The works of Michael de Montaigne, comprising his essays, letters, and journey through Germany and Italy

Front matter

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Preface

The dedication is followed by this letter from Lord Halifax : —

This for Charles Cotton, Esq., at his House at Berisford. — To be left at Ashburne in Derbyshire.

"Sir, — I have too long delayed my thanks to you for giving me such an obliging evidence of your remembrance : that alone would have been a welcome present, but when joined with the book in the world I am best entertained with, it raiseth a strong desire in me to be better known, where I am sure to be so much pleased. I have till now thought wit could not be translated, and do still retain so much of that opinion, that I believe it impossible, except by one whose genius cometh up to that of the author. You have the original strength of his thought, that it almost tempts a man to believe the transmigration of souls, and that his, being used to hills, is come to the moor-lands, to reward us here in England, for doing him more right than his country will afford him. He hath, by your means, mended his first edition. To transplant and make him ours is not only a valuable acquisition to us, but a just censure of the critical impertinence of those French scribblers who have taken pains to make little cavils and exceptions to lessen the reputation of this great man, whom nature hath made too big to confine him to the exactness of a studied style. He let his mind have its full flight, and showeth, by a generous kind of negligence, that he did not write for praise, but to give the world a true picture of himself and of mankind. He scorned affected periods, or to please the mistaken reader with an empty chime of words. He hath no affection to set himself out, and dependeth wholly upon the natural force of what is his own, and the excellent application of what he borroweth!

"You see, sir, I have kindness enough for Monsieur de Montaigne to be your rival; but nobody can now pretend to be in equal competition with you : I do willingly yield it is no small matter for a man to do to a more prosperous lover; and if you will repay this piece of justice with another, pray believe that he who can translate such an author without doing him wrong, must not only make me glad but proud of being his very humble servant,

"Halifax.''

Mr. Cotton prefaces his translation in the following terms: —

"My design in attempting this translation was to present my country with a true copy of a very brave original. How far I have succeeded in that design, is left to every one to judge ; and I expect to be the more gently censured, for having myself so modest an opinion of my own performance, as to confess that the author has suffered by me as well as the former translator; though I hope, and dare affirm, the misinterpretations I shall be found guilty of are neither so numerous nor so gross. I cannot discern my own errors ; it were unpardonable in me if I could, and did not mend them ; but I can see his (except when we are both mistaken), and those I have corrected; but I am not so ill-natured as to show where. In truth, both Mr. Florio and I are to be excused, where we miss the sense of the author, whose language is such, in many places, as grammar cannot reconcile, which renders it the hardest book to make a justifiable version of that I ever yet saw in that or any other language I understand; insomuch that, though I do think, and am pretty confident, I understand French as well as any man, I have yet sometimes been forced to grope at his meaning. Peradventure, the greatest critic would, in some place, have found my author abstruse enough. Yet are not these mistakes I speak of either so many or of so great importance, as to cast any scandalous blemish upon the book, but such as few readers can discover, and they that do will, I hope, easily excuse.

" The errors of the press I must in part take upon myself, living at so remote a distance from it, and supplying it with a slubbered copy from an illiterate amanuensis, the last of which is provided against in the quires that must succeed."

PREFACE.

With reference to this translation, the editor of a later edition remarks : —

"Mr. Cotton has, indeed, succeeded to a miracle in his translation of so celebrated a piece, and we are thoroughly persuaded that very few Frenchmen now living, were they to undertake the task, would find themselves capable of turning Montaigne's Essays into modern French with the same spirit and justice to the author; but still our translator was not altogether infallible : he had certainly one of the most difficult books in the world to struggle with, and he complains of it himself in his preface : it is no wonder, then, that he fell into such mistakes, which we should not only have fallen into ourselves, but probably have committed a great many more, had he not first trod the rugged way before us."

The same Editor states that he has altered Mr. Cotton's prose in above three thousand places, and changed his language where fifty years had rendered it obsolete or harsh.

