



Produced by David Widger





ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877




CONTENTS OF VOLUME 5.

XXV.      Of the education of children.
XXVI.     That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own
          capacity.




CHAPTER XXV

OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

TO MADAME DIANE DE FOIX, Comtesse de Gurson

I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so decrepit or
deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if he
were not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection, that
he did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all defaults he
was still his.  Just so, I see better than any other, that all I write
here are but the idle reveries of a man that has only nibbled upon the
outward crust of sciences in his nonage, and only retained a general and
formless image of them; who has got a little snatch of everything and
nothing of the whole, 'a la Francoise'.  For I know, in general, that
there is such a thing as physic, as jurisprudence: four parts in
mathematics, and, roughly, what all these aim and point at; and,
peradventure, I yet know farther, what sciences in general pretend unto,
in order to the service of our life: but to dive farther than that, and
to have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all
modern learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science,
I have never done it; neither is there any one art of which I am able to
draw the first lineaments and dead colour; insomuch that there is not a
boy of the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser than
I, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I am at
any time forced upon, I am necessitated in my own defence, to ask him,
unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve to try his
natural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to him, as his is
to me.

I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of solid
learning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the Danaides, I
eternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something of which drops
upon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me. History is my
particular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry, for which I have
particular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes said, as the voice,
forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible
and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse
darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and
apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.  As to the natural
parts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under the
burden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and
stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no
degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land
before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds,
that I am not able to penetrate.  And taking upon me to write
indifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use of
nothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, as
oft-times it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same heads
and commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I did but just
now in Plutarch's "Discourse of the Force of Imagination"), to see myself
so weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so flat, in comparison of those
better writers, I at once pity or despise myself.  Yet do I please myself
with this, that my opinions have often the honour and good fortune to
jump with theirs, and that I go in the same path, though at a very great
distance, and can say, "Ah, that is so."  I am farther satisfied to find
that I have a quality, which every one is not blessed withal, which is,
to discern the vast difference between them and me; and notwithstanding
all that, suffer my own inventions, low and feeble as they are, to run on
in their career, without mending or plastering up the defects that this
comparison has laid open to my own view.  And, in plain truth, a man had
need of a good strong back to keep pace with these people.  The
indiscreet scribblers of our times, who, amongst their laborious
nothings, insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors, with a
design, by that means, to illustrate their own writings, do quite
contrary; for this infinite dissimilitude of ornaments renders the
complexion of their own compositions so sallow and deformed, that they
lose much more than they get.

The philosophers, Chrysippus and Epicurus, were in this of two quite
contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and
sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole Medea
of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that should a man
pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would leave him
nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the contrary, in
three hundred volumes that he left behind him, has not so much as one
quotation.--[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Chyysippus, vii. 181, and
Epicurus, x. 26.]

I happened the other day upon this piece of fortune; I was reading a
French book, where after I had a long time run dreaming over a great many
words, so dull, so insipid, so void of all wit or common sense, that
indeed they were only French words: after a long and tedious travel, I
came at last to meet with a piece that was lofty, rich, and elevated to
the very clouds; of which, had I found either the declivity easy or the
ascent gradual, there had been some excuse; but it was so perpendicular
a precipice, and so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the
first six words, I found myself flying into the other world, and thence
discovered the vale whence I came so deep and low, that I have never had
since the heart to descend into it any more.  If I should set out one of
my discourses with such rich spoils as these, it would but too evidently
manifest the imperfection of my own writing.  To reprehend the fault in
others that I am guilty of myself, appears to me no more unreasonable,
than to condemn, as I often do, those of others in myself: they are to be
everywhere reproved, and ought to have no sanctuary allowed them.  I know
very well how audaciously I myself, at every turn, attempt to equal
myself to my thefts, and to make my style go hand in hand with them, not
without a temerarious hope of deceiving the eyes of my reader from
discerning the difference; but withal it is as much by the benefit of my
application, that I hope to do it, as by that of my invention or any
force of my own.  Besides, I do not offer to contend with the whole body
of these champions, nor hand to hand with anyone of them: 'tis only by
flights and little light attempts that I engage them; I do not grapple
with them, but try their strength only, and never engage so far as I make
a show to do.  If I could hold them in play, I were a brave fellow; for I
never attack them; but where they are most sinewy and strong.  To cover a
man's self (as I have seen some do) with another man's armour, so as not
to discover so much as his fingers' ends; to carry on a design (as it is
not hard for a man that has anything of a scholar in him, in an ordinary
subject to do) under old inventions patched up here and there with his
own trumpery, and then to endeavour to conceal the theft, and to make it
pass for his own, is first injustice and meanness of spirit in those who
do it, who having nothing in them of their own fit to procure them a
reputation, endeavour to do it by attempting to impose things upon the
world in their own name, which they have no manner of title to; and next,
a ridiculous folly to content themselves with acquiring the ignorant
approbation of the vulgar by such a pitiful cheat, at the price at the
same time of degrading themselves in the eyes of men of understanding,
who turn up their noses at all this borrowed incrustation, yet whose
praise alone is worth the having.  For my own part, there is nothing I
would not sooner do than that, neither have I said so much of others, but
to get a better opportunity to explain myself.  Nor in this do I glance
at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which
sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and
particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.
These are really men of wit, and that make it appear they are so, both by
that and other ways of writing; as for example, Lipsius, in that learned
and laborious contexture of his Politics.

But, be it how it will, and how inconsiderable soever these ineptitudes
may be, I will say I never intended to conceal them, no more than my old
bald grizzled likeness before them, where the painter has presented you
not with a perfect face, but with mine.  For these are my own particular
opinions and fancies, and I deliver them as only what I myself believe,
and not for what is to be believed by others.  I have no other end in
this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure,
be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to
change me.  I have no authority to be believed, neither do I desire it,
being too conscious of my own inerudition to be able to instruct others.

Some one, then, having seen the preceding chapter, the other day told me
at my house, that I should a little farther have extended my discourse on
the education of children.--["Which, how fit I am to do, let my friends
flatter me if they please, I have in the meantime no such opinion of my
own talent, as to promise myself any very good success from my
endeavour."  This passage would appear to be an interpolation by Cotton.
At all events, I do not find it in the original editions before me, or in
Coste.]--

Now, madam, if I had any sufficiency in this subject, I could not
possibly better employ it, than to present my best instructions to the
little man that threatens you shortly with a happy birth (for you are too
generous to begin otherwise than with a male); for, having had so great a
hand in the treaty of your marriage, I have a certain particular right
and interest in the greatness and prosperity of the issue that shall
spring from it; beside that, your having had the best of my services so
long in possession, sufficiently obliges me to desire the honour and
advantage of all wherein you shall be concerned.  But, in truth, all I
understand as to that particular is only this, that the greatest and most
important difficulty of human science is the education of children.  For
as in agriculture, the husbandry that is to precede planting, as also
planting itself, is certain, plain, and well known; but after that which
is planted comes to life, there is a great deal more to be done, more art
to be used, more care to be taken, and much more difficulty to cultivate
and bring it to perfection so it is with men; it is no hard matter to get
children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude,
and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.  The symptoms of
their inclinations in that tender age are so obscure, and the promises so
uncertain and fallacious, that it is very hard to establish any solid
judgment or conjecture upon them.  Look at Cimon, for example, and
Themistocles, and a thousand others, who very much deceived the
expectation men had of them.  Cubs of bears and puppies readily discover
their natural inclination; but men, so soon as ever they are grownup,
applying themselves to certain habits, engaging themselves in certain
opinions, and conforming themselves to particular laws and customs,
easily alter, or at least disguise, their true and real disposition; and
yet it is hard to force the propension of nature.  Whence it comes to
pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very
great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children
to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally
unfit.  In this difficulty, nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion, that
they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies,
without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those
light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years, and to
which Plato, in his Republic, gives, methinks, too much authority.

Madam, science is a very great ornament, and a thing of marvellous use,
especially in persons raised to that degree of fortune in which you are.
And, in truth, in persons of mean and low condition, it cannot perform
its true and genuine office, being naturally more prompt to assist in the
conduct of war, in the government of peoples, in negotiating the leagues
and friendships of princes and foreign nations, than in forming a
syllogism in logic, in pleading a process in law, or in prescribing a
dose of pills in physic.  Wherefore, madam, believing you will not omit
this so necessary feature in the education of your children, who yourself
have tasted its sweetness, and are of a learned extraction (for we yet
have the writings of the ancient Counts of Foix, from whom my lord, your
husband, and yourself, are both of you descended, and Monsieur de
Candale, your uncle, every day obliges the world with others, which will
extend the knowledge of this quality in your family for so many
succeeding ages), I will, upon this occasion, presume to acquaint your
ladyship with one particular fancy of my own, contrary to the common
method, which is all I am able to contribute to your service in this
affair.

