospitality, that would not appear to me discreditable, tyrannical, and tainted withreproach, if necessity had reduced me to it. As giving is an ambitiousand authoritative quality, so is accepting a quality of submission;witness the insulting and quarrelsome refusal that Bajazet made of thepresents that Tamerlane sent him; and those that were offered on the partof the Emperor Solyman to the Emperor of Calicut, so angered him, that henot only rudely rejected them, saying that neither he nor any of hispredecessors had ever been wont to take, and that it was their office togive; but, moreover, caused the ambassadors sent with the gifts to be putinto a dungeon. When Thetis, says Aristotle, flatters Jupiter, when theLacedaemonians flatter the Athenians, they do not put them in mind of thegood they have done them, which is always odious, but of the benefitsthey have received from them. Such as I see so frequently employ everyone in their affairs, and thrust themselves into so much obligation, would never do it, did they but relish as I do the sweetness of a pureliberty, and did they but weigh, as wise: men should, the burden ofobligation: 'tis sometimes, peradventure, fully paid, but 'tis neverdissolved. 'Tis a miserable slavery to a man who loves to be at fullliberty in all reapects. Such as know me, both above and below me instation, are able to say whether they have ever known a man lessimportuning, soliciting, entreating, and pressing upon others than I. If I am so, and a degree beyond all modern example, 'tis no great wonder, so many parts of my manners contributing to it: a little natural pride, an impatience at being refused, the moderation of my desires and designs, my incapacity for business, and my most beloved qualities, idleness andfreedom; by all these together I have conceived a mortal hatred to beingobliged to any other, or by any other than myself. I leave no stoneunturned, to do without it, rather than employ the bounty of another inany light or important occasion or necessity whatever. My friendsstrangely trouble me when they ask me to ask a third person; and I thinkit costs me little less to disengage him who is indebted to me, by makinguse of him, than to engage myself to him who owes me nothing. Theseconditions being removed, and provided they require of me nothing if anygreat trouble or care (for I have declared mortal war against all care), I am very ready to do every one the best service I can. I have been verywilling to seek occasion to do people a good turn, and to attach them tome; and methinks there is no more agreeable employment for our means. But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving, and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy. , My fortune hasallowed me but little to do others good withal, and the little it canafford, is put into a pretty close hand. Had I been born a great person, I should have been ambitious to have made myself beloved, not to makemyself feared or admired: shall I more plainly express it? I should morehave endeavoured to please than to profit others. Cyrus very wisely, andby the mouth of a great captain, and still greater philosopher, prefershis bounty and benefits much before his valour and warlike conquests;and the elder Scipio, wherever he would raise himself in esteem, sets ahigher value upon his affability and humanity, than on his prowess andvictories, and has always this glorious saying in his mouth: "That he hasgiven his enemies as much occasion to love him as his friends. " I willthen say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to beby a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which thenecessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt asthat of my total preservation both of life and fortune: it overwhelms me. 

I have a thousand times gone to bed in my own house with an apprehensionthat I should be betrayed and murdered that very night; compounding withfortune, that it might be without terror and with quick despatch; and, after my Paternoster, I have cried out, "Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit!"

 ["Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?" --Virgil, Ecl. , i. 71. ]

What remedy? 'tis the place of my birth, and that of most of myancestors; they have here fixed their affection and name. We inureourselves to whatever we are accustomed to; and in so miserable acondition as ours is, custom is a great bounty of nature, which benumbsout senses to the sufferance of many evils. A civil war has this with itworse than other wars have, to make us stand sentinels in our own houses. 

 "Quam miserum, porta vitam muroque tueri, Vixque suae tutum viribus esse domus!"

 ["'Tis miserable to protect one's life by doors and walls, and to be scarcely safe in one's own house. "--Ovid, Trist. , iv. I, 69. ]

'Tis a grievous extremity for a man to be jostled even in his own houseand domestic repose. The country where I live is always the first inarms and the last that lays them down, and where there is never anabsolute peace:

 "Tunc quoque, cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli.... Quoties Romam fortuna lacessit; Hac iter est bellis.... Melius, Fortuna, dedisses Orbe sub Eco sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto, Errantesque domos. "

 ["Even when there's peace, there is here still the dear of war when Fortune troubles peace, this is ever the way by which war passes. " --Ovid, Trist. , iii. 10, 67. ]

 ["We might have lived happier in the remote East or in the icy North, or among the wandering tribes. "--Lucan, i. 255. ]

I sometimes extract the means to fortify myself against theseconsiderations from indifference and indolence, which, in some sort, bring us on to resolution. It often befalls me to imagine and expectmortal dangers with a kind of delight: I stupidly plunge myself headlonginto death, without considering or taking a view of it, as into a deepand obscure abyss which swallows me up at one leap, and involves me in aninstant in a profound sleep, without any sense of pain. And in theseshort and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers moreconsolation to me than the effect does fear. They say, that as life isnot better for being long, so death is better for being not long. I donot so much evade being dead, as I enter into confidence with dying. Iwrap and shroud myself into the storm that is to blind and carry me awaywith the fury of a sudden and insensible attack. Moreover, if it shouldfall out that, as some gardeners say, roses and violets spring moreodoriferous near garlic and onions, by reason that the last suck andimbibe all the ill odour of the earth; so, if these depraved naturesshould also attract all the malignity of my air and climate, and renderit so much better and purer by their vicinity, I should not lose all. That cannot be: but there may be something in this, that goodness is morebeautiful and attractive when it is rare; and that contrariety anddiversity fortify and consolidate well-doing within itself, and inflameit by the jealousy of opposition and by glory. Thieves and robbers, oftheir special favour, have no particular spite at me; no more have I tothem: I should have my hands too full. Like consciences are lodged underseveral sorts of robes; like cruelty, disloyalty, rapine; and so much theworse, and more falsely, when the more secure and concealed under colourof the laws. I less hate an open professed injury than one that istreacherous; an enemy in arms, than an enemy in a gown. Our fever hasseized upon a body that is not much the worse for it; there was firebefore, and now 'tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, notthe evil. I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels, "That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek. " If theytell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, andthat their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it ishard to be believed;

 "Tam multa: scelerum facies!"

 ["There are so many forms of crime. "--Virgil, Georg. , i. 506. ]

secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one thatis uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so muchas our own. 

I will not here omit, that I never mutiny so much against France, that Iam not perfectly friends with Paris; that city has ever had my heart frommy infancy, and it has fallen out, as of excellent things, that the morebeautiful cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this stillwins upon my affection. I love her for herself, and more in her ownnative being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquiredembellishments. I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes. I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great inthe felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable invariety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of themost noble ornaments of the world. May God drive our divisions far fromher. Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all otherviolences. I give her caution that, of all sorts of people, those willbe the worst that shall set her in discord; I have no fear for her, butof herself, and, certainly, I have as much fear for her as for any otherpart of the kingdom. Whilst she shall continue, I shall never want aretreat, where I may stand at bay, sufficient to make me amends forparting with any other retreat. 

Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my ownhumour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men asmy compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring theuniversal and common tie to all national ties whatever. I am not muchtaken with the sweetness of a native air: acquaintance wholly new andwholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common andfortuitous ones with Four neighbours: friendships that are purely of ourown acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communicationof climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world freeand unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings ofPersia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of theriver Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all otherstreams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the otherrivers of the world. What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon asentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, Ishall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated tomy own country to be of that opinion. These celestial lives have imagesenough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have somealso so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much asby esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them. That fancy was singularin a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that hedisdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Atticterritories. What say you to his complaint of the money his friendsoffered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison bythe mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time whenthey were otherwise so corrupt? These examples are of the first kind forme; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the sameperson: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, butsome of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment. 

Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitableexercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new andunknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better schoolwherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversityof so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish aperpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein, neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it inbreath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am, without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:

 "Vires ultra sorternque senectae. "

 ["Beyond the strength and lot of age. "--AEneid, vi. 114. ]

No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; forthe umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancientRomans, more burden a man's arm than they relieve his head. I would fainknow how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy ofluxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, asXenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, aswell as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; everysky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breedwithin myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to begot out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best. I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitousto equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as forthe longest voyage. I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion, and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heatsI always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise. The other method ofbaiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is, especially in short days, very inconvenient. My horses perform thebetter; never any horse tired under me that was able to hold out thefirst day's journey. I water them at every brook I meet, and have only acare they have so much way to go before I come to my inn, as will digestthe water in their bellies. My unwillingness to rise in a morning givesmy servants leisure to dine at their ease before they set out; for my ownpart, I never eat too late; my appetite comes to me in eating, and notelse; I am never hungry but at table. 

Some of my friends blame me for continuing this travelling humour, beingmarried and old. But they are out in't; 'tis the best time to leave aman's house, when he has put it into a way of continuing without him, andsettled such order as corresponds with its former government. 'Tis muchgreater imprudence to abandon it to a less faithful housekeeper, and whowill be less solicitous to look after your affairs. 

The most useful and honourable knowledge and employment for the mother ofa family is the science of good housewifery. I see some that arecovetous indeed, but very few that are good managers. 'Tis the supremequality of a woman, which a man ought to seek before any other, as theonly dowry that must ruin or preserve our houses. Let men say what theywill, according to the experience I have learned, I require in marriedwomen the economical virtue above all other virtues; I put my wife to't, as a concern of her own, leaving her, by my absence, the whole governmentof my affairs. I see, and am vexed to see, in several families I know, Monsieur about noon come home all jaded and ruffled about his affairs, when Madame is still dressing her hair and tricking up herself, forsooth, in her closet: this is for queens to do, and that's a question, too: 'tisridiculous and unjust that the laziness of our wives should be maintainedwith our sweat and labour. No man, so far as in me lie, shall have aclearer, a more quiet and free fruition of his estate than I. If thehusband bring matter, nature herself will that the wife find the form. 

As to the duties of conjugal friendship, that some think to be impairedby these absences, I am quite of another opinion. It is, on thecontrary, an intelligence that easily cools by a too frequent andassiduous companionship. Every strange woman appears charming, and weall find by experience that being continually together is not so pleasingas to part for a time and meet again. These interruptions fill me withfresh affection towards my family, and render my house more pleasant tome. Change warms my appetite to the one and then to the other. I knowthat the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end ofthe world to the other, and especially this, where there is a continualcommunication of offices that rouse the obligation and remembrance. TheStoics say that there is so great connection and relation amongst thesages, that he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt; andthat whoever does but hold out his finger, in what part of the worldsoever, all the sages upon the habitable earth feel themselves assistedby it. Fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination;it more fervently and constantly embraces what it is in quest of, thanwhat we hold in our arms. Cast up your daily amusements; you will findthat you are most absent from your friend when he is present with you;his presence relaxes your attention, and gives you liberty to absentyourself at every turn and upon every occasion. When I am away at Rome, I keep and govern my house, and the conveniences I there left; see mywalls rise, my trees shoot, and my revenue increase or decrease, verynear as well as when I am there:

 "Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum. "

 ["My house and the forms of places float before my eyes" --Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57. ]

If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the moneyin our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting. We willhave them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day's journey from home, far? What is ten leagues: far or near? If near, what is eleven, twelve, or thirteen, and so by degrees. In earnest, if there be a woman who cantell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote, I would advise her to stop between;

 "Excludat jurgia finis . . . . Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:"

 ["Let the end shut out all disputes . . . . I use what is permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse's tail one by one; while I thus outwit my opponent. "--Horace, Ep. , ii, I, 38, 45]

and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teethit may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other endof the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and theshort, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing itdiscovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge veryuncertainly of the middle:

 "Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium. "

 ["Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things. " --Cicero, Acad. , ii. 29. ]

Are they not still wives and friends to the dead who are not at the endof this but in the other world? We embrace not only the absent, butthose who have been, and those who are not yet. We do not promise inmarriage to be continually twisted and linked together, like some littleanimals that we see, or, like the bewitched folks of Karenty, --[Karantia, a town in the isle of Rugen. See Saxo-Grammaticus, Hist. Of Denmark, book xiv. ]--tied together like dogs; and a wife ought not to be sogreedily enamoured of her husband's foreparts, that she cannot endure tosee him turn his back, if occasion be. But may not this saying of thatexcellent painter of woman's humours be here introduced, to show thereason of their complaints?

 "Uxor, si cesses, aut to amare cogitat, Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi; Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male;"

 ["Your wife, if you loiter, thinks that you love or are beloved; or that you are drinking or following your inclination; and that it is well for you when it is ill for her (all the pleasure is yours and hers all the care). " --Terence, Adelph. , act i. , sc. I, v. 7. ]

or may it not be, that of itself opposition and contradiction entertainand nourish them, and that they sufficiently accommodate themselves, provided they incommodate you?

In true friendship, wherein I am perfect, I more give myself to myfriend, than I endeavour to attract him to me. I am not only betterpleased in doing him service than if he conferred a benefit upon me, but, moreover, had rather he should do himself good than me, and he mostobliges me when he does so; and if absence be either more pleasant orconvenient for him, 'tis also more acceptable to me than his presence;neither is it properly absence, when we can write to one another: I havesometimes made good use of our separation from one another: we betterfilled and further extended the possession of life in being parted. He--[La Boetie. ]--lived, enjoyed, and saw for me, and I for him, asfully as if he had himself been there; one part of us remained idle, andwe were too much blended in one another when we were together; thedistance of place rendered the conjunction of our wills more rich. Thisinsatiable desire of personal presence a little implies weakness in thefruition of souls. 

As to what concerns age, which is alleged against me, 'tis quitecontrary; 'tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions, and tocurb itself to please others; it has wherewithal to please both thepeople and itself; we have but too much ado to please ourselves alone. As natural conveniences fail, let us supply them with those that areartificial. 'Tis injustice to excuse youth for pursuing its pleasures, and to forbid old men to seek them. When young, I concealed my wantonpassions with prudence; now I am old, I chase away melancholy by debauch. And thus do the platonic laws forbid men to travel till forty or fiftyyears old, so that travel might be more useful and instructive in somature an age. I should sooner subscribe to the second article of thesame Laws, which forbids it after threescore. 

"But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. "What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish itmy business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;I only walk for the walk's sake. They who run after a benefit or a hare, run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running. My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any greathopes: every day concludes my expectation: and the journey of my life iscarried on after the same manner. And yet I have seen places enough agreat way off, where I could have wished to have stayed. And why not, if Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater, so many sages of thesourest sect, readily abandoned their country, without occasion ofcomplaint, and only for the enjoyment of another air. In earnest, thatwhich most displeases me in all my travels is, that I cannot resolve tosettle my abode where I should best like, but that I must always proposeto myself to return, to accommodate myself to the common humour. 

