“Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet, quam necesse est.”

[“He grieves more than is necessary, who grieves before it is

necessary.”--Seneca, Ep., 98.]

The sharpness of this imagination springs from our curiosity: ‘tis thus

we ever impede ourselves, desiring to anticipate and regulate natural

prescripts. It is only for the doctors to dine worse for it, when in the

best health, and to frown at the image of death; the common sort stand in

need of no remedy or consolation, but just in the shock, and when the

blow comes; and consider on’t no more than just what they endure. Is it

not then, as we say, that the stolidity and want of apprehension in the

vulgar give them that patience m present evils, and that profound

carelessness of future sinister accidents? That their souls, in being

more gross and dull, are less penetrable and not so easily moved? If it

be so, let us henceforth, in God’s name, teach nothing but ignorance;

‘tis the utmost fruit the sciences promise us, to which this stolidity so

gently leads its disciples.

We have no want of good masters, interpreters of natural simplicity.

Socrates shall be one; for, as I remember, he speaks something to this

purpose to the judges who sat upon his life and death.

[That which follows is taken from the Apology of Socrates in Plato,

chap. 17, &c.]

“I am afraid, my masters, that if I entreat you not to put me to death, I

shall confirm the charge of my accusers, which is, that I pretend to be

wiser than others, as having some more secret knowledge of things that

are above and below us. I have neither frequented nor known death, nor

have ever seen any person that has tried its qualities, from whom to

inform myself. Such as fear it, presuppose they know it; as for my part,

I neither know what it is, nor what they do in the other world. Death

is, peradventure, an indifferent thing; peradventure, a thing to be

desired. ‘Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration

from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one’s condition to

go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from

having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an

annihilation of our being, ‘tis yet a bettering of one’s condition to

enter into a long and peaceable night; we find nothing more sweet in life

than quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams. The things that

I know to be evil, as to injure one’s neighbour and to disobey one’s

superior, whether it be God or man, I carefully avoid; such as I do not

know whether they be good or evil, I cannot fear them. If I am to die

and leave you alive, the gods alone only know whether it will go better

with you or with me. Wherefore, as to what concerns me, you may do as

you shall think fit. But according to my method of advising just and

profitable things, I say that you will do your consciences more right to

set me at liberty, unless you see further into my cause than I do; and,

judging according to my past actions, both public and private, according

to my intentions, and according to the profit that so many of our

citizens, both young and old, daily extract from my conversation, and the

fruit that you all reap from me, you cannot more duly acquit yourselves

towards my merit than in ordering that, my poverty considered, I should

be maintained at the Prytanaeum, at the public expense, a thing that I

have often known you, with less reason, grant to others. Do not impute

it to obstinacy or disdain that I do not, according to the custom,

supplicate and go about to move you to commiseration. I have both

friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of

stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you

with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to

move you to compassion; but I should do a shame to our city at the age I

am, and in the reputation of wisdom which is now charged against me, to

appear in such an abject form. What would men say of the other

Athenians? I have always admonished those who have frequented my

lectures, not to redeem their lives by an unbecoming action; and in the

wars of my country, at Amphipolis, Potidea, Delia, and other expeditions

where I have been, I have effectually manifested how far I was from

securing my safety by my shame. I should, moreover, compromise your

duty, and should invite you to unbecoming things; for ‘tis not for my

prayers to persuade you, but for the pure and solid reasons of justice.

You have sworn to the gods to keep yourselves upright; and it would seem

as if I suspected you, or would recriminate upon you that I do not

believe that you are so; and I should testify against myself, not to

believe them as I ought, mistrusting their conduct, and not purely

committing my affair into their hands. I wholly rely upon them; and hold

myself assured they will do in this what shall be most fit both for you

and for me: good men, whether living or dead, have no reason to fear the

gods.”

Is not this an innocent child’s pleading of an unimaginable loftiness,

true, frank, and just, unexampled?--and in what a necessity employed!

Truly, he had very good reason to prefer it before that which the great

orator Lysias had penned for him: admirably couched, indeed, in the

judiciary style, but unworthy of so noble a criminal. Had a suppliant

voice been heard out of the mouth of Socrates, that lofty virtue had

struck sail in the height of its glory; and ought his rich and powerful

nature to have committed her defence to art, and, in her highest proof,

have renounced truth and simplicity, the ornaments of his speaking, to

adorn and deck herself with the embellishments of figures and the

flourishes of a premeditated speech? He did very wisely, and like

himself, not to corrupt the tenor of an incorrupt life, and so sacred an

image of the human form, to spin out his decrepitude another year, and to

betray the immortal memory of that glorious end. He owed his life not to

himself, but to the example of the world; had it not been a public

damage, that he should have concluded it after a lazy and obscure manner?