The charge of the tutor you shall provide for your son, upon the choice
of whom depends the whole success of his education, has several other
great and considerable parts and duties required in so important a trust,
besides that of which I am about to speak: these, however, I shall not
mention, as being unable to add anything of moment to the common rules:
and in this, wherein I take upon me to advise, he may follow it so far
only as it shall appear advisable.

For a, boy of quality then, who pretends to letters not upon the account
of profit (for so mean an object is unworthy of the grace and favour
of the Muses, and moreover, in it a man directs his service to and
depends upon others), nor so much for outward ornament, as for his own
proper and peculiar use, and to furnish and enrich himself within, having
rather a desire to come out an accomplished cavalier than a mere scholar
or learned man; for such a one, I say, I would, also, have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a
well-filled head;--["'Tete bien faite', an expression created by
Montaigne, and which has remained a part of our language."--Servan.]--
seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but rather of the two to
prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and that this man should
exercise his charge after a new method.

'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their pupil's
ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the
pupil is only to repeat what the others have said: now I would have a
tutor to correct this error, and, that at the very first, he should
according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test,
permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself to discern
and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving
him to open it for himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent
and speak, but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.
Socrates, and since him Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak, and
then they spoke to them--[Diogenes Laertius, iv. 36.]

               "Obest plerumque iis, qui discere volunt,
               auctoritas eorum, qui docent."

     ["The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to
     those who desire to learn."--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 5.]

It is good to make him, like a young horse, trot before him, that he may
judge of his going, and how much he is to abate of his own speed, to
accommodate himself to the vigour and capacity of the other.  For want of
which due proportion we spoil all; which also to know how to adjust, and
to keep within an exact and due measure, is one of the hardest things I
know, and 'tis the effect of a high and well-tempered soul, to know how
to condescend to such puerile motions and to govern and direct them.
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.

Such as, according to our common way of teaching, undertake, with one and
the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several
boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and
'tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found
above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and
discipline.  Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical
construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let
him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory,
but by that of his life.  Let him make him put what he has learned into a
hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to
see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking
instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato.  'Tis
a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office
unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it
to concoct.  Our minds work only upon trust, when bound and compelled to
follow the appetite of another's fancy, enslaved and captivated under the
authority of another's instruction; we have been so subjected to the
trammel, that we have no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own
vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:

                    "Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt."

          ["They are ever in wardship."--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an
Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: "That the touchstone and
square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute
conformity to Aristotle's doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but
inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all." A position,
that for having been a little too injuriously and broadly interpreted,
brought him once and long kept him in great danger of the Inquisition at
Rome.

Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust.
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him, than those
of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded
to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not,
he will remain in doubt.

               "Che non men the saver, dubbiar m' aggrata."

     ["I love to doubt, as well as to know."--Dante, Inferno, xi. 93]

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason,
they will no more be theirs, but become his own.  Who follows another,
follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing.

          "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet."

          ["We are under no king; let each vindicate himself."
          --Seneca, Ep.,33]

Let him, at least, know that he knows.  It will be necessary that he
imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts;
and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know
how to apply it to his own use.  Truth and reason are common to every
one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them
after: 'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
he and I equally see and understand them.  Bees cull their several sweets
from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them,
but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their
own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows
from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work
that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:
his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.
He is not obliged to discover whence he got the materials that have
assisted him, but only to produce what he has himself done with them.
Men that live upon pillage and borrowing, expose their purchases and
buildings to every one's view: but do not proclaim how they came by the
money.  We do not see the fees and perquisites of a gentleman of the long
robe; but we see the alliances wherewith he fortifies himself and his
family, and the titles and honours he has obtained for him and his.  No
man divulges his revenue; or, at least, which way it comes in but every
one publishes his acquisitions.  The advantages of our study are to
become better and more wise.  'Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding
that sees and hears, 'tis the understanding that improves everything,
that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other
faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul.  And certainly we render
it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to
do anything of itself.  Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of
grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero?  Our
masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish
them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the
substance of the thing.  To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies
no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.  That
which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at
his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had
it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book.  A mere bookish learning is
a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no
foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it, according to the
opinion of Plato, who says, that constancy, faith, and sincerity, are the
true philosophy, and the other sciences, that are directed to other ends;
mere adulterate paint.  I could wish that Paluel or Pompey, those two
noted dancers of my time, could have taught us to cut capers, by only
seeing them do it, without stirring from our places, as these men pretend
to inform the understanding without ever setting it to work, or that we
could learn to ride, handle a pike, touch a lute, or sing without the
trouble of practice, as these attempt to make us judge and speak well,
without exercising us in judging or speaking.  Now in this initiation of
our studies in their progress, whatsoever presents itself before us is
book sufficient; a roguish trick of a page, a sottish mistake of a
servant, a jest at the table, are so many new subjects.

And for this reason, conversation with men is of very great use and
travel into foreign countries; not to bring back (as most of our young
monsieurs do) an account only of how many paces Santa Rotonda--[The
Pantheon of Agrippa.]--is in circuit; or of the richness of Signora
Livia's petticoats; or, as some others, how much Nero's face, in a statue
in such an old ruin, is longer and broader than that made for him on some
medal; but to be able chiefly to give an account of the humours, manners,
customs, and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may
whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others.  I
would that a boy should be sent abroad very young, and first, so as to
kill two birds with one stone, into those neighbouring nations whose
language is most differing from our own, and to which, if it be not
formed betimes, the tongue will grow too stiff to bend.

And also 'tis the general opinion of all, that a child should not be
brought up in his mother's lap.  Mothers are too tender, and their
natural affection is apt to make the most discreet of them all so
overfond, that they can neither find in their hearts to give them due
correction for the faults they may commit, nor suffer them to be inured
to hardships and hazards, as they ought to be.  They will not endure to
see them return all dust and sweat from their exercise, to drink cold
drink when they are hot, nor see them mount an unruly horse, nor take a
foil in hand against a rude fencer, or so much as to discharge a carbine.
And yet there is no remedy; whoever will breed a boy to be good for
anything when he comes to be a man, must by no means spare him when
young, and must very often transgress the rules of physic:

              "Vitamque sub dio, et trepidis agat
               In rebus."

     ["Let him live in open air, and ever in movement about something."
     --Horace, Od. ii., 3, 5.]

It is not enough to fortify his soul; you are also to make his sinews
strong; for the soul will be oppressed if not assisted by the members,
and would have too hard a task to discharge two offices alone.  I know
very well to my cost, how much mine groans under the burden, from being
accommodated with a body so tender and indisposed, as eternally leans and
presses upon her; and often in my reading perceive that our masters, in
their writings, make examples pass for magnanimity and fortitude of mind,
which really are rather toughness of skin and hardness of bones; for I
have seen men, women, and children, naturally born of so hard and
insensible a constitution of body, that a sound cudgelling has been less
to them than a flirt with a finger would have been to me, and that would
neither cry out, wince, nor shrink, for a good swinging beating; and when
wrestlers counterfeit the philosophers in patience, 'tis rather strength
of nerves than stoutness of heart.  Now to be inured to undergo labour,
is to be accustomed to endure pain:

                    "Labor callum obducit dolori."

     ["Labour hardens us against pain."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 15.]

A boy is to be broken in to the toil and roughness of exercise, so as to
be trained up to the pain and suffering of dislocations, cholics,
cauteries, and even imprisonment and the rack itself; for he may come by
misfortune to be reduced to the worst of these, which (as this world
goes) is sometimes inflicted on the good as well as the bad.  As for
proof, in our present civil war whoever draws his sword against the laws,
threatens the honestest men with the whip and the halter.

And, moreover, by living at home, the authority of this governor, which
ought to be sovereign over the boy he has received into his charge, is
often checked and hindered by the presence of parents; to which may also
be added, that the respect the whole family pay him, as their master's
son, and the knowledge he has of the estate and greatness he is heir to,
are, in my opinion, no small inconveniences in these tender years.

And yet, even in this conversing with men I spoke of but now, I have
observed this vice, that instead of gathering observations from others,
we make it our whole business to lay ourselves open to them, and are more
concerned how to expose and set out our own commodities, than how to
increase our stock by acquiring new.  Silence, therefore, and modesty are
very advantageous qualities in conversation.  One should, therefore,
train up this boy to be sparing and an husband of his knowledge when he
has acquired it; and to forbear taking exceptions at or reproving every
idle saying or ridiculous story that is said or told in his presence; for
it is a very unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything that is not
agreeable to our own palate.  Let him be satisfied with correcting
himself, and not seem to condemn everything in another he would not do
himself, nor dispute it as against common customs.

               "Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia."

          ["Let us be wise without ostentation, without envy."
          --Seneca, Ep., 103.]