If I feared to die in any other place than that of my birth; if I thoughtI should die more uneasily remote from my own family, I should hardly goout of France; I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feeldeath always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I amotherwise constituted; 'tis in all places alike to me. Yet, might I havemy choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than inbed; out of my own house, and far from my own people. There is moreheartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one's friends; I amwilling to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices offriendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all myheart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell. If there be anyconvenience in so many standers-by, it brings an hundred inconveniencesalong with it. I have seen many dying miserably surrounded with all thistrain: 'tis a crowd that chokes them. 'Tis against duty, and is atestimony of little kindness and little care, to permit you to die inrepose; one torments your eyes, another your ears, another your tongue;you have neither sense nor member that is not worried by them. Yourheart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and, perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders. Who ever has been delicate and sensitive, when well, is much more so whenill. In such a necessity, a gentle hand is required, accommodated to hissentiment, to scratch him just in the place where he itches, otherwisescratch him not at all. If we stand in need of a wise woman--[midwife, Fr. 'sage femme'. ]--to bring us into the world, we have much more needof a still wiser man to help us out of it. Such a one, and a friend toboot, a man ought to purchase at any cost for such an occasion. I am notyet arrived to that pitch of disdainful vigour that is fortified initself, that nothing can assist or disturb; I am of a lower form; Iendeavour to hide myself, and to escape from this passage, not by fear, but by art. I do not intend in this act of dying to make proof and showof my constancy. For whom should I do it? all the right and interest Ihave in reputation will then cease. I content myself with a deathinvolved within itself, quiet, solitary, and all my own, suitable to myretired and private life; quite contrary to the Roman superstition, wherea man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who hadnot his nearest relations to close his eyes. I have enough to do tocomfort myself, without having to console others; thoughts enough in myhead, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; andmatter enough to occupy me without borrowing. This affair is out of thepart of society; 'tis the act of one single person. Let us live and bemerry amongst our friends; let us go repine and die amongst strangers; aman may find those, for his money, who will shift his pillow and rub hisfeet, and will trouble him no more than he would have them; who willpresent to him an indifferent countenance, and suffer him to governhimself, and to complain according to his own method. 

I wean myself daily by my reason from this childish and inhuman humour, of desiring by our sufferings to move the compassion and mourning of ourfriends: we stretch our own incommodities beyond their just extent whenwe extract tears from others; and the constancy which we commend in everyone in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in ourfriends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they shouldbe sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted. A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief. He whomakes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented whenthere shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never tobe lamented; by making himself always in so pitiful a taking, he is nevercommiserated by any. He who makes himself out dead when he is alive, issubject to be thought living when he is dying. I have seen some who havetaken it ill when they have been told that they looked well, and thattheir pulse was good; restrain their smiles, because they betrayed arecovery, and be angry, at their health because it was not to belamented: and, which is a great deal more, these were not women. I describe my infirmities, such as they really are, at most, and avoidall expressions of evil prognostic and composed exclamations. If notmirth, at least a temperate countenance in the standers-by, is proper inthe presence of a wise sick man: he does not quarrel with health, for, seeing himself in a contrary condition, he is pleased to contemplate itsound and entire in others, and at least to enjoy it for company: he doesnot, for feeling himself melt away, abandon all living thoughts, noravoid ordinary discourse. I would study sickness whilst I am well; whenit has seized me, it will make its impression real enough, without thehelp of my imagination. We prepare ourselves beforehand for the journeyswe undertake, and resolve upon them; we leave the appointment of the hourwhen to take horse to the company, and in their favour defer it. 

I find this unexpected advantage in the publication of my manners, thatit in some sort serves me for a rule. I have, at times, someconsideration of not betraying the history of my life: this publicdeclaration obliges me to keep my way, and not to give the lie to theimage I have drawn of my qualities, commonly less deformed andcontradictory than consists with the malignity and infirmity of thejudgments of this age. The uniformity and simplicity of my mannersproduce a face of easy interpretation; but because the fashion is alittle new and not in use, it gives too great opportunity to slander. Yet so it is, that whoever would fairly assail me, I think I sosufficiently assist his purpose in my known and avowed imperfections, that he may that way satisfy his ill-nature without fighting with thewind. If I myself, to anticipate accusation and discovery, confessenough to frustrate his malice, as he conceives, 'tis but reason that hemake use of his right of amplification, and to wire-draw my vices as faras he can; attack has its rights beyond justice; and let him make theroots of those errors I have laid open to him shoot up into trees: lethim make his use, not only of those I am really affected with, but alsoof those that only threaten me; injurious vices, both in quality andnumber; let him cudgel me that way. I should willingly follow theexample of the philosopher Bion: Antigonus being about to reproach himwith the meanness of his birth, he presently cut him short with thisdeclaration: "I am, " said he, "the son of a slave, a butcher, andbranded, and of a strumpet my father married in the lowest of hisfortune; both of them were whipped for offences they had committed. Anorator bought me, when a child, and finding me a pretty and hopeful boy, bred me up, and when he died left me all his estate, which I havetransported into this city of Athens, and here settled myself to thestudy of philosophy. Let the historians never trouble themselves withinquiring about me: I will tell them about it. " A free and generousconfession enervates reproach and disarms slander. So it is that, onething with another, I fancy men as often commend as undervalue me beyondreason; as, methinks also, from my childhood, in rank and degree ofhonour, they have given me a place rather above than below my right. I should find myself more at ease in a country where these degrees wereeither regulated or not regarded. Amongst men, when an altercation aboutthe precedence either of walking or sitting exceeds three replies, 'tisreputed uncivil. I never stick at giving or taking place out of rule, toavoid the trouble of such ceremony; and never any man had a mind to gobefore me, but I permitted him to do it. 

Besides this profit I make of writing of myself, I have also hoped forthis other advantage, that if it should fall out that my humour shouldplease or jump with those of some honest man before I die, he would thendesire and seek to be acquainted with me. I have given him a great dealof made-way; for all that he could have, in many years, acquired by closefamiliarity, he has seen in three days in this memorial, and more surelyand exactly. A pleasant fancy: many things that I would not confess toany one in particular, I deliver to the public, and send my best friendsto a bookseller's shop, there to inform themselves concerning my mostsecret thoughts;

 "Excutienda damus praecordia. "

 ["We give our hearts to be examined. "--Persius, V. 22. ]

Did I, by good direction, know where to seek any one proper for myconversation, I should certainly go a great way to find him out: for thesweetness of suitable and agreeable company cannot; in my opinion, bebought too dear. O what a thing is a true friend! how true is that oldsaying, that the use of a friend is more pleasing and necessary than theelements of water and fire!

To return to my subject: there is, then, no great harm in dying privatelyand far from home; we conceive ourselves obliged to retire for naturalactions less unseemly and less terrible than this. But, moreover, suchas are reduced to spin out a long languishing life, ought not, perhaps, to wish to trouble a great family with their continual miseries;therefore the Indians, in a certain province, thought it just to knock aman on the head when reduced to such a necessity; and in another of theirprovinces, they all forsook him to shift for himself as well as he could. To whom do they not, at last, become tedious and insupportable? theordinary offices of fife do not go that length. You teach your bestfriends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long useneither to regard nor to lament your sufferings. The groans of the stoneare grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them. And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (whichdoes not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, whicheasily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not toomuch to make abuse of this half a lifetime? The more I should see themconstrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more Ishould be sorry for their pains. We have liberty to lean, but not to layour whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; likehim who caused little children's throats to be cut to make use of theirblood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who wascontinually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warmin the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour andstinking. I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline oflife. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. I am sociable even to excess, yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from thesight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw upmyself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men withouthanging upon them. I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: 'tistime to turn my back to company. 