In 1776 appeared a new- edition of Cotton's translation, " with very considerable amendments and improvements from the most accurate and elegant French edition of Peter Coste." Of this version there was a reprint in 1811. It exhibits, in many places, just corrections of Mr. Cotton, where that gentleman has obviously misapprehended his author ; but it leaves a far greater number of errors untouched ; while its constant « improvements," in the way of modernizing Mr. Cotton's style and language, divest his translation of nearly all its spirit and naivete. I also, no doubt, subject myself, in the opinion of many persons, to the charge of presumption, for having in my turn, ventured to correct Mr. Cotton ; and, indeed, I have had it roundly objected, that in any way to alter Cotton Ls to damage Montaigne. Having, however, read and re-read both the original work and the translation, the careful comparison I have made of the two has shown me that not to alter Cotton, in many places, were gross injustice to Montaigne ; and it is solely with this conviction that I have ventured upon the emendations here made. I most readily admit that Cotton's translation is, as a whole, a master-piece ; but then there occur in it, and at no very long intervals, instances of carelessness which greatly detract from the value of the translation, by making it fall short of, and in some cases absurdly misrepresent, the author's meaning. I could easily collect enough of these instances to make a new chapter in the Curiosities of Literature, but this would be as ungracious as it is unnecessary. One or two illustrations will, I conceive, suffice to form my justification. In chapter 55, Montaigne, chatting about smells, remarks, En la plus espesse babarie, les femmes Scythes, &c. " in an age of the darkest barbarism, the Scythian women," &c. ; which in Cotton's version assumes the following shape : " in the wildest parts of Barbary, the Scythian women," &c. In chapter 56, Montaigne, after quoting a curious opinion set forth by Margaret de Valois, who speaks of a young man's saying his prayers in a church regularly after visiting another man's wife, as a testimonial of singular devotion, says, — Mais ce n'est pas par ceste preuve seulement qu' on pourroit verifier que les femmes ne sont gueres propres, a traicter les matieres de la theologie : " But this is not the only proof we have that women are not very fit to treat of theological matters," which Cotton thus renders : — " But it is by this proof only, that a man may conclude few men very fit to treat of theological affairs!" Again, in chapter 57, Montaigne observes, 1«

PREFACE.

E me semble que, considerant la foiblesse de nostre vie et a combien d'escueils ordinaries et naturels elle est exposee, on n'en debvroit pas f aire si grande part a la naissance, a Poysifvete et a Papprentissage, — " Methinks considering the frailty of life, and the many natural and ordinary wrecks to which it is exposed, we should not give so large a portion of it to idleness, either in childhood or in apprenticeship to the world," — which Cotton reads, — "For the frailty of life, and the many natural and accidental rubs to which it is obnoxious and daily exposed, birth though noble, ought not to share so large a vacancy, and so tedious a course of education." Book ii., chapter 2, Montaigne says, Laissons cette autre secte (the t Stoic) faisant expresse profession de fierte ; — "Let us leave that other sect, which makes an express profession of haughty superiority ;" which Cotton converts into this sentence: — "Let us leave that other sect, and make a downright profession of fierceness." In another place, Cotton subjects his author to a sad imputation: Montaigne (book ii. chapter 6), speaking of an accident that threw him into a swoon, says that, however, Je m'advisais de commander qu'on donnast un cheval a ma femme, que je veoyois s'empestrer et se tracasser dans le chemin, qui est montueux et malayse, "I had so much sense about me as to order them to give a horse to my wife, who, I saw, was toiling and labouring along the road, which was a steep and uneasy one ;" this Cotton renders, " I had so much sense as to order that a horse I saw trip and falter on the way, which is mountainous and uneasy, should be given to my wife," &c.

I trust that these illustrations will suffice to justify me, even with the warmest, admirers of Cotton, — and he has no sincerer admirer than myself, — for the departures which I have made from his translation. They are frequent, it is true, but for the most part, only where absolutely required to restore the author's meaning. The style and spirit of Cotton's version it would be impossible to improve upon ; and I have no hesitation in expressing the opinion that, the inaccuracies in question being now carefully corrected, the present edition of the essays of Montaigne fully comes up to the definition of a good translation suggested by Lord Woodhouselee, viz. — " That in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is to those who speak the language of the original work." Here, indeed, as in the case of Ozell's Rabelais, the position might be even more strongly put.

THE LIFE

MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE.

Michael me Montaigne was born, as he himself tells us, « betwixt eleven and twelve o'clock in the forenoon, the last of February, 1533." He was the third son of Pierre Ey quern, 1 Ecuyer? a brave and loyal soldier, who had seen service in the wars beyond the mountains, and had brought back with him from Italy and Spain a cultivated mind. The description which his son gives of him, is highly interesting : — " He spoke little and well, ever mixing his language with some illustration out of modern authors, especially Spanish ; and amongst them Marcus Aurelius was very frequent in his mouth. His behaviour was grave, humble, and modest ; he was very solicitous of neatness and decency in his person and dress, whether a-foot or on horseback. He was exceedingly punctual to his word, and of a conscience and religion tending rather toward superstition than otherwise. For a man of little stature, very strong, well proportioned, and well knit; of a pleasing countenance, inclining to brown, and very adroit in all noble exercises. I have yet in the house to be seen cines full of lead, with which, they say, he exercised his arms for throwing the bar or the stone ; and shoes with leaden soles, to make him ' afterwards lighter for running or leaping. Of his vaulting he has left little miracles behind him ; and I have seen him, when past threescore, laugh at our agilities, throw himself in his furred gown into the saddle, make the tour of a table upon his thumbs, and scarce ever mount the stairs up to his chamber without taking three or four steps at a time."