Let him avoid these vain and uncivil images of authority, this childish
ambition of coveting to appear better bred and more accomplished, than he
really will, by such carriage, discover himself to be.  And, as if
opportunities of interrupting and reprehending were not to be omitted, to
desire thence to derive the reputation of something more than ordinary.
For as it becomes none but great poets to make use of the poetical
licence, so it is intolerable for any but men of great and illustrious
souls to assume privilege above the authority of custom:

     "Si quid Socrates ant Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem
     fecerunt, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et
     divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur."

     ["If Socrates and Aristippus have committed any act against manners
     and custom, let him not think that he is allowed to do the same; for
     it was by great and divine benefits that they obtained this
     privilege."--Cicero, De Offic., i. 41.]

Let him be instructed not to engage in discourse or dispute but with a
champion worthy of him, and, even there, not to make use of all the
little subtleties that may seem pat for his purpose, but only such
arguments as may best serve him.  Let him be taught to be curious in the
election and choice of his reasons, to abominate impertinence, and
consequently, to affect brevity; but, above all, let him be lessoned to
acquiesce and submit to truth so soon as ever he shall discover it,
whether in his opponent's argument, or upon better consideration of his
own; for he shall never be preferred to the chair for a mere clatter of
words and syllogisms, and is no further engaged to any argument whatever,
than as he shall in his own judgment approve it: nor yet is arguing a
trade, where the liberty of recantation and getting off upon better
thoughts, are to be sold for ready money:

          "Neque, ut omnia, qux praescripta et imperata sint,
          defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur."

     ["Neither is their any necessity upon him, that he should defend
     all things that are prescribed and enjoined him."
     --Cicero, Acad., ii. 3.]

If his governor be of my humour, he will form his will to be a very good
and loyal subject to his prince, very affectionate to his person, and
very stout in his quarrel; but withal he will cool in him the desire of
having any other tie to his service than public duty.  Besides several
other inconveniences that are inconsistent with the liberty every honest
man ought to have, a man's judgment, being bribed and prepossessed by
these particular obligations, is either blinded and less free to exercise
its function, or is blemished with ingratitude and indiscretion.  A man
that is purely a courtier, can neither have power nor will to speak or
think otherwise than favourably and well of a master, who, amongst so
many millions of other subjects, has picked out him with his own hand to
nourish and advance; this favour, and the profit flowing from it, must
needs, and not without some show of reason, corrupt his freedom and
dazzle him; and we commonly see these people speak in another kind of
phrase than is ordinarily spoken by others of the same nation, though
what they say in that courtly language is not much to be believed.

Let his conscience and virtue be eminently manifest in his speaking, and
have only reason for their guide.  Make him understand, that to
acknowledge the error he shall discover in his own argument, though only
found out by himself, is an effect of judgment and sincerity, which are
the principal things he is to seek after; that obstinacy and contention
are common qualities, most appearing in mean souls; that to revise and
correct himself, to forsake an unjust argument in the height and heat of
dispute, are rare, great, and philosophical qualities.

Let him be advised, being in company, to have his eye and ear in every
corner; for I find that the places of greatest honour are commonly seized
upon by men that have least in them, and that the greatest fortunes are
seldom accompanied with the ablest parts.  I have been present when,
whilst they at the upper end of the chamber have been only commenting the
beauty of the arras, or the flavour of the wine, many things that have
been very finely said at the lower end of the table have been lost and
thrown away.  Let him examine every man's talent; a peasant, a
bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these
in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their
discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another; nay, even
the folly and impertinence of others will contribute to his instruction.
By observing the graces and manners of all he sees, he will create to
himself an emulation of the good, and a contempt of the bad.

Let an honest curiosity be suggested to his fancy of being inquisitive
after everything; whatever there is singular and rare near the place
where he is, let him go and see it; a fine house, a noble fountain, an
eminent man, the place where a battle has been anciently fought, the
passages of Caesar and Charlemagne:

              "Qux tellus sit lenta gelu, quae putris ab aestu,
               Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat."

     ["What country is bound in frost, what land is friable with heat,
     what wind serves fairest for Italy."--Propertius, iv. 3, 39.]

Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes,
things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know.

In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who only
live in the records of history; he shall, by reading those books,
converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.  'Tis an idle
and vain study to those who make it so by doing it after a negligent
manner, but to those who do it with care and observation, 'tis a study of
inestimable fruit and value; and the only study, as Plato reports, that
the Lacedaemonians reserved to themselves.  What profit shall he not reap
as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch?  But,
withal, let my governor remember to what end his instructions are
principally directed, and that he do not so much imprint in his pupil's
memory the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and
Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as why it was unworthy of his
duty that he died there.  Let him not teach him so much the narrative
parts of history as to judge them; the reading of them, in my opinion,
is a thing that of all others we apply ourselves unto with the most
differing measure.  I have read a hundred things in Livy that another has
not, or not taken notice of at least; and Plutarch has read a hundred
more there than ever I could find, or than, peradventure, that author
ever wrote; to some it is merely a grammar study, to others the very
anatomy of philosophy, by which the most abstruse parts of our human
nature penetrate.  There are in Plutarch many long discourses very worthy
to be carefully read and observed, for he is, in my opinion, of all
others the greatest master in that kind of writing; but there are a
thousand others which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only
points with his finger to direct us which way we may go if we will, and
contents himself sometimes with giving only one brisk hit in the nicest
article of the question, whence we are to grope out the rest.  As, for
example, where he says'--[In the Essay on False Shame.]--that the
inhabitants of Asia came to be vassals to one only, for not having been
able to pronounce one syllable, which is No.  Which saying of his gave
perhaps matter and occasion to La Boetie to write his "Voluntary
Servitude."  Only to see him pick out a light action in a man's life, or
a mere word that does not seem to amount even to that, is itself a whole
discourse.  'Tis to our prejudice that men of understanding should so
immoderately affect brevity; no doubt their reputation is the better by
it, but in the meantime we are the worse.  Plutarch had rather we should
applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and had rather leave us
with an appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have already
read.  He knew very well, that a man may say too much even upon the best
subjects, and that Alexandridas justly reproached him who made very good.
but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: "O stranger!  thou
speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak
them."--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.]--Such as have lean
and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are
defective in matter endeavour to make amends with words.

Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation
with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves,
and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.  One asking
Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but
of the world;--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 37; Plutarch, On Exile, c. 4.]--
he whose imagination was fuller and wider, embraced the whole world for
his country, and extended his society and friendship to all mankind;
not as we do, who look no further than our feet.  When the vines of my
village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes,
that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race, and
that the cannibals have already got the pip.  Who is it that, seeing the
havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of
the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand;
without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in
the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the
earth for all this?  For my part, considering the licence and impunity
that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate, and
that there is no more mischief done.  To him who feels the hailstones
patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and
tempest; like the ridiculous Savoyard, who said very gravely, that if
that simple king of France could have managed his fortune as he should
have done, he might in time have come to have been steward of the
household to the duke his master: the fellow could not, in his shallow
imagination, conceive that there could be anything greater than a Duke of
Savoy.  And, in truth, we are all of us, insensibly, in this error, an
error of a very great weight and very pernicious consequence.  But
whoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image
of our mother nature, in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in her face
shall read so general and so constant a variety, whoever shall observe
himself in that figure, and not himself but a whole kingdom, no bigger
than the least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole,
that man alone is able to value things according to their true estimate
and grandeur.

This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one
genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to
know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias.  In short, I would
have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most
attention.  So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions,
laws, and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our
understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which
is no trivial speculation.  So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and
so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough
to make no great wonder of our own.  So many great names, so many famous
victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our
hopes ridiculous of eternising our names by the taking of half-a-score of
light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin.
The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of
so many courts and grandeurs, accustom and fortify our sight without
closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of
men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good
company in the other world: and so of the rest Pythagoras was want to
say,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v.  3.]--that our life resembles the great
and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the
body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring
merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of
the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and
consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the
lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their
own.

To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of
philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to
be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know--

                    "Quid fas optare: quid asper
          Utile nummus habet: patrix carisque propinquis
          Quantum elargiri deceat: quern te Deus esse
          Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
          Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimur."

     ["Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined
     money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country
     and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to
     be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we
     are ant to what purpose engendered."--Persius, iii. 69]

what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and
design of study; what valour, temperance, and justice are; the difference
betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and
liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far
death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;

          "Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem."

          ["And how you may shun or sustain every hardship."
          --Virgil, AEneid, iii. 459.]

by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations
and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should
season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners
and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to dig
and well to live.  Amongst the liberal sciences, let us begin with that
which makes us free; not that they do not all serve in some measure to
the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also
do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves
to that end.  If we are once able to restrain the offices of human life
within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of the
sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are,
that there are many very unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we
had better let alone, and, following Socrates' direction, limit the
course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real
utility:

                              "Sapere aude;
               Incipe;  Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
               Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis; at ille
               Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis oevum."