"But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place, where nothing can be had to relieve you. " I always carry most thingsnecessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she onceresolves to attack us. I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick. I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot. At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcilemyself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself byso doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so muchthe better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary orcounsellor than of a physician. What I have not settled of my affairswhen I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick. What I will do for the service of death is always done; I durst not somuch as one day defer it; and if nothing be done, 'tis as much as to sayeither that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes 'tis well chosen notto choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all. 

I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been matter ofduration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to thecontinual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, whocan expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it isaltered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every agesays the same of its own. I shall hardly trust to that, so long as itvaries and changes as it does. 'Tis for good and useful writings torivet it to them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune ofour state. For which reason I am not afraid to insert in it severalprivate articles, which will spend their use amongst the men that are nowliving, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will seefurther into them than every common reader. I will not, after all, as Ioften hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: "He judged, helived so and so; he would have done this or that; could he have spokenwhen he was dying, he would have said so or so, and have given this thingor t'other; I knew him better than any. " Now, as much as decencypermits, I here discover my inclinations and affections; but I do morewillingly and freely by word of mouth to any one who desires to beinformed. So it is that in these memoirs, if any one observe, he willfind that I have either told or designed to tell all; what I cannotexpress, I point out with my finger:

 "Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere caetera tute"

 ["By these footsteps a sagacious mind many easily find all other matters (are sufficient to enable one to learn the rest well. )" --Lucretius, i. 403. ]

I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me. Ifpeople must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly; Iwould come again, with all my heart, from the other world to give any onethe lie who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honourme. I perceive that people represent, even living men, quite anotherthing than what they really are; and had I not stoutly defended a friendwhom I have lost, --[De la Boetie. ]--they would have torn him into athousand contrary pieces. 

To conclude the account of my poor humours, I confess that in my travelsI seldom reach my inn but that it comes into my mind to consider whetherI could there be sick and dying at my ease. I desire to be lodged insome private part of the house, remote from all noise, ill scents, andsmoke. I endeavour to flatter death by these frivolous circumstances;or, to say better, to discharge myself from all other incumbrances, thatI may have nothing to do, nor be troubled with anything but that whichwill lie heavy enough upon me without any other load. I would have mydeath share in the ease and conveniences of my life; 'tis a great part ofit, and of great importance, and I hope it will not in the futurecontradict the past. Death has some forms that are more easy thanothers, and receives divers qualities, according to every one's fancy. Amongst the natural deaths, that which proceeds from weakness and stuporI think the most favourable; amongst those that are violent, I can worseendure to think of a precipice than of the fall of a house that willcrush me in a moment, and of a wound with a sword than of a harquebusshot; I should rather have chosen to poison myself with Socrates, thanstab myself with Cato. And, though it, be all one, yet my imaginationmakes as great a difference as betwixt death and life, betwixt throwingmyself into a burning furnace and plunging into the channel of a river:so idly does our fear more concern itself in the means than the effect. It is but an instant, 'tis true, but withal an instant of such weight, that I would willingly give a great many days of my life to pass it overafter my own fashion. Since every one's imagination renders it more orless terrible, and since every one has some choice amongst the severalforms of dying, let us try a little further to find some one that iswholly clear from all offence. Might not one render it even voluptuous, like the Commoyientes of Antony and Cleopatra? I set aside the brave andexemplary efforts produced by philosophy and religion; but, amongst menof little mark there have been found some, such as Petronius andTigellinus at Rome, condemned to despatch themselves, who have, as itwere, rocked death asleep with the delicacy of their preparations; theyhave made it slip and steal away in the height of their accustomeddiversions amongst girls and good fellows; not a word of consolation, nomention of making a will, no ambitious affectation of constancy, no talkof their future condition; amongst sports, feastings, wit, and mirth, common and indifferent discourses, music, and amorous verses. Were itnot possible for us to imitate this resolution after a more decentmanner? Since there are deaths that are good for fools, deaths good forthe wise, let us find out such as are fit for those who are betwixt both. My imagination suggests to me one that is easy, and, since we must die, to be desired. The Roman tyrants thought they did, in a manner, give acriminal life when they gave him the choice of his death. But was notTheophrastus, that so delicate, so modest, and so wise a philosopher, compelled by reason, when he durst say this verse, translated by Cicero:

 "Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia?"

 ["Fortune, not wisdom, sways human life. " --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes. , V. 31. ]

Fortune assists the facility of the bargain of my life, having placed itin such a condition that for the future it can be neither advantage norhindrance to those who are concerned in me; 'tis a condition that I wouldhave accepted at any time of my life; but in this occasion of trussing upmy baggage, I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall neither dothem good nor harm. She has so ordered it, by a cunning compensation, that they who may pretend to any considerable advantage by my death will, at the same time, sustain a material inconvenience. Death sometimes ismore grievous to us, in that it is grievous to others, and interests usin their interest as much as in our own, and sometimes more. 

In this conveniency of lodging that I desire, I mix nothing of pomp andamplitude--I hate it rather; but a certain plain neatness, which isoftenest found in places where there is less of art, and that Nature hasadorned with some grace that is all her own:

 "Non ampliter, sea munditer convivium. "

 ["To eat not largely, but cleanly. "--Nepos, Life of Atticus, c. 13]

 "Plus salis quam sumptus. "

 ["Rather enough than costly (More wit than cost)"--Nonius, xi. 19. ]

And besides, 'tis for those whose affairs compel them to travel in thedepth of winter through the Grisons country to be surprised upon the waywith great inconveniences. I, who, for the most part, travel for mypleasure, do not order my affairs so ill. If the way be foul on my righthand, I turn on my left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stay where Iam; and, so doing, in earnest I see nothing that is not as pleasant andcommodious as my own house. 'Tis true that I always find superfluitysuperfluous, and observe a kind of trouble even in abundance itself. Have I left anything behind me unseen, I go back to see it; 'tis still onmy way; I trace no certain line, either straight or crooked. --[Rousseauhas translated this passage in his Emile, book v. ]--Do I not find in theplace to which I go what was reported to me--as it often falls out thatthe judgments of others do not jump with mine, and that I have foundtheir reports for the most part false--I never complain of losing mylabour: I have, at least, informed myself that what was told me was nottrue. 