Assuredly, that careless and indifferent consideration of his death

deserved that posterity should consider it so much the more, as indeed

they did; and there is nothing so just in justice than that which fortune

ordained for his recommendation; for the Athenians abominated all those

who had been causers of his death to such a degree, that they avoided

them as excommunicated persons, and looked upon everything as polluted

that had been touched by them; no one would wash with them in the public

baths, none would salute or own acquaintance with them: so that, at last,

unable longer to support this public hatred, they hanged themselves.

If any one shall think that, amongst so many other examples that I had to

choose out of in the sayings of Socrates for my present purpose, I have

made an ill choice of this, and shall judge this discourse of his

elevated above common conceptions, I must tell them that I have properly

selected it; for I am of another opinion, and hold it to be a discourse,

in rank and simplicity, much below and behind common conceptions. He

represents, in an inartificial boldness and infantine security, the pure

and first impression and ignorance of nature; for it is to be believed

that we have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death, by reason of

itself; ‘tis a part of our being, and no less essential than living.

To what end should nature have begotten in us a hatred to it and a horror

of it, considering that it is of so great utility to her in maintaining

the succession and vicissitude of her works? and that in this universal

republic, it conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss or

ruin?

“Sic rerum summa novatur.”

“Mille animas una necata dedit.”

“The failing of one life is the passage to a thousand other lives.”

Nature has imprinted in beasts the care of themselves and of their

conservation; they proceed so far as hitting or hurting to be timorous of

being worse, of themselves, of our haltering and beating them, accidents

subject to their sense and experience; but that we should kill them, they

cannot fear, nor have they the faculty to imagine and conclude such a

thing as death; it is said, indeed, that we see them not only cheerfully

undergo it, horses for the most part neighing and swans singing when they

die, but, moreover, seek it at need, of which elephants have given many

examples.

Besides, the method of arguing, of which Socrates here makes use, is it

not equally admirable both in simplicity and vehemence? Truly it is much

more easy to speak like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to speak

and live as Socrates did; there lies the extreme degree of perfection and

difficulty; art cannot reach it. Now, our faculties are not so trained

up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of

others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have

here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of

my own but the thread to tie them.

Certainly I have so far yielded to public opinion, that those borrowed

ornaments accompany me; but I do not mean that they shall cover me and

hide me; that is quite contrary to my design, who desire to make a show

of nothing but what is my own, and what is my own by nature; and had I

taken my own advice, I had at all hazards spoken purely alone, I more and

more load myself every day,

[In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very

few quotations. These became more numerous in the edition of 1588;

but the multitude of classical texts which at times encumber

Montaigne’s text, only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595, he

had made these collections in the four last years of his life, as an

amusement of his “idleness.”--Le Clerc. They grow, however, more

sparing in the Third Book.]

beyond my purpose and first method, upon the account of idleness and the

humour of the age. If it misbecome me, as I believe it does, ‘tis no

matter; it may be of use to some others. Such there are who quote Plato

and Homer, who never saw either of them; and I also have taken things out

of places far enough distant from their source. Without pains and

without learning, having a thousand volumes about me in the place where I

write, I can presently borrow, if I please, from a dozen such

scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith

to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy; there needs no more but a

preliminary epistle of a German to stuff me with quotations. And so it

is we go in quest of a tickling story to cheat the foolish world. These

lumber pies of commonplaces, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are

of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not

to direct us: a ridiculous fruit of learning, that Socrates so pleasantly

discusses against Euthydemus. I have seen books made of things that were

never either studied or understood; the author committing to several of

his learned friends the examination of this and t’other matter to compile

it, contenting himself, for his share, with having projected the design,

and by his industry to have tied together this faggot of unknown

provisions; the ink and paper, at least, are his. This is to buy or

borrow a book, and not to make one; ‘tis to show men not that he can make

a book, but that, whereof they may be in doubt, he cannot make one.

A president, where I was, boasted that he had amassed together two

hundred and odd commonplaces in one of his judgments; in telling which,

he deprived himself of the glory he had got by it: in my opinion, a

pusillanimous and absurd vanity for such a subject and such a person.

I do the contrary; and amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can

steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service; at the hazard

of having it said that ‘tis for want of understanding its natural use;

I give it some particular touch of my own hand, to the end it may not be

so absolutely foreign. These set their thefts in show and value

themselves upon them, and so have more credit with the laws than I have:

we naturalists I think that there is a great and incomparable preference

in the honour of invention over that of allegation.