     ["Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is
     like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but
     the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to
     ages without end."--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

'Tis a great foolery to teach our children:

              "Quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
               Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua,"

     ["What influence Pisces have, or the sign of angry Leo, or
     Capricorn, washed by the Hesperian wave."--Propertius, iv. I, 89.]

the knowledge of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere before
their own:

     ["What care I about the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus?"
     --Anacreon, Ode, xvii. 10.]

Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, "To what purpose," said he, "should I
trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or
slavery continually before my eyes?" for the kings of Persia were at that
time preparing to invade his country.  Every one ought to say thus,
"Being assaulted, as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition,
and having within so many other enemies of life, shall I go ponder over
the world's changes?"

After having taught him what will make him more wise and good, you may
then entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry,
rhetoric, and the science which he shall then himself most incline to,
his judgment being beforehand formed and fit to choose, he will quickly
make his own.  The way of instructing him ought to be sometimes by
discourse, and sometimes by reading; sometimes his governor shall put the
author himself, which he shall think most proper for him, into his hands,
and sometimes only the marrow and substance of it; and if himself be not
conversant enough in books to turn to all the fine discourses the books
contain for his purpose, there may some man of learning be joined to him,
that upon every occasion shall supply him with what he stands in need of,
to furnish it to his pupil.  And who can doubt but that this way of
teaching is much more easy and natural than that of Gaza,--[Theodore
Gaza, rector of the Academy of Ferrara.]--in which the precepts are so
intricate, and so harsh, and the words so vain, lean; and insignificant,
that there is no hold to be taken of them, nothing that quickens and
elevates the wit and fancy, whereas here the mind has what to feed upon
and to digest.  This fruit, therefore, is not only without comparison,
much more fair and beautiful; but will also be much more early ripe.

'Tis a thousand pities that matters should be at such a pass in this age
of ours, that philosophy, even with men of understanding, should be,
looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use, no value,
either in opinion or effect, of which I think those ergotisms and petty
sophistries, by prepossessing the avenues to it, are the cause.  And
people are much to blame to represent it to children for a thing of so
difficult access, and with such a frowning, grim, and formidable aspect.
Who is it that has disguised it thus, with this false, pale, and ghostly
countenance?  There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I
had like to have said, more wanton.  She preaches nothing but feasting
and jollity; a melancholic anxious look shows that she does not inhabit
there.  Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot
of philosophers set chatting together, said to them,--[Plutarch, Treatise
on Oracles which have ceased]--"Either I am much deceived, or by your
cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no, very deep
discourse."  To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied:
"Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of
the verb ------ is spelt with a double A, or that hunt after the
derivation of the comparatives ----- and -----, and the superlatives ----
and ------, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science: but
as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those
that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad."

              "Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro
               Corpore; deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque
               Inde habitum facies."

     ["You may discern the torments of mind lurking in a sick body; you
     may discern its joys: either expression the face assumes from the
     mind."--Juvenal, ix. 18]

The soul that lodges philosophy, ought to be of such a constitution of
health, as to render the body in like manner healthful too; she ought to
make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as to appear without, and
her contentment ought to fashion the outward behaviour to her own mould,
and consequently to fortify it with a graceful confidence, an active and
joyous carriage, and a serene and contented countenance.  The most
manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like
that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
'Tis Baroco and Baralipton--[Two terms of the ancient scholastic
logic.]--that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not
she; they do not so much as know her but by hearsay.  What!  It is she
that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who
teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain
imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.  She has virtue
for her end, which is not, as the schoolmen say, situate upon the summit
of a perpendicular, rugged, inaccessible precipice: such as have
approached her find her, quite on the contrary, to be seated in a fair,
fruitful, and flourishing plain, whence she easily discovers all things
below; to which place any one may, however, arrive, if he know but the
way, through shady, green, and sweetly-flourishing avenues, by a
pleasant, easy, and smooth descent, like that of the celestial vault.
'Tis for not having frequented this supreme, this beautiful, triumphant,
and amiable, this equally delicious and courageous virtue, this so
professed and implacable enemy to anxiety, sorrow, fear, and constraint,
who, having nature for her guide, has fortune and pleasure for her
companions, that they have gone, according to their own weak imagination,
and created this ridiculous, this sorrowful, querulous, despiteful,
threatening, terrible image of it to themselves and others, and placed it
upon a rock apart, amongst thorns and brambles, and made of it a
hobgoblin to affright people.

But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it to be
his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than
reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets have
evermore accommodated themselves to the public humour, and make him
sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the avenues
of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva.  And when he shall
once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a Bradamante
or an Angelica--[Heroines of Ariosto.]--for a mistress, a natural,
active, generous, and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison
of a soft, delicate, artificial simpering, and affected form; the one in
the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other
tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look
upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite
contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia.

Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the height
and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure
of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and
the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; it is by
order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired.  Socrates, her first
minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally to throw it
aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own progress; 'tis
the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in rendering them just,
renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in
breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses,
whets our desire to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal
mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if
not to lassitude: unless we mean to say that the regimen which stops the
toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten
to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to
pleasure.  If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms
another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other.  She
can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed
beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and
peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good
things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more noble
than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is
unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may
justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices.

If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he
had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble
expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum,
that excites the youthful ardour of his companions, leaves that to follow
another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find
it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat
victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize
of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice
in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of
a duke; according to Plato's precept, that children are to be placed out
and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of
the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own
souls.

Since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and that infancy has
there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to
children betimes?

         "Udum et molle lutum est; nunc, nunc properandus, et acri
          Fingendus sine fine rota."

     ["The clay is moist and soft: now, now make haste, and form the
     pitcher on the rapid wheel."--Persius, iii. 23.]

They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living.
A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read
Aristotle's lecture on temperance.  Cicero said, that though he should
live two men's ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric
poets; and I find these sophisters yet more deplorably unprofitable.
The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but
the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the
remainder is due to action.  Let us, therefore, employ that short time in
necessary instruction.  Away with the thorny subtleties of dialectics;
they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended: take the
plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then
rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of
Boccaccio's novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than
of learning to read or to write.  Philosophy has discourses proper for
childhood, as well as for the decrepit age of men.

I am of Plutarch's mind, that Aristotle did not so much trouble his great
disciple with the knack of forming syllogisms, or with the elements of
geometry; as with infusing into him good precepts concerning valour,
prowess, magnanimity, temperance, and the contempt of fear; and with this
ammunition, sent him, whilst yet a boy, with no more than thirty thousand
foot, four thousand horse, and but forty-two thousand crowns, to
subjugate the empire of the whole earth.  For the other acts and
sciences, he says, Alexander highly indeed commended their excellence and
charm, and had them in very great honour and esteem, but not ravished
with them to that degree as to be tempted to affect the practice of them
In his own person:

              "Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque,
              Finem ammo certum, miserisque viatica canis."

     ["Young men and old men, derive hence a certain end to the mind,
     and stores for miserable grey hairs."--Persius, v. 64.]

Epicurus, in the beginning of his letter to Meniceus,--[Diogenes
Laertius, x. 122.]--says, "That neither the youngest should refuse to
philosophise, nor the oldest grow weary of it."  Who does otherwise,
seems tacitly to imply, that either the time of living happily is
not yet come, or that it is already past.  And yet, a for all that, I
would not have this pupil of ours imprisoned and made a slave to his
book; nor would I have him given up to the morosity and melancholic
humour of a sour ill-natured pedant.

I would not have his spirit cowed and subdued, by applying him to the
rack, and tormenting him, as some do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day,
and so make a pack-horse of him.  Neither should I think it good, when,
by reason of a solitary and melancholic complexion, he is discovered to
be overmuch addicted to his book, to nourish that humour in him; for that
renders him unfit for civil conversation, and diverts him from better
employments.  And how many have I seen in my time totally brutified by an
immoderate thirst after knowledge?  Carneades was so besotted with it,
that he would not find time so much as to comb his head or to pare his
nails.  Neither would I have his generous manners spoiled and corrupted
by the incivility and barbarism of those of another.  The French wisdom
was anciently turned into proverb: "Early, but of no continuance."  And,
in truth, we yet see, that nothing can be more ingenious and pleasing
than the children of France; but they ordinarily deceive the hope and
expectation that have been conceived of them; and grown up to be men,
have nothing extraordinary or worth taking notice of: I have heard men of
good understanding say, these colleges of ours to which we send our young
people (and of which we have but too many) make them such animals as they
are.--[Hobbes said that if he Had been at college as long as other people
he should have been as great a blockhead as they. W.C.H.] [And Bacon
before Hobbe's time had discussed the "futility" of university teaching.
D.W.]