I have a constitution of body as free, and a palate as indifferent, asany man living: the diversity of manners of several nations only affectsme in the pleasure of variety: every usage has its reason. Let the plateand dishes be pewter, wood, or earth; my meat be boiled or roasted; letthem give me butter or oil, of nuts or olives, hot or cold, 'tis all oneto me; and so indifferent, that growing old, I accuse this generousfaculty, and would wish that delicacy and choice should correct theindiscretion of my appetite, and sometimes soothe my stomach. When Ihave been abroad out of France and that people, out of courtesy, haveasked me if I would be served after the French manner, I laughed at thequestion, and always frequented tables the most filled with foreigners. I am ashamed to see our countrymen besotted with this foolish humour ofquarrelling with forms contrary to their own; they seem to be out oftheir element when out of their own village: wherever they go, they keepto their own fashions and abominate those of strangers. Do they meetwith a compatriot in Hungary? O the happy chance! They are henceforwardinseparable; they cling together, and their whole discourse is to condemnthe barbarous manners they see about them. Why barbarous, because theyare not French? And those have made the best use of their travels whohave observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other endbut to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravityand circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preservingthemselves from the contagion of an unknown air. What I am saying ofthem puts me in mind of something like it I have at times observed insome of our young courtiers; they will not mix with any but men of theirown sort, and look upon us as men of another world, with disdain or pity. Put them upon any discourse but the intrigues of the court, and they areutterly at a loss; as very owls and novices to us as we are to them. 'Tis truly said that a well-bred man is a compound man. I, on thecontrary, travel very much sated with our own fashions; I do not look forGascons in Sicily; I have left enough of them at home; I rather seek forGreeks and Persians; they are the men I endeavour to be acquainted withand the men I study; 'tis there that I bestow and employ myself. Andwhich is more, I fancy that I have met but with few customs that are notas good as our own; I have not, I confess, travelled very far; scarce outof the sight of the vanes of my own house. 

As to the rest, most of the accidental company a man falls into upon theroad beget him more trouble than pleasure; I waive them as much as Icivilly can, especially now that age seems in some sort to privilege andsequester me from the common forms. You suffer for others or otherssuffer for you; both of them inconveniences of importance enough, but thelatter appears to me the greater. 'Tis a rare fortune, but ofinestimable solace; to have a worthy man, one of a sound judgment and ofmanners conformable to your own, who takes a delight to bear you company. I have been at an infinite loss for such upon my travels. But such acompanion should be chosen and acquired from your first setting out. There can be no pleasure to me without communication: there is not somuch as a sprightly thought comes into my mind, that it does not grieveme to have produced alone, and that I have no one to communicate it to:

 "Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia, ut illam inclusam teneam, nec enuntiem, rejiciam. "

 ["If wisdom be conferred with this reservation, that I must keep it to myself, and not communicate it to others, I would none of it. " --Seneca, Ep. , 6. ]

This other has strained it one note higher:

 "Si contigerit ea vita sapienti, ut ommum rerum afliuentibus copiis, quamvis omnia, quae cognitione digna sunt, summo otio secum ipse consideret et contempletur, tamen, si solitudo tanta sit, ut hominem videre non possit, excedat a vita. "

 ["If such a condition of life should happen to a wise man, that in the greatest plenty of all conveniences he might, at the most undisturbed leisure, consider and contemplate all things worth the knowing, yet if his solitude be such that he must not see a man, let him depart from life. "--Cicero, De Offic. , i. 43. ]

Architas pleases me when he says, "that it would be unpleasant, even inheaven itself, to wander in those great and divine celestial bodieswithout a companion. But yet 'tis much better to be alone than infoolish and troublesome company. Aristippus loved to live as a strangerin all places:

 "Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam Auspiciis, "

 ["If the fates would let me live in my own way. "--AEneid, iv. 340. ]

I should choose to pass away the greatest part of my life on horseback:

 "Visere gestiens, Qua pane debacchentur ignes, Qua nebula, pluviique rores. "

 ["Visit the regions where the sun burns, where are the thick rain-clouds and the frosts. "--Horace, Od. , iii. 3, 54. ]

"Have you not more easy diversions at home? What do you there want? Isnot your house situated in a sweet and healthful air, sufficientlyfurnished, and more than sufficiently large? Has not the royal majestybeen more than once there entertained with all its train? Are there notmore below your family in good ease than there are above it in eminence?Is there any local, extraordinary, indigestible thought that afflictsyou?"

 "Qua to nunc coquat, et vexet sub pectore fixa. "

 ["That may now worry you, and vex, fixed in your breast. " --Cicero, De Senect, c. 1, Ex Ennio. ]

"Where do you think to live without disturbance?"

 "Nunquam simpliciter Fortuna indulget. "

 ["Fortune is never simply complaisant (unmixed). " --Quintus Curtius, iv. 14]

You see, then, it is only you that trouble yourself; you will everywherefollow yourself, and everywhere complain; for there is no satisfactionhere below, but either for brutish or for divine souls. He who, on sojust an occasion, has no contentment, where will he think to find it?How many thousands of men terminate their wishes in such a condition asyours? Do but reform yourself; for that is wholly in your own power!whereas you have no other right but patience towards fortune:

 "Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composuit. "

 ["There is no tranquillity but that which reason has conferred. " --Seneca, Ep. , 56. ]

I see the reason of this advice, and see it perfectly well; but he mightsooner have done, and more pertinently, in bidding me in one word bewise; that resolution is beyond wisdom; 'tis her precise work andproduct. Thus the physician keeps preaching to a poor languishingpatient to "be cheerful"; but he would advise him a little morediscreetly in bidding him "be well. " For my part, I am but a man of thecommon sort. 'Tis a wholesome precept, certain and easy to beunderstood, "Be content with what you have, " that is to say, with reason:and yet to follow this advice is no more in the power of the wise men ofthe world than in me. 'Tis a common saying, but of a terrible extent:what does it not comprehend? All things fall under discretion andqualification. I know very well that, to take it by the letter, thispleasure of travelling is a testimony of uneasiness and irresolution, and, in sooth, these two are our governing and predominating qualities. Yes, I confess, I see nothing, not so much as in a dream, in a wish, whereon I could set up my rest: variety only, and the possession ofdiversity, can satisfy me; that is, if anything can. In travelling, itpleases me that I may stay where I like, without inconvenience, and thatI have a place wherein commodiously to divert myself. I love a privatelife, because 'tis my own choice that I love it, not by any dissentingfrom or dislike of public life, which, peradventure, is as much accordingto my complexion. I serve my prince more cheerfully because it is by thefree election of my own judgment and reason, without any particularobligation; and that I am not reduced and constrained so to do for beingrejected or disliked by the other party; and so of all the rest. I hatethe morsels that necessity carves me; any commodity upon which I had onlyto depend would have me by the throat;

 "Alter remus aquas, alter mihi radat arenas;"

 ["Let me have one oar in the water, and with the other rake the shore. "--Propertius, iii. 3, 23. ]

one cord will never hold me fast enough. You will say, there is vanityin this way of living. But where is there not? All these fine preceptsare vanity, and all wisdom is vanity:

 "Dominus novit cogitationes sapientum, quoniam vanae sunt. "

 ["The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. " --Ps. Xciii. II; or I Cor. Iii. 20. ]

These exquisite subtleties are only fit for sermons; they are discoursesthat will send us all saddled into the other world. Life is a materialand corporal motion, an action imperfect and irregular of its own properessence; I make it my business to serve it according to itself:

 "Quisque suos patimur manes. "

 ["We each of us suffer our own particular demon. "--AEneid, vi. 743. ]

 "Sic est faciendum, ut contra naturam universam nihil contendamus; ea tamen conservata propriam sequamur. "

 ["We must so order it as by no means to contend against universal nature; but yet, that rule being observed, to follow our own. " --Cicero, De Offcc. , i. 31. ]

To what end are these elevated points of philosophy, upon which no humanbeing can rely? and those rules that exceed both our use and force?