If I would have spoken by learning, I had spoken sooner; I had written of

the time nearer to my studies, when I had more wit and better memory, and

should sooner have trusted to the vigour of that age than of this, would

I have made a business of writing. And what if this gracious favour

--[His acquaintance with Mademoiselle de Gournay.]--which Fortune has

lately offered me upon the account of this work, had befallen me in that

time of my life, instead of this, wherein ‘tis equally desirable to

possess, soon to be lost! Two of my acquaintance, great men in this

faculty, have, in my opinion, lost half, in refusing to publish at forty

years old, that they might stay till threescore. Maturity has its

defects as well as green years, and worse; and old age is as unfit for

this kind of business as any other. He who commits his decrepitude to

the press plays the fool if he think to squeeze anything out thence that

does not relish of dreaming, dotage, and drivelling; the mind grows

costive and thick in growing old. I deliver my ignorance in pomp and

state, and my learning meagrely and poorly; this accidentally and

accessorily, that principally and expressly; and write specifically of

nothing but nothing, nor of any science but of that inscience. I have

chosen a time when my life, which I am to give an account of, lies wholly

before me; what remains has more to do with death; and of my death

itself, should I find it a prating death, as others do, I would willingly

give an account at my departure.

Socrates was a perfect exemplar in all great qualities, and I am vexed

that he had so deformed a face and body as is said, and so unsuitable to

the beauty of his soul, himself being so amorous and such an admirer of

beauty: Nature did him wrong. There is nothing more probable than the

conformity and relation of the body to the soul:

“Ipsi animi magni refert, quali in corpore locati sint: multo enim a

corpore existunt, qux acuant mentem: multa qua obtundant;”

[“It is of great consequence in what bodies minds are placed, for

many things spring from the body that may sharpen the mind, and many

that may blunt it.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 33.]

this refers to an unnatural ugliness and deformity of limbs; but we call

ugliness also an unseemliness at first sight, which is principally lodged

in the face, and disgusts us on very slight grounds: by the complexion, a

spot, a rugged countenance, for some reasons often wholly inexplicable,

in members nevertheless of good symmetry and perfect. The deformity,

that clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boetie, was of this predicament:

that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most

imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little

certainty in the opinion of men. The other, which is never properly

called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in. Not every

shoe of smooth shining leather, but every shoe well-made, shews the shape

of the foot within. As Socrates said of his, it betrayed equal ugliness

in his soul, had he not corrected it by education; but in saying so, I

hold he was in jest, as his custom was; never so excellent a soul formed

itself.

I cannot often enough repeat how great an esteem I have for beauty, that

potent and advantageous quality; he (La Boetie) called it “a short

tyranny,” and Plato, “the privilege of nature.” We have nothing that

excels it in reputation; it has the first place in the commerce of men;

it presents itself in the front; seduces and prepossesses our judgments

with great authority and wonderful impression. Phryne had lost her cause

in the hands of an excellent advocate, if, opening her robe, she had not

corrupted her judges by the lustre of her beauty. And I find that Cyrus,

Alexander, and Caesar, the three masters of the world, never neglected

beauty in their greatest affairs; no more did the first Scipio. The same

word in Greek signifies both fair and good; and the Holy Word often says

good when it means fair: I should willingly maintain the priority in good

things, according to the song that Plato calls an idle thing, taken out

of some ancient poet: “health, beauty, riches.” Aristotle says that the

right of command appertains to the beautiful; and that, when there is a

person whose beauty comes near the images of the gods, veneration is

equally due to him. To him who asked why people oftener and longer

frequent the company of handsome persons: “That question,” said he, “is

only to be asked by the blind.” Most of the philosophers, and the

greatest, paid for their schooling, and acquired wisdom by the favour and

mediation of their beauty. Not only in the men that serve me, but also

in the beasts, I consider it within two fingers’ breadth of goodness.

And yet I fancy that those features and moulds of face, and those

lineaments, by which men guess at our internal complexions and our

fortunes to come, is a thing that does not very directly and simply lie

under the chapter of beauty and deformity, no more than every good odour

and serenity of air promises health, nor all fog and stink infection in a

time of pestilence. Such as accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty

by their manners, do not always hit right; for, in a face which is none

of the best, there may dwell some air of probity and trust; as, on the

contrary, I have read, betwixt two beautiful eyes, menaces of a dangerous

and malignant nature. There are favourable physiognomies, so that in a

crowd of victorious enemies, you shall presently choose, amongst men you

never saw before, one rather than another to whom to surrender, and with

whom to intrust your life; and yet not properly upon the consideration of

beauty.

A person’s look is but a feeble warranty; and yet it is something

considerable too; and if I had to lash them, I would most severely

scourge the wicked ones who belie and betray the promises that nature has

planted in their foreheads; I should with greater severity punish malice

under a mild and gentle aspect. It seems as if there were some lucky and

some unlucky faces; and I believe there is some art in distinguishing

affable from merely simple faces, severe from rugged, malicious from

pensive, scornful from melancholic, and such other bordering qualities.

There are beauties which are not only haughty, but sour, and others that

are not only gentle, but more than that, insipid; to prognosticate from

them future events is a matter that I shall leave undecided.