But to our little monsieur, a closet, a garden, the table, his bed,
solitude, and company, morning and evening, all hours shall be the same,
and all places to him a study; for philosophy, who, as the formatrix of
judgment and manners, shall be his principal lesson, has that privilege
to have a hand in everything.  The orator Isocrates, being at a feast
entreated to speak of his art, all the company were satisfied with and
commended his answer:  "It is not now a time," said he, "to do what I can
do; and that which it is now time to do, I cannot do."--[Plutarch,
Symp., i. I.]--For to make orations and rhetorical disputes in a company
met together to laugh and make good cheer, had been very unreasonable and
improper, and as much might have been said of all the other sciences.
But as to what concerns philosophy, that part of it at least that treats
of man, and of his offices and duties, it has been the common opinion of
all wise men, that, out of respect to the sweetness of her conversation,
she is ever to be admitted in all sports and entertainments.  And Plato,
having invited her to his feast, we see after how gentle and obliging a
manner, accommodated both to time and place, she entertained the company,
though in a discourse of the highest and most important nature:

              "Aeque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque;
               Et, neglecta, aeque pueris senibusque nocebit."

     ["It profits poor and rich alike, but, neglected, equally hurts old
     and young."--Horace, Ep., i. 25.]

By this method of instruction, my young pupil will be much more and
better employed than his fellows of the college are.  But as the steps we
take in walking to and fro in a gallery, though three times as many, do
not tire a man so much as those we employ in a formal journey, so our
lesson, as it were accidentally occurring, without any set obligation of
time or place, and falling naturally into every action, will insensibly
insinuate itself.  By which means our very exercises and recreations,
running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, and fencing, will
prove to be a good part of our study.  I would have his outward fashion
and mien, and the disposition of his limbs, formed at the same time with
his mind.  'Tis not a soul, 'tis not a body that we are training up, but
a man, and we ought not to divide him.  And, as Plato says, we are not to
fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two
horses harnessed to a coach.  By which saying of his, does he not seem to
allow more time for, and to take more care of exercises for the body, and
to hold that the mind, in a good proportion, does her business at the
same time too?

As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a
severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who,
instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle
ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules,
horror and cruelty.  Away with this violence!  away with this compulsion!
than which, I certainly believe nothing more dulls and degenerates a
well-descended nature.  If you would have him apprehend shame and
chastisement, do not harden him to them: inure him to heat and cold, to
wind and sun, and to dangers that he ought to despise; wean him from all
effeminacy and delicacy in clothes and lodging, eating and drinking;
accustom him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris,
a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man.  I have
ever from a child to the age wherein I now am, been of this opinion, and
am still constant to it.  But amongst other things, the strict
government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me;
peradventure, they might have erred less perniciously on the indulgent
side.  'Tis a real house of correction of imprisoned youth.  They are
made debauched by being punished before they are so.  Do but come in
when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the
outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their
pedagogues drunk with fury. A very pretty way this, to tempt these
tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious
countenance, and a rod in hand!  A cursed and pernicious way of
proceeding!  Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this
imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences,
and particularly our way of chastising.  How much more decent would it
be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than
with the bloody stumps of birch and willows?  Were it left to my
ordering.  I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and
gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his.
Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too. Such
viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should be sweetened
with sugar, and such as are dangerous to them, embittered with gall.
'Tis marvellous to see how solicitous Plato is in his Laws concerning
the gaiety and diversion of the youth of his city, and how much and
often he enlarges upon the races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances: of
which, he says, that antiquity has given the ordering and patronage
particularly to the gods themselves, to Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses. 
He insists long upon, and is very particular in, giving innumerable
precepts for exercises; but as to the lettered sciences, says very
little, and only seems particularly to recommend poetry upon the account
of music.

All singularity in our manners and conditions is to be avoided, as
inconsistent with civil society.  Who would not be astonished at so
strange a constitution as that of Demophoon, steward to Alexander the
Great, who sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun?  I have seen
those who have run from the smell of a mellow apple with greater
precipitation than from a harquebuss-shot; others afraid of a mouse;
others vomit at the sight of cream; others ready to swoon at the making
of a feather bed; Germanicus could neither endure the sight nor the
crowing of a cock.  I will not deny, but that there may, peradventure,
be some occult cause and natural aversion in these cases; but, in my
opinion, a man might conquer it, if he took it in time.  Precept has in
this wrought so effectually upon me, though not without some pains on my
part, I confess, that beer excepted, my appetite accommodates itself
indifferently to all sorts of diet.  Young bodies are supple; one should,
therefore, in that age bend and ply them to all fashions and customs: and
provided a man can contain the appetite and the will within their due
limits, let a young man, in God's name, be rendered fit for all nations
and all companies, even to debauchery and excess, if need be; that is,
where he shall do it out of complacency to the customs of the place.
Let him be able to do everything, but love to do nothing but what is
good.  The philosophers themselves do not justify Callisthenes for
forfeiting the favour of his master Alexander the Great, by refusing to
pledge him a cup of wine.  Let him laugh, play, wench with his prince:
nay, I would have him, even in his debauches, too hard for the rest of
the company, and to excel his companions in ability and vigour, and that
he may not give over doing it, either through defect of power or
knowledge how to do it, but for want of will.

     "Multum interest, utrum peccare ali quis nolit, an nesciat."

     ["There is a vast difference betwixt forbearing to sin, and not
     knowing how to sin."--Seneca, Ep., 90]

I thought I passed a compliment upon a lord, as free from those excesses
as any man in France, by asking him before a great deal of very good
company, how many times in his life he had been drunk in Germany, in the
time of his being there about his Majesty's affairs; which he also took
as it was intended, and made answer, "Three times"; and withal told us
the whole story of his debauches.  I know some who, for want of this
faculty, have found a great inconvenience in negotiating with that
nation.  I have often with great admiration reflected upon the wonderful
constitution of Alcibiades, who so easily could transform himself to so
various fashions without any prejudice to his health; one while outdoing
the Persian pomp and luxury, and another, the Lacedaemonian austerity and
frugality; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous in Ionia:

          "Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res."

     ["Every complexion of life, and station, and circumstance became
     Aristippus."--Horace, Ep., xvii. 23.]

I would have my pupil to be such an one,

                    "Quem duplici panno patentia velat,
               Mirabor, vitae via si conversa decebit,
               Personamque feret non inconcinnus utramque."

     ["I should admire him who with patience bearing a patched garment,
     bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well."
     --Horace Ep., xvii. 25.]

These are my lessons, and he who puts them in practice shall reap more
advantage than he who has had them read to him only, and so only knows
them.  If you see him, you hear him; if you hear him, you see him.  God
forbid, says one in Plato, that to philosophise were only to read a great
many books, and to learn the arts.

          "Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam,
          vita magis quam literis, persequuti sunt."

     ["They have proceeded to this discipline of living well, which of
     all arts is the greatest, by their lives, rather than by their
     reading."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 3.]

Leo, prince of the Phliasians, asking Heraclides Ponticus--[It was not
Heraclides of Pontus who made this answer, but Pythagoras.]--of what art
or science he made profession: "I know," said he, "neither art nor
science, but I am a philosopher."  One reproaching Diogenes that, being
ignorant, he should pretend to philosophy; "I therefore," answered he,
"pretend to it with so much the more reason."  Hegesias entreated that he
would read a certain book to him: "You are pleasant," said he; "you
choose those figs that are true and natural, and not those that are
painted; why do you not also choose exercises which are naturally true,
rather than those written?"

The lad will not so much get his lesson by heart as he will practise it:
he will repeat it in his actions.  We shall discover if there be prudence
in his exercises, if there be sincerity and justice in his deportment, if
there be grace and judgment in his speaking; if there be constancy in his
sickness; if there be modesty in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures,
order in his domestic economy, indifference in palate, whether what he
eats or drinks be flesh or fish, wine or water:

     "Qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae
     putet: quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat."

     ["Who considers his own discipline, not as a vain ostentation of
     science, but as a law and rule of life; and who obeys his own
     decrees, and the laws he has prescribed for himself."
     --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., ii. 4.]

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.  Zeuxidamus,
to one who asked him, why the Lacedaemonians did not commit their
constitutions of chivalry to writing, and deliver them to their young men
to read, made answer, that it was because they would inure them to
action, and not amuse them with words.  With such a one, after fifteen or
sixteen years' study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has
thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak.  The world is
nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather
prate too much, than speak too little.  And yet half of our age is
embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only,
and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a
long discourse, divided into four or five parts; and other five years, at
least, to learn succinctly to mix and interweave them after a subtle and
intricate manner let us leave all this to those who make a profession of
it.