I see often that we have theories of life set before us which neither theproposer nor those who hear him have any hope, nor, which is more, anyinclination to follow. Of the same sheet of paper whereon the judge hasbut just written a sentence against an adulterer, he steals a piecewhereon to write a love-letter to his companion's wife. She whom youhave but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in yourhearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion thana Portia would do;--[The chaste daughter of Cato of Utica. ]--and menthere are who will condemn others to death for crimes that theythemselves do not repute so much as faults. I have, in my youth, seen aman of good rank with one hand present to the people verses that excelledboth in wit and debauchery, and with the other, at the same time, themost ripe and pugnacious theological reformation that the world has beentreated withal these many years. And so men proceed; we let the laws andprecepts follow their way; ourselves keep another course, not only fromdebauchery of manners, but ofttimes by judgment and contrary opinion. Dobut hear a philosophical lecture; the invention, eloquence, pertinencyimmediately strike upon your mind and move you; there is nothing thattouches or stings your conscience; 'tis not to this they addressthemselves. Is not this true? It made Aristo say, that neither a bathnor a lecture did aught unless it scoured and made men clean. One maystop at the skin; but it is after the marrow is picked out as, after wehave swallowed good wine out of a fine cup, we examine the designs andworkmanship. In all the courts of ancient philosophy, this is to befound, that the same teacher publishes rules of temperance and at thesame time lessons in love and wantonness; Xenophon, in the very bosom ofClinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue. 'Tis not that there is anymiraculous conversion in it that makes them thus wavering; 'tis thatSolon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes inthat of a legislator; one while he speaks for the crowd, and another forhimself; taking the free and natural rules for his own share, feelingassured of a firm and entire health:

 "Curentur dubii medicis majoribus aegri. "

 ["Desperate maladies require the best doctors. " --Juvenal, xiii. 124. ]

Antisthenes allows a sage to love, and to do whatever he thinksconvenient, without regard to the laws, forasmuch as he is better advisedthan they, and has a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenessaid, that "men to perturbations were to oppose reason: to fortune, courage: to the laws, nature. " For tender stomachs, constrained andartificial recipes must be prescribed: good and strong stomachs servethemselves simply with the prescriptions of their own natural appetite;after this manner do our physicians proceed, who eat melons and drinkiced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops. "I know not, " said the courtezan Lais, "what they may talk of books, wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as anyothers. " At the same rate that our licence carries us beyond what islawful and allowed, men have, often beyond universal reason, stretchedthe precepts and rules of our life:

 "Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere, quantum Permittas. "

 ["No one thinks he has done ill to the full extent of what he may. " --Juvenal, xiv. 233. ]

It were to be wished that there was more proportion betwixt the commandand the obedience; and the mark seems to be unjust to which one cannotattain. There is no so good man, who so squares all his thoughts andactions to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging tentimes in his life; and he may well be such a one, as it were greatinjustice and great harm to punish and ruin:

 "Ole, quid ad te De cute quid faciat ille vel ille sua?"

 ["Olus, what is it to thee what he or she does with their skin?" --Martial, vii. 9, I. ]

and such an one there may be, who has no way offended the laws, who, nevertheless, would not deserve the character of a virtuous man, and whomphilosophy would justly condemn to be whipped; so unequal and perplexedis this relation. We are so far from being good men, according to thelaws of God, that we cannot be so according to our own human wisdom neveryet arrived at the duties it had itself prescribed; and could it arrivethere, it would still prescribe to itself others beyond, to which itwould ever aspire and pretend; so great an enemy to consistency is ourhuman condition. Man enjoins himself to be necessarily in fault: he isnot very discreet to cut out his own duty by the measure of another beingthan his own. To whom does he prescribe that which he does not expectany one should perform? is he unjust in not doing what it is impossiblefor him to do? The laws which condemn us not to be able, condemn us fornot being able. 

At the worst, this difform liberty of presenting ourselves two severalways, the actions after one manner and the reasoning after another, maybe allowed to those who only speak of things; but it cannot be allowed tothose who speak of themselves, as I do: I must march my pen as I do myfeet. Common life ought to have relation to the other lives: the virtueof Cato was vigorous beyond the reason of the age he lived in; and for aman who made it his business to govern others, a man dedicated to thepublic service, it might be called a justice, if not unjust, at leastvain and out of season. Even my own manners, which differ not above aninch from those current amongst us, render me, nevertheless, a littlerough and unsociable at my age. I know not whether it be without reasonthat I am disgusted with the world I frequent; but I know very well thatit would be without reason, should I complain of its being disgusted withme, seeing I am so with it. The virtue that is assigned to the affairsof the world is a virtue of many wavings, corners, and elbows, to joinand adapt itself to human frailty, mixed and artificial, not straight, clear, constant, nor purely innocent. Our annals to this very dayreproach one of our kings for suffering himself too simply to be carriedaway by the conscientious persuasions of his confessor: affairs of statehave bolder precepts;

 "Exeat aula, Qui vult esse pius. "

 ["Let him who will be pious retire from the court. " --Lucan, viii. 493]

I formerly tried to employ in the service of public affairs opinions andrules of living, as rough, new, unpolished or unpolluted, as they wereeither born with me, or brought away from my education, and wherewith Iserve my own turn, if not so commodiously, at least securely, in my ownparticular concerns: a scholastic and novice virtue; but I have foundthem unapt and dangerous. He who goes into a crowd must now go one wayand then another, keep his elbows close, retire or advance, and quit thestraight way, according to what he encounters; and must live not so muchaccording to his own method as to that of others; not according to whathe proposes to himself, but according to what is proposed to him, according to the time, according to the men, according to the occasions. Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world's handling with cleanbreeches, escapes by miracle: and says withal, that when he appoints hisphilosopher the head of a government, he does not mean a corrupt one likethat of Athens, and much less such a one as this of ours, wherein wisdomitself would be to seek. A good herb, transplanted into a soil contraryto its own nature, much sooner conforms itself to the soil than itreforms the soil to it. I found that if I had wholly to apply myself tosuch employments, it would require a great deal of change and newmodelling in me before I could be any way fit for it: And though I couldso far prevail upon myself (and why might I not with time and diligencework such a feat), I would not do it. The little trial I have had ofpublic employment has been so much disgust to me; I feel at timestemptations toward ambition rising in my soul, but I obstinately opposethem:

 "At tu, Catulle, obstinatus obdura. "

 ["But thou, Catullus, be obstinately firm. "--Catullus, viii. 19. ]

I am seldom called to it, and as seldom offer myself uncalled; libertyand laziness, the qualities most predominant in me, are qualitiesdiametrically contrary to that trade. We cannot well distinguish thefaculties of men; they have divisions and limits hard and delicate tochoose; to conclude from the discreet conduct of a private life acapacity for the management of public affairs is to conclude ill; a manmay govern himself well who cannot govern others so, and compose Essayswho could not work effects: men there may be who can order a siege well, who would ill marshal a battle; who can speak well in private, who wouldill harangue a people or a prince; nay, 'tis peradventure rather atestimony in him who can do the one that he cannot do the other, thanotherwise. I find that elevated souls are not much more proper for meanthings than mean souls are for high ones. Could it be imagined thatSocrates should have administered occasion of laughter, at the expense ofhis own reputation, to the Athenians for: having never been able to sumup the votes of his tribe, to deliver it to the council? Truly, theveneration I have for the perfections of this great man deserves that hisfortune should furnish, for the excuse of my principal imperfections, somagnificent an example. Our sufficiency is cut out into small parcels;mine has no latitude, and is also very contemptible in number. Saturninus, to those who had conferred upon him the command in chief:"Companions, " said he, "you have lost a good captain, to make of him abad general. "