I have, as I have said elsewhere as to my own concern, simply and

implicitly embraced this ancient rule, “That we cannot fail in following

Nature,” and that the sovereign precept is to conform ourselves to her.

I have not, as Socrates did, corrected my natural composition by the

force of reason, and have not in the least disturbed my inclination by

art; I have let myself go as I came: I contend not; my two principal

parts live, of their own accord, in peace and good intelligence, but my

nurse’s milk, thank God, was tolerably wholesome and good. Shall I say

this by the way, that I see in greater esteem than ‘tis worth, and in use

solely among ourselves, a certain image of scholastic probity, a slave to

precepts, and fettered with hope and fear? I would have it such as that

laws and religions should not make, but perfect and authorise it; that

finds it has wherewithal to support itself without help, born and rooted

in us from the seed of universal reason, imprinted in every man by

nature. That reason which strengthens Socrates from his vicious bend

renders him obedient to the gods and men of authority in his city:

courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal, but because he is

mortal. ‘Tis a doctrine ruinous to all government, and much more hurtful

than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that a religious

belief is alone sufficient, and without conduct, to satisfy the divine

justice. Use demonstrates to us a vast distinction betwixt devotion and

conscience.

I have a favourable aspect, both in form and in interpretation:

“Quid dixi, habere me? imo habui, Chreme.”

[“What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had.”

--Terence, Heaut., act i., sec. 2, v. 42.]

“Heu! tantum attriti corporis ossa vides;”

[“Alas! of a worn body thou seest only the bones”]

and that makes a quite contrary show to that of Socrates. It has often

befallen me, that upon the mere credit of my presence and air, persons

who had no manner of knowledge of me have put a very great confidence in

me, whether in their own affairs or mine; and I have in foreign parts

thence obtained singular and rare favours. But the two following

examples are, peradventure, worth particular relation. A certain person

planned to surprise my house and me in it; his scheme was to come to my

gates alone, and to be importunate to be let in. I knew him by name,

and had fair reason to repose confidence in him, as being my neighbour

and something related to me. I caused the gates to be opened to him,

as I do to every one. There I found him, with every appearance of alarm,

his horse panting and very tired. He entertained me with this story:

“That, about half a league off, he had met with a certain enemy of his,

whom I also knew, and had heard of their quarrel; that his enemy had

given him a very brisk chase, and that having been surprised in disorder,

and his party being too weak, he had fled to my gates for refuge;

and that he was in great trouble for his followers, whom (he said) he

concluded to be all either dead or taken.” I innocently did my best to

comfort, assure, and refresh him. Shortly after came four or five of his

soldiers, who presented themselves in the same countenance and affright,

to get in too; and after them more, and still more, very well mounted and

armed, to the number of five-and-twenty or thirty, pretending that they

had the enemy at their heels. This mystery began a little to awaken my

suspicion; I was not ignorant what an age I lived in, how much my house

might be envied, and I had several examples of others of my acquaintance

to whom a mishap of this sort had happened. But thinking there was

nothing to be got by having begun to do a courtesy, unless I went through

with it, and that I could not disengage myself from them without spoiling

all, I let myself go the most natural and simple way, as I always do, and

invited them all to come in. And in truth I am naturally very little

inclined to suspicion and distrust; I willingly incline towards excuse

and the gentlest interpretation; I take men according to the common

order, and do not more believe in those perverse and unnatural

inclinations, unless convinced by manifest evidence, than I do in

monsters and miracles; and I am, moreover, a man who willingly commit

myself to Fortune, and throw myself headlong into her arms; and I have

hitherto found more reason to applaud than to blame myself for so doing,

having ever found her more discreet about, and a greater friend to, my

affairs than I am myself. There are some actions in my life whereof the

conduct may justly be called difficult, or, if you please, prudent; of

these, supposing the third part to have been my own, doubtless the other

two-thirds were absolutely hers. We make, methinks, a mistake in that we

do not enough trust Heaven with our affairs, and pretend to more from our

own conduct than appertains to us; and therefore it is that our designs

so often miscarry. Heaven is jealous of the extent that we attribute to

the right of human prudence above its own, and cuts it all the shorter by

how much the more we amplify it. The last comers remained on horseback

in my courtyard, whilst their leader, who was with me in the parlour,

would not have his horse put up in the stable, saying he should

immediately retire, so soon as he had news of his men. He saw himself

master of his enterprise, and nothing now remained but its execution.

He has since several times said (for he was not ashamed to tell the story

himself) that my countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out

of his hands. He again mounted his horse; his followers, who had their

eyes intent upon him, to see when he would give the signal, being very

much astonished to find him come away and leave his prey behind him.