This gentleman, with some instinctive prescience apparently, of his son Michael's mental superiority, formed a wish to have him educated in a manner altogether different from the routine then gone through. Even before his birth, he consulted learned and clever men on the subject, and on these consultations and his own admirable judgment, he formed a system, as Mrs. Shelley observes, such as may in some sort be considered the basis of Rousseau's ; and which shows that, however we may consider one age more enlightened than another, the natural reason of men of talent leads them to the same conclusions, whether living in an age when warfare, party struggles, and the concomitant ignorance, were rife, or when philosophers set the fashion of the day : " The good father that God gave me," says he, " who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of his bounty, but truly 'lis a very hearty one, sent me from my cradle to be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the while I was at nurse, and even longer, bringing me up to the meanest and most common way of living. This humour of his yet aimed this end, to make me familiar with those people, and that condition of men, which most need our assistance ; believing that I should be more holden to regard them who extended their arms to me, than those who turned their backs upon me: and for this reason also it was that he provided me godfathers of the meanest fortune, to oblige and bind me to them."

Next came the question of education. The Greek and Latin tongues, our author's father felt, are an acquisition of great worth ; but at the same time they were somewhat dearly bought under the system which, at that period, universally prevailed, and does so even now, to a great extent. The elder

1 Scaliger, in the Scaligcrana Sccunda, is reported ns saying that Montaigne's father was a seller of herrings, — whether in gross or detail is not specified,— but the statement is a mere falsehood. In the supplement to the Chronique Bordelaisc, hy Jean Darnal, there is an account of the various gradations by which Pierre Eyciuein, Seigneur da Montaigne, ascended from the office of first jurat of Bordeaux, in 1530, to thut of mayor, in 1S33.

'* Montaigne himself mentions the surname of Eyquem, though it does not appear that he ever made use of it himself. He says the name was still borne by a family in England; its English form was probably Egham.

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LIFE OF MONTAIGNE.

Montaigne's own reading being confined to works written in the living tongues, he was the more anxious that his son should be early made acquainted with the languages of Athens and Rome, and he meditated long on the received modes of introducing youth into the chief vestibules of knowledge. He was struck by the time given to, and the annoyances a child suffers in, the acquirement of the dead languages, and had thus been exaggerated to him as a cause why the moderns were so inferior to the ancients in greatness of soul and wisdom. But the difficulty which he felt, the expedient he devised to obviate it, and the result of this expedient, cannot be better told than in Montaigne's own words : —

" My late father having made the most precise enquiry that any man can possibly make amongst men of the greatest learning and judgment, of an exact method of education, was by them cautioned of the inconvenience then in use, and informed that the tedious time we applied to the learning of the languages of those people who, themselves, 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 ; the expedient my father, however, 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, but very fluent and a great critic in Latin. This man, whom he had sent for out of his own country, and whom he entertained, at a very great salary, for this only end, had me continually with him. To whom there were also joined two others of the same nation, but of inferior learning, to attend me, and sometimes to relieve him ; who all of them conversed with me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family, it was an inviolable rule that neither himself, nor my mother, nor man, nor maid, should speak anything, in my company, but such Latin words as every one had learnt to gabble with me. It is not to be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family ; my father and my mother, by this means, learning 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.

To be short, we did Latin it at such a rate that it overflowed to all the neighbouring villages, where there yet remain, and have established themselves by custom, several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for myself, I was above six years of age before I understood either French or Perigordian any more than Arabic, and without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense of a tear, had by that time learned to speak as pure Latin as my master himself. 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 gave it in the worst Latin, to turn it into that which was pure and good ; and Nicholas Grouchy, who wrote a book de Comitiis Rornanorum ; William Guerente, who has written a Commentary upon Aristotle; George Buchanan, that great Scotch poet, and Marc Antony Muret, whom both France and Italy have acknowledged for the best orator of his time, my domestic tutors [at college], 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. 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 Count de Brissac, who afterwards proved so valiant and so brave a gentleman."

"As to Greek, of which I have but little smattering, my father also designed to have taught it me by art, but in a new way, and as a sort of sport; tossing out declensions to and fro, after the manner of those who, by certain games, at tables and chess, 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, that some being of opinion 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 waked by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose. By which example you may judge of the rest, this alone being sufficient to recommend both the prudence and affection of so good a father ; who, therefore, is not to be blamed if he did not reap the fruits answerable to so excellent a culture. Of which, 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 gentle and tractable, yet I was, withal, so heavy, idle, and sluggish, that they could not rouse me even to any exercise of recreation, nor get me out to play. What I saw, I saw clear enough; and under this lazy complexion nourished a bold imagination, and opinions above my age. I had a slothful wit, that would go no faster than it was led, a slow understanding, a languishing invention, and, above all, an 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 a long and steady cure, submit to all sorts of prescriptions and receipts, 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 over-ruled by the common opinion, which always follows the lead of what has gone on before, like cranes; and falling in with the method of the time, having no longer about him those persons he had brought out of Italy, and who had given him his first models of education, 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,