Going one day to Orleans, I met in that plain on this side Clery, two
pedants who were travelling towards Bordeaux, about fifty paces distant
from one another; and, a good way further behind them, I discovered a
troop of horse, with a gentleman at the head of them, who was the late
Monsieur le Comte de la Rochefoucauld.  One of my people inquired of the
foremost of these masters of arts, who that gentleman was that came after
him; he, having not seen the train that followed after, and thinking his
companion was meant, pleasantly answered, "He is not a gentleman; he is a
grammarian; and I am a logician."  Now we who, quite contrary, do not
here pretend to breed a grammarian or a logician, but a gentleman, let us
leave them to abuse their leisure; our business lies elsewhere.  Let but
our pupil be well furnished with things, words will follow but too fast;
he will pull them after him if they do not voluntarily follow.  I have
observed some to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and
pretend to have their fancies full of a great many very fine things,
which yet, for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; 'tis a mere shift,
and nothing else.  Will you know what I think of it?  I think they are
nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they
know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out; they do not
yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but observe
how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you will soon
conclude, that their labour is not to delivery, but about conception, and
that they are but licking their formless embryo.  For my part, I hold,
and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his mind a sprightly and
clear imagination, he will express it well enough in one kind of tongue
or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs--

               "Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur;"

     ["Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it
     soon present themselves." ("The words will not reluctantly follow the
     thing preconceived.")--Horace, De Arte Poetica. v. 311]

And as another as poetically says in his prose:

          "Quum res animum occupavere, verbs ambiunt,"

     ["When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves
     readily."  ("When things have taken possession of the mind, the
     words trip.")--Seneca, Controvers., iii.  proem.]

and this other.

                    "Ipsae res verbs rapiunt."

     ["The things themselves force the words to express them."
     --Cicero, De Finib., iii.  5.]

He knows nothing of ablative, conjunctive, substantive, or grammar, no
more than his lackey, or a fishwife of the Petit Pont; and yet these will
give you a bellyful of talk, if you will hear them, and peradventure
shall trip as little in their language as the best masters of art in
France.  He knows no rhetoric, nor how in a preface to bribe the
benevolence of the courteous reader; neither does he care to know it.
Indeed all this fine decoration of painting is easily effaced by the
lustre of a simple and blunt truth; these fine flourishes serve only to
amuse the vulgar, of themselves incapable of more solid and nutritive
diet, as Aper very evidently demonstrates in Tacitus.  The ambassadors
of Samos, prepared with a long and elegant oration, came to Cleomenes,
king of Sparta, to incite him to a war against the tyrant Polycrates;
who, after he had heard their harangue with great gravity and patience,
gave them this answer: "As to the exordium, I remember it not, nor
consequently the middle of your speech; and for what concerns your
conclusion, I will not do what you desire:"--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the
Lacedaemonians.]--a very pretty answer this, methinks, and a pack of
learned orators most sweetly gravelled.  And what did the other man say?
The Athenians were to choose one of two architects for a very great
building they had designed; of these, the first, a pert affected fellow,
offered his service in a long premeditated discourse upon the subject of
the work in hand, and by his oratory inclined the voices of the people in
his favour; but the other in three words: "O Athenians, what this man
says, I will do."--[Plutarch, Instructions to Statesmen, c. 4.]--
When Cicero was in the height and heat of an eloquent harangue, many were
struck with admiration; but Cato only laughed, saying, "We have a
pleasant (mirth-making) consul."  Let it go before, or come after, a good
sentence or a thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit
well with what went before, nor has much coherence with what follows
after, it is good in itself.  I am none of those who think that good
rhyme makes a good poem.  Let him make short long, and long short if he
will, 'tis no great matter; if there be invention, and that the wit and
judgment have well performed their offices, I will say, here's a good
poet, but an ill rhymer.

               "Emunctae naris, durus componere versus."

          ["Of delicate humour, but of rugged versification."
          --Horace, Sat, iv. 8.]

Let a man, says Horace, divest his work of all method and measure,

         "Tempora certa modosque, et, quod prius ordine verbum est,
          Posterius facias, praeponens ultima primis
          Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetae."

     ["Take away certain rhythms and measures, and make the word which
     was first in order come later, putting that which should be last
     first, you will still find the scattered remains of the poet."
     --Horace, Sat., i. 4, 58.]

he will never the more lose himself for that; the very pieces will be
fine by themselves.  Menander's answer had this meaning, who being
reproved by a friend, the time drawing on at which he had promised a
comedy, that he had not yet fallen in hand with it; "It is made, and
ready," said he, "all but the verses."--[Plutarch, Whether the Athenians
more excelled in Arms or in Letters.]--Having contrived the subject, and
disposed the scenes in his fancy, he took little care for the rest.
Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have given reputation to our French poesy,
every little dabbler, for aught I see, swells his words as high, and
makes his cadences very near as harmonious as they:

                    "Plus sonat, quam valet."

               ["More sound than sense"--Seneca, Ep., 40.]

For the vulgar, there were never so many poetasters as now; but though
they find it no hard matter to imitate their rhyme, they yet fall
infinitely short of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the
delicate invention of the other of these masters.

But what will become of our young gentleman, if he be attacked with the
sophistic subtlety of some syllogism?  "A Westfalia ham makes a man
drink; drink quenches thirst: ergo a Westfalia ham quenches thirst."
Why, let him laugh at it; it will be more discretion to do so, than to go
about to answer it; or let him borrow this pleasant evasion from
Aristippus:  "Why should I trouble myself to untie that, which bound as
it is, gives me so much trouble?"--[Diogenes Laertius, ii. 70.]--
One offering at this dialectic juggling against Cleanthes, Chrysippus
took him short, saying, "Reserve these baubles to play with children,
and do not by such fooleries divert the serious thoughts of a man of
years."  If these ridiculous subtleties,

               "Contorta et aculeata sophismata,"

as Cicero calls them, are designed to possess him with an untruth, they
are dangerous; but if they signify no more than only to make him laugh,
I do not see why a man need to be fortified against them.  There are some
so ridiculous, as to go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word:

          "Aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus
          arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant."

     ["Who do not fit words to the subject, but seek out for things
     quite from the purpose to fit the words."--Quintilian, viii. 3.]

And as another says,

          "Qui, alicujus verbi decore placentis, vocentur ad id,
          quod non proposuerant scribere."

     ["Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word, are tempted to
     something they had no intention to treat of."--Seneca, Ep., 59.]

I for my part rather bring in a fine sentence by head and shoulders to
fit my purpose, than divert my designs to hunt after a sentence.  On the
contrary, words are to serve, and to follow a man's purpose; and let
Gascon come in play where French will not do.  I would have things so
excelling, and so wholly possessing the imagination of him that hears,
that he should have something else to do, than to think of words.  The
way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as
in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man's self,
short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt and vehement;

               "Haec demum sapiet dictio, qux feriet;"

     ["That has most weight and wisdom which pierces the ear." ("That
     utterance indeed will have a taste which shall strike the ear.")
     --Epitaph on Lucan, in Fabricius, Biblioth.  Lat., ii. 10.]

rather hard than wearisome; free from affectation; irregular,
incontinuous, and bold; where every piece makes up an entire body; not
like a pedant, a preacher, or a pleader, but rather a soldier-like style,
as Suetonius calls that of Julius Caesar; and yet I see no reason why he
should call it so.  I have ever been ready to imitate the negligent garb,
which is yet observable amongst the young men of our time, to wear my
cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking in disorder, which
seems to express a kind of haughty disdain of these exotic ornaments, and
a contempt of the artificial; but I find this negligence of much better
use in the form of speaking.  All affectation, particularly in the French
gaiety and freedom, is ungraceful in a courtier, and in a monarchy every
gentleman ought to be fashioned according to the court model; for which
reason, an easy and natural negligence does well.  I no more like a web
where the knots and seams are to be seen, than a fine figure, so
delicate, that a man may tell all the bones and veins:

     "Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex."

     ["Let the language that is dedicated to truth be plain and
     unaffected.--Seneca, Ep. 40.]

          "Quis accurat loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?"

     ["For who studies to speak accurately, that does not at the same
     time wish to perplex his auditory?"--Idem, Ep., 75.]

That eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance, that wholly
attracts us to itself.  And as in our outward habit, 'tis a ridiculous
effeminacy to distinguish ourselves by a particular and unusual garb or
fashion; so in language, to study new phrases, and to affect words that
are not of current use, proceeds from a puerile and scholastic ambition.
May I be bound to speak no other language than what is spoken in the
market-places of Paris!  Aristophanes the grammarian was quite out, when
he reprehended Epicurus for his plain way of delivering himself, and the
design of his oratory, which was only perspicuity of speech.
The imitation of words, by its own facility, immediately disperses itself
through a whole people; but the imitation of inventing and fitly applying
those words is of a slower progress.  The generality of readers, for
having found a like robe, very mistakingly imagine they have the same
body and inside too, whereas force and sinews are never to be borrowed;
the gloss, and outward ornament, that is, words and elocution, may.  Most
of those I converse with, speak the same language I here write; but
whether they think the same thoughts I cannot say.  The Athenians, says
Plato, study fulness and elegancy of speaking; the Lacedaemonians affect
brevity, and those of Crete to aim more at the fecundity of conception
than the fertility of speech; and these are the best.  Zeno used to say
that he had two sorts of disciples, one that he called cy-----ous,
curious to learn things, and these were his favourites; the other,
aoy---ous, that cared for nothing but words.  Not that fine speaking is
not a very good and commendable quality; but not so excellent and so
necessary as some would make it; and I am scandalised that our whole life
should be spent in nothing else.  I would first understand my own
language, and that of my neighbours, with whom most of my business and
conversation lies.