Another time, relying upon some truce just published in the army, I took

a journey through a very ticklish country. I had not ridden far, but I

was discovered, and two or three parties of horse, from various places,

were sent out to seize me; one of them overtook me on the third day, and

I was attacked by fifteen or twenty gentlemen in vizors, followed at a

distance by a band of foot-soldiers. I was taken, withdrawn into the

thick of a neighbouring forest, dismounted, robbed, my trunks rifled, my

money-box taken, and my horses and equipage divided amongst new masters.

We had, in this copse, a very long contest about my ransom, which they

set so high, that it was manifest that I was not known to them. They

were, moreover, in a very great debate about my life; and, in truth,

there were various circumstances that clearly showed the danger I was in:

“Tunc animis opus, AEnea, tunc pectore firmo.”

[“Then, AEneas, there is need of courage, of a firm heart.”

--AEneid, vi. 261.]

I still insisted upon the truce, too willing they should have the gain of

what they had already taken from me, which was not to be despised,

without promise of any other ransom. After two or three hours that we

had been in this place, and that they had mounted me upon a horse that

was not likely to run from them, and committed me to the guard of fifteen

or twenty harquebusiers, and dispersed my servants to others, having

given order that they should carry us away prisoners several ways, and I

being already got some two or three musket-shots from the place,

“Jam prece Pollucis, jam Castoris, implorata,”

[“By a prayer addressed now to Pollux, now to Castor.”

--Catullus, lxvi. 65.]

behold a sudden and unexpected alteration; I saw the chief return to me

with gentler language, making search amongst the troopers for my

scattered property, and causing as much as could be recovered to be

restored to me, even to my money-box; but the best present they made was

my liberty, for the rest did not much concern me at that time. The true

cause of so sudden a change, and of this reconsideration, without any

apparent impulse, and of so miraculous a repentance, in such a time, in a

planned and deliberate enterprise, and become just by usage (for, at the

first dash, I plainly confessed to them of what party I was, and whither

I was going), truly, I do not yet rightly understand. The most prominent

amongst them, who pulled off his vizor and told me his name, repeatedly

told me at the time, over and over again, that I owed my deliverance to

my countenance, and the liberty and boldness of my speech, that rendered

me unworthy of such a misadventure, and should secure me from its

repetition. ‘Tis possible that the Divine goodness willed to make use of

this vain instrument for my preservation; and it, moreover, defended me

the next day from other and worse ambushes, of which these my assailants

had given me warning. The last of these two gentlemen is yet living

himself to tell the story; the first was killed not long ago.

If my face did not answer for me, if men did not read in my eyes and in

my voice the innocence of intention, I had not lived so long without

quarrels and without giving offence, seeing the indiscreet whatever comes

into my head, and to judge so rashly of things. This way may, with

reason, appear uncivil, and ill adapted to our way of conversation; but

I have never met with any who judged it outrageous or malicious, or that

took offence at my liberty, if he had it from my own mouth; words

repeated have another kind of sound and sense. Nor do I hate any person;

and I am so slow to offend, that I cannot do it, even upon the account of

reason itself; and when occasion has required me to sentence criminals,

I have rather chosen to fail in point of justice than to do it:

“Ut magis peccari nolim, quam satis animi

ad vindicanda peccata habeam.”

[“So that I had rather men should not commit faults than that I

should have sufficient courage to condemn them.”---Livy, xxxix. 21.]

Aristotle, ‘tis said, was reproached for having been too merciful to a

wicked man: “I was indeed,” said he, “merciful to the man, but not to his

wickedness.” Ordinary judgments exasperate themselves to punishment by

the horror of the fact: but it cools mine; the horror of the first murder

makes me fear a second; and the deformity of the first cruelty makes me

abhor all imitation of it.’ That may be applied to me, who am but a

Squire of Clubs, which was said of Charillus, king of Sparta: “He cannot

be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked.” Or thus--for

Plutarch delivers it both these ways, as he does a thousand other things,

variously and contradictorily--“He must needs be good, because he is so

even to the wicked.” Even as in lawful actions I dislike to employ

myself when for such as are displeased at it; so, to say the truth, in

unlawful things I do not make conscience enough of employing myself when

it is for such as are willing.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:

A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may

A person’s look is but a feeble warranty

Accept all things we are not able to refute

Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy

Advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice

Apt to promise something less than what I am able to do

As if anything were so common as ignorance

Authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses

Best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd

Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise

Books of things that were never either studied or understood

Condemn the opposite affirmation equally

Courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal--Socrates

Death conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss

Decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter”

Deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation

Enters lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it

Establish this proposition by authority and huffing

Extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question

Fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand

Fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents

Hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions

Haste trips up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself

He cannot be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked

He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course

“How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”