LIFE OF MONTAIGNE.

it was a College still. My Latin immediately grew corrupt, and, by discontinuance, I have since lost all maaner of use of it; and so this new plan 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 left the College, I had gone through my whole course, as they call it, and, in truth, without any manner of improvement, that I can honestly brag of, in all this time." The vigorous idiom of Tacitus and Seneca, which had thus become his natuial language, had doubtless, through life, an influence in him greatly over the French, which he learned at a later period, as it were a foreign tongue, and which, having only just been nationalized by Francis I., was as yet anything but a langage fait, took the more freely, in an organ still young, the form given it by the earlier impressions. Locke, in his Treatise on Education, seems to have paid great attention to that of Montaigne; so far admitting the plan pursued with our Essayist, that, while he requires that a child should, in the first instance, learn his maternal language, he at the same time lays it strongly down that he should be provided with a master to teach him Latin also, by conversing with him in that tongue.

As a child, though of a gentle and tractable disposition, it was difficult to rouse him from his quiet, even to join in boyish games ; but when he once began to play, then all the sports of his youthful companions seemed to him in the light of serious actions; and he had an entire repugnance to mix up with them any finesse or trickery, going always the straight way to play as to work, and keeping to it. Yet his mind, which seemed inactive, did not fail to form judgments upon the objects which he became acquainted with, and he digested his thoughts freely and at leisure. " Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine," says he, " my mind, when retired into itself, was not altogether idle, nor wholly deprived of solid inquiry, nor of certain 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," he adds, " with one faculty of my youth 1 I had great boldness and assurance of countenance, and to that a flexibility of voice and gesture to any part I undertook to act ; for before

Alter ab undecimo turn me vix ceperat annus,

I played the chief parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente, and Muret, that were acted in our college of Guienne with very great form; wherein Andreas Goveanus, our principal, as in all other parts of his undertaking, was, without comparison, the best of that employment in France, and I was looked upon as one of his chief actors." The first taste for reading that Montaigne acquired, arose in the manner which he himself thus relates: — '.< The first thing that gave me any taste of books was the pleasure I took in reading the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses ; and with them I was so taken that, being but seven or eight years old, I would steal from 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 Lancelot of the Lake, Amadis of Gaul, Huon of Bordeaux, and such trumpery, 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. This made me think the less of the other lessons prescribed me ; and here it was infinitely to my advantage to have to do with an understanding tutor, who was wise enough to connive at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this means I ran through Virgil's .-Encids, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, allured by the pleasure of the subject ; whereas had he been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion, I do really believe I had brought nothing away 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 heightened rny appetite by allowing me only such time for this reading as I could steal from my regular studies. For the chief things my father expected from them to whom he had delivered me for education, was affability of manners and good humour ; and, to say the truth, my temper had no other vice but sloth and want of mettle. The fear was not that'I should do ill, but that I should do nothing. Nobody suspected that I should be wicked, but most thought I should be useless ; they foresaw idleness, but no malice in my nature ; and I find it falls out accordingly. There is nothing," he adds, « like alluring the appetite and affection, otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with books, and by virtue of the lash give them their pocket full of learning to keep." Montaigne thus grew towards maturity, with an education more like that of our day than of his own. In the management of those first years of life, it is impossible not to see the source of much that afterwards marked him out from others. The main principle of teaching him every thing without requiring any conscious effect, or producing any sense of struggle on his part, doubtless disinclined him, as such a system always must, to encounter hardships, or engage in conflict : whence partly the indolence, though a busy indolence, of his life : hence, too, in a great degree, his reluctance to admit any views of man and duty which required him to regard life as a long battle against ignorance and weakness, in a word, against evil ; and which estimate the highest and best of our thoughts and feelings as only then pure and active, when consciously toiling against the stream of self-indulgence. But as his education gave him not only ease, but also knowledge, and opened to him an inexhaustible source of mental pleasure, no wonder that he became a literary epicure, and made the gratification of every whim in speculation, and to a great degree in practice, the only aim, xii LIFE OF MONTAIGNE.

if so it can be called, of his existence. Thanks, however, to the sound structure of mind and body, to the sturdy manly nature which he partly inherited from his father, partly owed to his care, to the strong and honest minds and the admirable books with which he was early familiarized, there is under and around all this capricious idleness predominant, clear, homely sense and apprehensiveness for truth, accompanied by sincerity and kindness of will, the natural yoke-fellows of such endowments, which give both the most sterling value and the most exquisite charm to his works.