No doubt but Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, and of very great
use, but we buy them too dear.  I will here discover one way, which has
been experimented in my own person, by which they are to be had better
cheap, and such may make use of it as will.  My late father having made
the most precise inquiry that any man could possibly make amongst men of
the greatest learning and judgment, of an exact method of education, was
by them cautioned of this inconvenience then in use, and made to believe,
that the tedious time we applied to the learning of the tongues of them
who had them for nothing, was the sole cause we could not arrive to the
grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge, of the ancient Greeks and
Romans.  I do not, however, believe that to be the only cause.  So it is,
that the expedient my father found out for this was, that in my infancy,
and before I began to speak, he committed me to the care of a German, who
since died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of our
language, and very fluent and a great critic in Latin.  This man, whom he
had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained with a great
salary for this only one end, had me continually with him; he had with
him also joined two others, of inferior learning, to attend me, and to
relieve him; these spoke to me in no other language but Latin.  As to the
rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself,
nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, should speak anything in my
company, but such Latin words as each one had learned to gabble with me.
--[These passages are, the basis of a small volume by the Abbe Mangin:
"Education de Montaigne; ou, L'Art d'enseigner le Latin a l'instar des
meres latines."]--It is not to be imagined how great an advantage this
proved to the whole family; my father and my mother by this means learned
Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a
degree as was sufficient for any necessary use; as also those of the
servants did who were most frequently with me.  In short, we Latined it
at such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighbouring villages,
where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools.  As for what
concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood either
French or Perigordin, any more than Arabic; and without art, book,
grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense of a tear, I had, by that
time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no
means of mixing it up with any other.  If, for example, they were to give
me a theme after the college fashion, they gave it to others in French;
but to me they were to give it in bad Latin, to turn it into that which
was good.  And Nicolas Grouchy, who wrote a book De Comitiis Romanorum;
Guillaume Guerente, who wrote a comment upon Aristotle: George Buchanan,
that great Scottish poet: and Marc Antoine Muret (whom both France and
Italy have acknowledged for the best orator of his time), my domestic
tutors, have all of them often told me that I had in my infancy that
language so very fluent and ready, that they were afraid to enter into
discourse with me.  And particularly Buchanan, whom I since saw attending
the late Mareschal de Brissac, then told me, that he was about to write a
treatise of education, the example of which he intended to take from
mine; for he was then tutor to that Comte de Brissac who afterward proved
so valiant and so brave a gentleman.

As to Greek, of which I have but a mere smattering, my father also
designed to have it taught me by a device, but a new one, and by way of
sport; tossing our declensions to and fro, after the manner of those who,
by certain games of tables, learn geometry and arithmetic.  For he,
amongst other rules, had been advised to make me relish science and duty
by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion, and to educate my
soul in all liberty and delight, without any severity or constraint;
which he was an observer of to such a degree, even of superstition, if I
may say so, that some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the
brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch
them violently--and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more
profoundly involved than we), he caused me to be wakened by the sound of
some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that
purpose.  By this example you may judge of the rest, this alone being
sufficient to recommend both the prudence and the affection of so good a
father, who is not to be blamed if he did not reap fruits answerable to
so exquisite a culture.  Of this, two things were the cause: first, a
sterile and improper soil; for, though I was of a strong and healthful
constitution, and of a disposition tolerably sweet and tractable, yet I
was, withal, so heavy, idle, and indisposed, that they could not rouse me
from my sloth, not even to get me out to play.  What I saw, I saw clearly
enough, and under this heavy complexion nourished a bold imagination and
opinions above my age.  I had a slow wit that would go no faster than it
was led; a tardy understanding, a languishing invention, and above all,
incredible defect of memory; so that, it is no wonder, if from all these
nothing considerable could be extracted.  Secondly, like those who,
impatient of along and steady cure, submit to all sorts of prescriptions
and recipes, the good man being extremely timorous of any way failing in
a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to
be overruled by the common opinions, which always follow their leader as
a flight of cranes, and complying with the method of the time, having no
more those persons he had brought out of Italy, and who had given him the
first model of education, about him, he sent me at six years of age to
the College of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in
France.  And there it was not possible to add anything to the care he had
to provide me the most able tutors, with all other circumstances of
education, reserving also several particular rules contrary to the
college practice; but so it was, that with all these precautions, it was
a college still.  My Latin immediately grew corrupt, of which also by
discontinuance I have since lost all manner of use; so that this new way
of education served me to no other end, than only at my first coming to
prefer me to the first forms; for at thirteen years old, that I came out
of the college, I had run through my whole course (as they call it), and,
in truth, without any manner of advantage, that I can honestly brag of,
in all this time.

The first taste which I had for books came to me from the pleasure in
reading the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses; for, being about seven or
eight years old, I gave up all other diversions to read them, both by
reason that this was my own natural language, the easiest book that I was
acquainted with, and for the subject, the most accommodated to the
capacity of my age: for as for the Lancelot of the Lake, the Amadis of
Gaul, the Huon of Bordeaux, and such farragos, by which children are most
delighted with, I had never so much as heard their names, no more than I
yet know what they contain; so exact was the discipline wherein I was
brought up.  But this was enough to make me neglect the other lessons
that were prescribed me; and here it was infinitely to my advantage,
to have to do with an understanding tutor, who very well knew discreetly
to connive at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this
means I ran through Virgil's AEneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus,
and then some Italian comedies, allured by the sweetness of the subject;
whereas had he been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion,
I do really believe, I had brought away nothing from the college but a
hatred of books, as almost all our young gentlemen do.  But he carried
himself very discreetly in that business, seeming to take no notice, and
allowing me only such time as I could steal from my other regular
studies, which whetted my appetite to devour those books.  For the chief
things my father expected from their endeavours to whom he had delivered
me for education, were affability and good-humour; and, to say the truth,
my manners had no other vice but sloth and want of metal.  The fear was
not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing; nobody
prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless; they foresaw
idleness, but no malice; and I find it falls out accordingly:
The complaints I hear of myself are these: "He is idle, cold in the
offices of friendship and relation, and in those of the public, too
particular, too disdainful."  But the most injurious do not say, "Why has
he taken such a thing?  Why has he not paid such an one?"  but, "Why does
he part with nothing?  Why does he not give?"  And I should take it for a
favour that men would expect from me no greater effects of supererogation
than these.  But they are unjust to exact from me what I do not owe, far
more rigorously than they require from others that which they do owe.
In condemning me to it, they efface the gratification of the action, and
deprive me of the gratitude that would be my due for it; whereas the
active well-doing ought to be of so much the greater value from my hands,
by how much I have never been passive that way at all.  I can the more
freely dispose of my fortune the more it is mine, and of myself the more
I am my own.  Nevertheless, if I were good at setting out my own actions,
I could, peradventure, very well repel these reproaches, and could give
some to understand, that they are not so much offended, that I do not
enough, as that I am able to do a great deal more than I do.

Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine, my mind, when retired into
itself, was not altogether without strong movements, solid and clear
judgments about those objects it could comprehend, and could also,
without any helps, digest them; but, amongst other things, I do really
believe, it had been totally impossible to have made it to submit by
violence and force.  Shall I here acquaint you with one faculty of my
youth?  I had great assurance of countenance, and flexibility of voice
and gesture, in applying myself to any part I undertook to act: for
before--

          "Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,"

     ["I had just entered my twelfth year."--Virgil, Bucol., 39.]

I played the chief parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente,
and Muret, that were presented in our College of Guienne with great
dignity: now Andreas Goveanus, our principal, as in all other parts of
his charge, was, without comparison, the best of that employment in
France; and I was looked upon as one of the best actors.  'Tis an
exercise that I do not disapprove in young people of condition; and I
have since seen our princes, after the example of some of the ancients,
in person handsomely and commendably perform these exercises; it was even
allowed to persons of quality to make a profession of it in Greece.

          "Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et
          fortuna honesta erant: nec ars, quia nihil tale apud
          Graecos pudori est, ea deformabat."