Whoever boasts, in so sick a time as this, to employ a true and sincerevirtue in the world's service, either knows not what it is, opinionsgrowing corrupt with manners (and, in truth, to hear them describe it, tohear the most of them glorify themselves in their deportments, and laydown their rules; instead of painting virtue, they paint pure vice andinjustice, and so represent it false in the education of princes); or ifhe does know it, boasts unjustly and let him say what he will, does athousand things of which his own conscience must necessarily accuse him. I should willingly take Seneca's word on the experience he made upon thelike occasion, provided he would deal sincerely with me. The mosthonourable mark of goodness in such a necessity is freely to confess bothone's own faults and those of others; with the power of its virtue tostay one's inclination towards evil; unwillingly to follow thispropension; to hope better, to desire better. I perceive that in thesedivisions wherein we are involved in France, every one labours to defendhis cause; but even the very best of them with dissimulation anddisguise: he who would write roundly of the true state of the quarrel, would write rashly and wrongly. The most just party is at best but amember of a decayed and worm-eaten body; but of such a body, the memberthat is least affected calls itself sound, and with good reason, forasmuch as our qualities have no title but in comparison; civilinnocence is measured according to times and places. Imagine this inXenophon, related as a fine commendation of Agesilaus: that, beingentreated by a neighbouring prince with whom he had formerly had war, topermit him to pass through his country, he granted his request, givinghim free passage through Peloponnesus; and not only did not imprison orpoison him, being at his mercy, but courteously received him according tothe obligation of his promise, without doing him the least injury oroffence. To such ideas as theirs this were an act of no especial note;elsewhere and in another age, the frankness and unanimity of such anaction would be thought wonderful; our monkeyish capets

 [Capets, so called from their short capes, were the students of Montaigne College at Paris, and were held in great contempt. ]

would have laughed at it, so little does the Spartan innocence resemblethat of France. We are not without virtuous men, but 'tis according toour notions of virtue. Whoever has his manners established in regularityabove the standard of the age he lives in, let him either wrest or blunthis rules, or, which I would rather advise him to, let him retire, andnot meddle with us at all. What will he get by it?

 "Egregium sanctumque virum si cerno, bimembri Hoc monstrum puero, et miranti jam sub aratro Piscibus inventis, et foetae comparo mulae. "

 ["If I see an exemplary and good man, I liken it to a two-headed boy, or a fish turned up by the plough, or a teeming mule. " --Juvenal, xiii. 64. ]

One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present; we may wishfor other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have;and, peradventure, 'tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good. Solong as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shallshine in any corner of the kingdom, there will I be. If theyunfortunately happen to thwart and contradict one another, so as toproduce two parts, of doubtful and difficult choice, I will willinglychoose to withdraw and escape the tempest; in the meantime nature or thehazards of war may lend me a helping hand. Betwixt Caesar and Pompey, I should frankly have declared myself; but, as amongst the three robberswho came after, --[Octavius, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. ]--a man must havebeen necessitated either to hide himself, or have gone along with thecurrent of the time, which I think one may fairly do when reason nolonger guides:

 "Quo diversus abis?"

 ["Whither dost thou run wandering?"--AEneid, v. 166. ]

This medley is a little from my theme; I go out of my way; but 'tisrather by licence than oversight; my fancies follow one another, butsometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but 'tiswith an oblique glance. I have read a dialogue of Plato, --[ThePhaedrus. ]--of the like motley and fantastic composition, the beginningabout love, and all the rest to the end about rhetoric; they fear notthese variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves becarried away at the pleasure of the wind, or at least to seem as if theywere. The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the wholematter; they often denote it by some mark only, as these others, Andria, Eunuchus; or these, Sylla, Cicero, Toyquatus. I love a poetic progress, by leaps and skips; 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble, demoniac. There are pieces in Plutarch where he forgets his theme; where theproposition of his argument is only found by incidence, stuffed and halfstifled in foreign matter. Observe his footsteps in the Daemon ofSocrates. O God! how beautiful are these frolicsome sallies, thosevariations and digressions, and all the more when they seem mostfortuitous and careless. 'Tis the indiligent reader who loses mysubject, and not I; there will always be found some word or other in acorner that is to the purpose, though it lie very close. I rambleindiscreetly and tumultuously; my style and my wit wander at the samerate. He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool, say both the precepts, and, still more, the examples of our masters. Athousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner; but the best oldprose (and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse) shinesthroughout with the lustre, vigour, and boldness of poetry, and notwithout some air of its fury. And certainly prose ought to have thepre-eminence in speaking. The poet, says Plato, seated upon the musestripod, pours out with fury whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipeof a fountain, without considering and weighing it; and things escape himof various colours, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent. Plato himself is throughout poetical; and the old theology, as thelearned tell us, is all poetry; and the first philosophy is the originallanguage of the gods. I would have my matter distinguish itself; itsufficiently shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, and where it rejoins, without interlacing it with words of connectionintroduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and withoutexplaining myself. Who is he that had not rather not be read at all thanafter a drowsy or cursory manner?

 "Nihil est tam utile, quod intransitu prosit. "

 ["Nothing is so useful as that which is cursorily so. " --Seneca, Ep. , 2. ]

If to take books in hand were to learn them: to look upon them were toconsider them: and to run these slightly over were to grasp them, I werethen to blame to make myself out so ignorant as I say I am. Seeing Icannot fix the attention of my reader by the weight of what I write, 'manco male', if I should chance to do it by my intricacies. "Nay, buthe will afterwards repent that he ever perplexed himself about it. "'Tis very true, but he will yet be there perplexed. And, besides, thereare some humours in which comprehension produces disdain; who will thinkbetter of me for not understanding what I say, and will conclude thedepth of my sense by its obscurity; which, to speak in good sooth, Imortally hate, and would avoid it if I could. Aristotle boasts somewherein his writings that he affected it: a vicious affectation. The frequentbreaks into chapters that I made my method in the beginning of my book, having since seemed to me to dissolve the attention before it was raised, as making it disdain to settle itself to so little, I, upon that account, have made them longer, such as require proposition and assigned leisure. In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you givenothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do it whilst youare doing something else. To which may be added that I have, peradventure, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, tospeak confusedly and discordantly. I am therefore angry at thistrouble-feast reason, and its extravagant projects that worry one's life, and its opinions, so fine and subtle, though they be all true, I thinktoo dear bought and too inconvenient. On the contrary, I make it mybusiness to bring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produceme any pleasure; and let myself follow my own natural inclinations, without carrying too strict a hand upon them. 