How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out

I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish

I am no longer in condition for any great change

I am not to be cuffed into belief

I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable

I do not judge opinions by years

I ever justly feared to raise my head too high

I would as willingly be lucky as wise

If I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it

If they hear no noise, they think men sleep

Impose them upon me as infallible

Inconveniences that moderation brings (in civil war)

Lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself

Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown

“Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.”--Seneca

Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation

Men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions

Merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness--Aristotle

Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me

My humour is no friend to tumult

Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own

Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred

Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding

Number of fools so much exceeds the wise

Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust

Others adore all of their own side

Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law

Prepare ourselves against the preparations of death

Profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit

Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams

Reasons often anticipate the effect

Refusin to justify, excuse, or explain myself

Remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest

Restoring what has been lent us, wit usury and accession

Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow

Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle

Rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact

Suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession

Swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking

Taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance

The last informed is better persuaded than the first

The mind grows costive and thick in growing old

The particular error first makes the public error

Their souls seek repose in agitation

They gently name them, so they patiently endure them (diseases)

Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile

Threats of the day of judgment

Tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance--Augustine

Tis no matter; it may be of use to some others

To forbear doing is often as generous as to do

To kill men, a clear and strong light is required

Too contemptible to be punished

True liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself

Vast distinction betwixt devotion and conscience

We have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death

What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had

Who discern no riches but in pomp and show

Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it

Would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead

Wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud

Yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 19.

XIII. Of Experience.

CHAPTER XIII

OF EXPERIENCE

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways

that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ

experience,

“Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,

Exemplo monstrante viam,”

[“By various trials experience created art, example shewing the

way.”--Manilius, i. 59.]

which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing

that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.

Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience

has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events

is unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality so

universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both the

Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,

employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at

Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well

that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell

which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive

at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully

polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not

distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance

does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has

obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the

multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them

their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and

latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but

fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling

us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find

the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than

to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in

commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for we

have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and

more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of

Epicurus:

“Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus.”

[“As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by

laws.”--Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]

and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judges

that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What have

our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular

cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This number

holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human

actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the

variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will

still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that,

in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall

so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with

it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will

require a diverse judgment. There is little relation betwixt our

actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws;

the most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple

and general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all

than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.

Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make ourselves;

witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the state wherein

we see nations live who have no other. Some there are, who for their

only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains,

to determine their cause; and others who, on their market day, choose out

some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their controversies. What

danger would there be that the wisest amongst us should so determine

ours, according to occurrences and at sight, without obligation of

example and consequence? For every foot its own shoe. King Ferdinand,

sending colonies to the Indies, wisely provided that they should not

carry along with them any students of jurisprudence, for fear lest suits

should get footing in that new world, as being a science in its own

nature, breeder of altercation and division; judging with Plato, “that

lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country.”

Whence does it come to pass that our common language, so easy for all

other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts?

and that he who so clearly expresses himself in whatever else he speaks

or writes, cannot find in these any way of declaring himself that does

not fall into doubt and contradiction? if it be not that the princes of

that art, applying themselves with a peculiar attention to cull out

portentous words and to contrive artificial sentences, have so weighed

every syllable, and so thoroughly sifted every sort of quirking

connection that they are now confounded and entangled in the infinity of

figures and minute divisions, and can no more fall within any rule or

prescription, nor any certain intelligence:

“Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est.”

[“Whatever is beaten into powder is undistinguishable (confused).”

--Seneca, Ep., 89.]

As you see children trying to bring a mass of quicksilver to a certain

number of parts, the more they press and work it and endeavour to reduce

it to their own will, the more they irritate the liberty of this generous

metal; it evades their endeavour and sprinkles itself into so many

separate bodies as frustrate all reckoning; so is it here, for in

subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doubts; they

put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties, and

lengthen and disperse them. In sowing and retailing questions they make

the world fructify and increase in uncertainties and disputes, as the

earth is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep.

“Difficultatem facit doctrina.”

[“Learning (Doctrine) begets difficulty.”

--Quintilian, Insat. Orat., x. 3.]

We doubted of Ulpian, and are still now more perplexed with Bartolus and

Baldus. We should efface the trace of this innumerable diversity of

opinions; not adorn ourselves with it, and fill posterity with crotchets.

I know not what to say to it; but experience makes it manifest, that so

many interpretations dissipate truth and break it. Aristotle wrote to be

understood; if he could not do this, much less will another that is not

so good at it; and a third than he, who expressed his own thoughts. We

open the matter, and spill it in pouring out: of one subject we make a

thousand, and in multiplying and subdividing them, fall again into the

infinity of atoms of Epicurus. Never did two men make the same judgment

of the same thing; and ‘tis impossible to find two opinions exactly

alike, not only in several men, but in the same man, at diverse hours.

I often find matter of doubt in things of which the commentary has

disdained to take notice; I am most apt to stumble in an even country,

like some horses that I have known, that make most trips in the smoothest

way.

Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there’s

no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies

itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation.

The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and

perplexed than he found it. When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves:

“This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it”? This

is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite

doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find

any end of the need of interpretating? is there, for all that, any

progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any

fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in

its first infancy? On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we

can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and

barriers. Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does

nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and

perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;

“Mus in pice.”--[“A mouse in a pitch barrel.”]--It thinks it discovers

at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary

truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and

new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with

the motion: not much unlike AEsop’s dogs, that seeing something like a

dead body floating in the sea, and not being able to approach it, set to

work to drink the water and lay the passage dry, and so choked

themselves. To which what one Crates’ said of the writings of Heraclitus

falls pat enough, “that they required a reader who could swim well,” so

that the depth and weight of his learning might not overwhelm and stifle

him. ‘Tis nothing but particular weakness that makes us content with

what others or ourselves have found out in this chase after knowledge:

one of better understanding will not rest so content; there is always

room for one to follow, nay, even for ourselves; and another road; there

is no end of our inquisitions; our end is in the other world. ‘Tis a

sign either that the mind has grown shortsighted when it is satisfied, or

that it has got weary. No generous mind can stop in itself; it will

still tend further and beyond its power; it has sallies beyond its

effects; if it do not advance and press forward, and retire, and rush and

wheel about, ‘tis but half alive; its pursuits are without bound or

method; its aliment is admiration, the chase, ambiguity, which Apollo

sufficiently declared in always speaking to us in a double, obscure, and

oblique sense: not feeding, but amusing and puzzling us. ‘Tis an

irregular and perpetual motion, without model and without aim; its

inventions heat, pursue, and interproduce one another:

Estienne de la Boetie; thus translated by Cotton:

“So in a running stream one wave we see

After another roll incessantly,

And as they glide, each does successively

Pursue the other, each the other fly

By this that’s evermore pushed on, and this

By that continually preceded is:

The water still does into water swill,

Still the same brook, but different water still.”

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things,

and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but

comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of

authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most

reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not

the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon

one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the

third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it

comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than

merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but

one.

How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to

make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that

it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the

frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their

hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity

wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of

maternal love; as Aristotle, whose valuing and undervaluing himself often

spring from the same air of arrogance. My own excuse is, that I ought in

this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically

of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme

turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.

I observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and disputes

about the doubt of his opinions, and more, than he himself raised upon

the Holy Scriptures. Our contest is verbal: I ask what nature is, what

pleasure, circle, and substitution are? the question is about words, and

is answered accordingly. A stone is a body; but if a man should further

urge: “And what is a body?”--“Substance”; “And what is substance?” and

so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his Calepin.

[Calepin (Ambrogio da Calepio), a famous lexicographer of the

fifteenth century. His Polyglot Dictionary became so famous, that

Calepin became a common appellation for a lexicon]

We exchange one word for another, and often for one less understood.

I better know what man is than I know what Animal is, or Mortal, or

Rational. To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; ‘tis the Hydra’s

head. Socrates asked Menon, “What virtue was.” “There is,” says Menon,

“the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private

person, of an old man and of a child.” “Very fine,” cried Socrates,

“we were in quest of one virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole

swarm.” We put one question, and they return us a whole hive. As no

event, no face, entirely resembles another, so do they not entirely

differ: an ingenious mixture of nature. If our faces were not alike, we

could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not unlike, we could

not distinguish one man from another; all things hold by some similitude;

every example halts, and the relation which is drawn from experience is

always faulty and imperfect. Comparisons are ever-coupled at one end or

other: so do the laws serve, and are fitted to every one of our affairs,

by some wrested, biassed, and forced interpretation.

Since the ethic laws, that concern the particular duty of every one in

himself, are so hard to be framed, as we see they are, ‘tis no wonder if

those which govern so many particulars are much more so. Do but consider

the form of this justice that governs us; ‘tis a true testimony of human

weakness, so full is it of error and contradiction. What we find to be

favour and severity in justice--and we find so much of them both, that I

know not whether the medium is as often met with are sickly and unjust

members of the very body and essence of justice. Some country people

have just brought me news in great haste, that they presently left in a

forest of mine a man with a hundred wounds upon him, who was yet

breathing, and begged of them water for pity’s sake, and help to carry

him to some place of relief; they tell me they durst not go near him, but

have run away, lest the officers of justice should catch them there; and

as happens to those who are found near a murdered person, they should be

called in question about this accident, to their utter ruin, having

neither money nor friends to defend their innocence. What could I have

said to these people? ‘Tis certain that this office of humanity would

have brought them into trouble.