     ["He imparted this matter to Aristo the tragedian; a man of good
     family and fortune, which neither of them receive any blemish by
     that profession; nothing of this kind being reputed a disparagement
     in Greece."--Livy, xxiv. 24.]

Nay, I have always taxed those with impertinence who condemn these
entertainments, and with injustice those who refuse to admit such
comedians as are worth seeing into our good towns, and grudge the people
that public diversion.  Well-governed corporations take care to assemble
their citizens, not only to the solemn duties of devotion, but also to
sports and spectacles.  They find society and friendship augmented by it;
and besides, can there possibly be allowed a more orderly and regular
diversion than what is performed m the sight of every one, and very often
in the presence of the supreme magistrate himself?  And I, for my part,
should think it reasonable, that the prince should sometimes gratify his
people at his own expense, out of paternal goodness and affection; and
that in populous cities there should be theatres erected for such
entertainments, if but to divert them from worse and private actions.

To return to my subject, there is nothing like alluring the appetite and
affections; otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with
books; by dint of the lash, you give them their pocketful of learning to
keep; whereas, to do well you should not only lodge it with them, but
make them espouse it.




CHAPTER XXVI

THAT IT IS FOLLY TO MEASURE TRUTH AND ERROR BY OUR OWN CAPACITY

'Tis not, perhaps, without reason, that we attribute facility of belief
and easiness of persuasion to simplicity and ignorance: for I fancy I
have heard belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul,
which by how much softer and of less resistance it is, is the more easy
to be impressed upon.

         "Ut necesse est, lancem in Libra, ponderibus impositis,
          deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere."

     ["As the scale of the balance must give way to the weight that
     presses it down, so the mind yields to demonstration."
     --Cicero, Acad., ii. 12.]

By how much the soul is more empty and without counterpoise, with so much
greater facility it yields under the weight of the first persuasion.  And
this is the reason that children, the common people, women, and sick
folks, are most apt to be led by the ears.  But then, on the other hand,
'tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false
that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as
fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours.  I was myself once one of
those; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies,
enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story I had no mind to believe:

              "Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
               Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala,"

     ["Dreams, magic terrors, marvels, sorceries, Thessalian prodigies."
     --Horace.  Ep. ii. 3, 208.]

I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies.
Whereas I now find, that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least,
as they; not that experience has taught me anything to alter my former
opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has
instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and
impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the
will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my
own capacity, than which no folly can be greater.  If we give the names
of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how
many are continually presented before our eyes?  Let us but consider
through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers
lead us to the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we
shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their
strangeness--

                    "Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
               Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;"

     ["Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven's lucid
     temples."--Lucretius, ii.  1037.  The text has 'statiate videnai']

and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think
them as incredible, if not more, than any others.

              "Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
               Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
               Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
               Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes."

     [Lucretius, ii. 1032.  The sense of the passage is in the preceding
     sentence.]

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the
sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we
conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

              "Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei'st
               Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
               Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
               Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit."

     ["A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a
     mighty stream; and so with other things--a tree, a man--anything
     appears greatest to him that never knew a greater."--Idem, vi. 674.]

         "Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur,
          neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident."

     ["Things grow familiar to men's minds by being often seen; so that
     they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily
     see."--Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]

The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire
into their causes.  We are to judge with more reverence, and with greater
acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity, of the infinite power
of nature.  How many unlikely things are there testified by people worthy
of faith, which, if we cannot persuade ourselves absolutely to believe,
we ought at least to leave them in suspense; for, to condemn them as
impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost
bounds of possibility.  Did we rightly understand the difference betwixt
the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that which is contrary to the
order and course of nature and contrary to the common opinion of men, in
not believing rashly, and on the other hand, in not being too
incredulous, we should observe the rule of 'Ne quid nimis' enjoined by
Chilo.

When we find in Froissart, that the Comte de Foix  knew in Bearn the
defeat of John, king of Castile, at Jubera the next day after it
happened, and the means by which he tells us he came to do so, we may be
allowed to be a little merry at it, as also at what our annals report,
that Pope Honorius, the same day that King Philip Augustus died at
Mantes, performed his public obsequies at Rome, and commanded the like
throughout Italy, the testimony of these authors not being, perhaps, of
authority enough to restrain us.  But what if Plutarch, besides several
examples that he produces out of antiquity, tells us, he knows of certain
knowledge, that in the time of Domitian, the news of the battle lost by
Antony in Germany was published at Rome, many days' journey from thence,
and dispersed throughout the whole world, the same day it was fought;
and if Caesar was of opinion, that it has often happened, that the report
has preceded the incident, shall we not say, that these simple people
have suffered themselves to be deceived with the vulgar, for not having
been so clear-sighted as we?  Is there anything more delicate, more
clear, more sprightly; than Pliny's judgment, when he is pleased to set
it to work?  Anything more remote from vanity?  Setting aside his
learning, of which I make less account, in which of these excellences do
any of us excel him?  And yet there is scarce a young schoolboy that does
not convict him of untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the
progress of the works of nature.  When we read in Bouchet the miracles of
St. Hilary's relics, away with them: his authority is not sufficient to
deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand
to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence.  That
great St. Augustin' testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight
upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at
Carthage cured of a cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a
woman newly baptized; Hesperius, a familiar friend of his, to have driven
away the spirits that haunted his house, with a little earth of the
sepulchre of our Lord; which earth, being also transported thence into
the church, a paralytic to have there been suddenly cured by it; a woman
in a procession, having touched St. Stephen's shrine with a nosegay, and
rubbing her eyes with it, to have recovered her sight, lost many years
before; with several other miracles of which he professes himself to have
been an eyewitness: of what shall we excuse him and the two holy bishops,
Aurelius and Maximinus, both of whom he attests to the truth of these
things?  Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice
and imposture?  Is any man now living so impudent as to think himself
comparable to them in virtue, piety, learning, judgment, or any kind of
perfection?

              "Qui, ut rationem nullam afferrent,
               ipsa auctoritate me frangerent."


     ["Who, though they should adduce no reason, would convince me with
     their authority alone."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, i. 21.]

'Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd
temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend.  For
after, according to your fine understanding, you have established the
limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards, there appears a
necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have
contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits.  Now, that
which seems to me so much to disorder our consciences in the commotions
we are now in concerning religion, is the Catholics dispensing so much
with their belief.  They fancy they appear moderate, and wise, when they
grant to their opponents some of the articles in question; but, besides
that they do not discern what advantage it is to those with whom we
contend, to begin to give ground and to retire, and how much this
animates our enemy to follow his blow: these articles which they select
as things indifferent, are sometimes of very great importance.  We are
either wholly and absolutely to submit ourselves to the authority of our
ecclesiastical polity, or totally throw off all obedience to it: 'tis not
for us to determine what and how much obedience we owe to it.  And this I
can say, as having myself made trial of it, that having formerly taken
the liberty of my own swing and fancy, and omitted or neglected certain
rules of the discipline of our Church, which seemed to me vain and
strange coming afterwards to discourse of it with learned men, I have
found those same things to be built upon very good and solid ground and
strong foundation; and that nothing but stupidity and ignorance makes us
receive them with less reverence than the rest.  Why do we not consider
what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were
yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables?
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to
thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything
doubtful and undecided.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A child should not be brought up in his mother's lap
     Acquiesce and submit to truth
     Affect words that are not of current use
     Anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater
     Appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have
     Applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge
     Attribute facility of belief to simplicity and ignorance
     Away with this violence!  away with this compulsion!
     Bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well
     Belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul
     cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking disordered
     College: a real house of correction of imprisoned youth
     Disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed
     Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness
     Eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance
     Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing
     Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul
     Hobbes said that if he had been at college as long as others--
     Inquisitive after everything
     Insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors
     It is no hard matter to get children
     Learn what it is right to wish
     Least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole
     Let him be satisfied with correcting himself
     Let him examine every man's talent
     Light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years
     Living well, which of all arts is the greatest
     Lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust
     Man may say too much even upon the best subjects
     Miracle: everything our reason cannot comprehend
     Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant
     Mothers are too tender
     Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men
     Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless
     Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!
     O Athenians, what this man says, I will do
     Obstinacy and contention are common qualities
     Occasion to La Boetie to write his "Voluntary Servitude"
     Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood
     Philosophy is that which instructs us to live
     Philosophy looked upon as a vain and fantastic name
     Preface to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader
     Reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls
     Silence, therefore, and modesty are very advantageous qualities
     So many trillions of men, buried before us
     Sparing and an husband of his knowledge
     The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine
     The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness
     Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception
     There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections
     They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living
     Things grow familiar to men's minds by being often seen
     To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption
     To contemn what we do not comprehend
     To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word
     To know by rote, is no knowledge
     Tongue will grow too stiff to bend
     Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge
     Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything
     Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe
     Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too
     Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 5
by Michel de Montaigne

*** 