I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men:these are men still. 'Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot sooften revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city, --[Rome]--that I do not admire and reverence it. The care of the dead isrecommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with thesedead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any ofthose of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew theLouvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine. The qualities andfortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my headthan those of any of my own country; they are all dead; so is my fatheras absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life ineighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred: whose memory, nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to embrace andutilise with a perfect and lively union. Nay, of my own inclination, Ipay more service to the dead; they can no longer help themselves, andtherefore, methinks, the more require my assistance: 'tis there thatgratitude appears in its full lustre. The benefit is not so generouslybestowed, where there is retrogradation and reflection. Arcesilaus, going to visit Ctesibius, who was sick, and finding him in a very poorcondition, very finely conveyed some money under his pillow, and, byconcealing it from him, acquitted him, moreover, from the acknowledgmentdue to such a benefit. Such as have merited from me friendship andgratitude have never lost these by being no more; I have better and morecarefully paid them when gone and ignorant of what I did; I speak mostaffectionately of my friends when they can no longer know it. I have hada hundred quarrels in defending Pompey and for the cause of Brutus; thisacquaintance yet continues betwixt us; we have no other hold even onpresent things but by fancy. Finding myself of no use to this age, Ithrow myself back upon that other, and am so enamoured of it, that thefree, just, and flourishing state of that ancient Rome (for I neitherlove it in its birth nor its old age) interests and impassionates me;and therefore I cannot so often revisit the sites of their streets andhouses, and those ruins profound even to the Antipodes, that I am notinterested in them. Is it by nature, or through error of fancy, that thesight of places which we know to have been frequented and inhabited bypersons whose memories are recommended in story, moves us in some sortmore than to hear a recital of their--acts or to read their writings?

 "Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis.... Et id quidem in hac urbe infinitum; quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliquam historiam vestigium ponimus. "

 ["So great a power of reminiscence resides in places; and that truly in this city infinite, for which way soever we go, we find the traces of some story. "--Cicero, De Fin. , v. I, 2. ]

It pleases me to consider their face, bearing, and vestments: I pronouncethose great names betwixt my teeth, and make them ring in my ears:

 "Ego illos veneror, et tantis nominibus semper assurgo. "

 ["I reverence them, and always rise to so great names. " --Seneca, Ep. , 64. ]

Of things that are in some part great and admirable, I admire even thecommon parts: I could wish to see them in familiar relations, walk, andsup. It were ingratitude to contemn the relics and images of so manyworthy and valiant men as I have seen live and die, and who, by theirexample, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them. 

And, moreover, this very Rome that we now see, deserves to be beloved, solong and by so many titles allied to our crown; the only common anduniversal city; the sovereign magistrate that commands there is equallyacknowledged elsewhere 'tis the metropolitan city of all the Christiannations the Spaniard and Frenchman is there at home: to be a prince ofthat state, there needs no more but to be of Christendom wheresoever. There is no place upon earth that heaven has embraced with such aninfluence and constancy of favour; her very ruins are grand and glorious, "Laudandis pretiosior ruinis. "

 ["More precious from her glorious ruins. " --Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm. , xxiii. ; Narba, v. 62. ]

she yet in her very tomb retains the marks and images of empire:

 "Ut palam sit, uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturx. "

 ["That it may be manifest that there is in one place the work of rejoicing nature. "--Pliny, Nat. Hist. , iii. 5. ]

Some would blame and be angry at themselves to perceive themselvestickled with so vain a pleasure our humours are never too vain that arepleasant let them be what they may, if they constantly content a man ofcommon understanding, I could not have the heart to blame him. 

I am very much obliged to Fortune, in that, to this very hour, she hasoffered me no outrage beyond what I was well able to bear. Is it not hercustom to let those live in quiet by whom she is not importuned?

 "Quanto quisque sibi plum negaverit, A diis plum feret: nil cupientium Nudus castra peto . . . . Multa petentibus Desunt multa. "

 ["The more each man denies himself, the more the gods give him. Poor as I am, I seek the company of those who ask nothing; they who desire much will be deficient in much. " --Horace, Od. , iii. 16, 21, 42. ]

If she continue her favour, she will dismiss me very well satisfied:

 "Nihil supra Deos lacesso. "

 ["I trouble the gods no farther. "--Horace, Od. , ii. 18, 11. ]

But beware a shock: there are a thousand who perish in the port. I easily comfort myself for what shall here happen when I shall be gone, present things trouble me enough:

 "Fortunae caetera mando. "

 ["I leave the rest to fortune. "--Ovid, Metam. , ii. 140. ]

Besides, I have not that strong obligation that they say ties men to thefuture, by the issue that succeeds to their name and honour; andperadventure, ought less to covet them, if they are to be so muchdesired. I am but too much tied to the world, and to this life, ofmyself: I am content to be in Fortune's power by circumstances properlynecessary to my being, without otherwise enlarging her jurisdiction overme; and have never thought that to be without children was a defect thatought to render life less complete or less contented: a sterile vocationhas its conveniences too. Children are of the number of things that arenot so much to be desired, especially now that it would be so hard tomake them good:

 "Bona jam nec nasci licet, ita corrupta Bunt semina;"

 ["Nothing good can be born now, the seed is so corrupt. " --Tertullian, De Pudicita. ]

and yet they are justly to be lamented by such as lose them when theyhave them. 

He who left me my house in charge, foretold that I was like to ruin it, considering my humour so little inclined to look after household affairs. But he was mistaken; for I am in the same condition now as when I firstentered into it, or rather somewhat better; and yet without office or anyplace of profit. 

As to the rest, if Fortune has never done me any violent or extraordinaryinjury, neither has she done me any particular favour; whatever we derivefrom her bounty, was there above a hundred years before my time: I have, as to my own particular, no essential and solid good, that I standindebted for to her liberality. She has, indeed, done me some airyfavours, honorary and titular favours, without substance, and those intruth she has not granted, but offered me, who, God knows, am allmaterial, and who take nothing but what is real, and indeed massive too, for current pay: and who, if I durst confess so much, should not thinkavarice much less excusable than ambition: nor pain less to be avoidedthan shame; nor health less to be coveted than learning, or riches thannobility. 

Amongst those empty favours of hers, there is none that so much pleasesvain humour natural to my country, as an authentic bull of a Romanburgess-ship, that was granted me when I was last there, glorious inseals and gilded letters, and granted with all gracious liberality. Andbecause 'tis couched in a mixt style, more or less favourable, and that Icould have been glad to have seen a copy of it before it had passed theseal. 

Being before burgess of no city at all, I am glad to be created one ofthe most noble that ever was or ever shall be. If other men wouldconsider themselves at the rate I do, they would, as I do, discoverthemselves to be full of inanity and foppery; to rid myself of it, Icannot, without making myself away. We are all steeped in it, as wellone as another; but they who are not aware on't, have somewhat the betterbargain; and yet I know not whether they have or no. 

This opinion and common usage to observe others more than ourselves hasvery much relieved us that way: 'tis a very displeasing object: we canthere see nothing but misery and vanity: nature, that we may not bedejected with the sight of our own deformities, has wisely thrust theaction of seeing outward. We go forward with the current, but to turnback towards ourselves is a painful motion; so is the sea moved andtroubled when the waves rush against one another. Observe, says everyone, the motions of the heavens, of public affairs; observe the quarrelof such a person, take notice of such a one's pulse, of such another'slast will and testament; in sum, be always looking high or low, on oneside, before or behind you. It was a paradoxical command anciently givenus by that god of Delphos: "Look into yourself; discover yourself; keepclose to yourself; call back your mind and will, that elsewhere consumethemselves into yourself; you run out, you spill yourself; carry a moresteady hand: men betray you, men spill you, men steal you from yourself. Dost thou not see that this world we live in keeps all its sight confinedwithin, and its eyes open to contemplate itself? 'Tis always vanity forthee, both within and without; but 'tis less vanity when less extended. Excepting thee, O man, said that god, everything studies itself first, and has bounds to its labours and desires, according to its need. Thereis nothing so empty and necessitous as thou, who embracest the universe;thou art the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate withoutjurisdiction, and, after all, the fool of the farce. "

 ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

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