How many innocent people have we known that have been punished, and this

without the judge’s fault; and how many that have not arrived at our

knowledge? This happened in my time: certain men were condemned to die

for a murder committed; their sentence, if not pronounced, at least

determined and concluded on. The judges, just in the nick, are informed

by the officers of an inferior court hard by, that they have some men in

custody, who have directly confessed the murder, and made an indubitable

discovery of all the particulars of the fact. Yet it was gravely

deliberated whether or not they ought to suspend the execution of the

sentence already passed upon the first accused: they considered the

novelty of the example judicially, and the consequence of reversing

judgments; that the sentence was passed, and the judges deprived of

repentance; and in the result, these poor devils were sacrificed by the

forms of justice. Philip, or some other, provided against a like

inconvenience after this manner. He had condemned a man in a great fine

towards another by an absolute judgment. The truth some time after being

discovered, he found that he had passed an unjust sentence. On one side

was the reason of the cause; on the other side, the reason of the

judicial forms: he in some sort satisfied both, leaving the sentence in

the state it was, and out of his own purse recompensing the condemned

party. But he had to do with a reparable affair; my men were irreparably

hanged. How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes

themselves?

All which makes me remember the ancient opinions, “That ‘tis of necessity

a man must do wrong by retail who will do right in gross; and injustice

in little things, who would come to do justice in great: that human

justice is formed after the model of physic, according to which, all that

is useful is also just and honest: and of what is held by the Stoics,

that Nature herself proceeds contrary to justice in most of her works:

and of what is received by the Cyrenaics, that there is nothing just of

itself, but that customs and laws make justice: and what the Theodorians

held that theft, sacrilege, and all sorts of uncleanness, are just in a

sage, if he knows them to be profitable to him.” There is no remedy: I

am in the same case that Alcibiades was, that I will never, if I can help

it, put myself into the hands of a man who may determine as to my head,

where my life and honour shall more depend upon the skill and diligence

of my attorney than on my own innocence. I would venture myself with

such justice as would take notice of my good deeds, as well as my ill;

where I had as much to hope as to fear: indemnity is not sufficient pay

to a man who does better than not to do amiss. Our justice presents to

us but one hand, and that the left hand, too; let him be who he may, he

shall be sure to come off with loss.

In China, of which kingdom the government and arts, without commerce with

or knowledge of ours, surpass our examples in several excellent features,

and of which the history teaches me how much greater and more various the

world is than either the ancients or we have been able to penetrate, the

officers deputed by the prince to visit the state of his provinces, as

they punish those who behave themselves ill in their charge, so do they

liberally reward those who have conducted themselves better than the

common sort, and beyond the necessity of their duty; these there present

themselves, not only to be approved but to get; not simply to be paid,

but to have a present made to them.

No judge, thank God, has ever yet spoken to me in the quality of a judge,

upon any account whatever, whether my own or that of a third party,

whether criminal or civil; nor no prison has ever received me, not even

to walk there. Imagination renders the very outside of a jail

displeasing to me; I am so enamoured of liberty, that should I be

interdicted the access to some corner of the Indies, I should live a

little less at my ease; and whilst I can find earth or air open

elsewhere, I shall never lurk in any place where I must hide myself.

My God! how ill should I endure the condition wherein I see so many

people, nailed to a corner of the kingdom, deprived of the right to enter

the principal cities and courts, and the liberty of the public roads,

for having quarrelled with our laws. If those under which I live should

shake a finger at me by way of menace, I would immediately go seek out

others, let them be where they would. All my little prudence in the

civil wars wherein we are now engaged is employed that they may not

hinder my liberty of going and coming.

Now, the laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they

are laws; ‘tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no

other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools,

still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but

always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much,

nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws. Whoever obeys

them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought. Our

French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a

helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their

dispensation and execution: the command is so perplexed and inconstant,

that it in some sort excuses alike disobedience and defect in the

interpretation, the administration and the observation of it. What fruit

then soever we may extract from experience, that will little advantage

our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so

little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us,

and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need.

I study myself more than any other subject; ‘tis my metaphysic, my

physic:

“Quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum:

Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit: unde coactis

Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit

Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet

Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua;

Sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces....”

[“What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world? whence

rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she? how is it that her horns

are contracted and reopen? whence do winds prevail on the main?

what does the east wind court with its blasts? and whence are the

clouds perpetually supplied with water? is a day to come which may

undermine the world?”--Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]

“Quaerite, quos agitat mundi labor.”

[“Ask whom the cares of the world trouble”--Lucan, i. 417.]

In this universality, I suffer myself to be ignorantly and negligently

led by the general law of the world: I shall know it well enough when I

feel it; my learning cannot make it alter its course; it will not change

itself for me; ‘tis folly to hope it, and a greater folly to concern

one’s self about it, seeing it is necessarily alike public and common.

The goodness and capacity of the governor ought absolutely to discharge

us of all care of the government: philosophical inquisitions and

contemplations serve for no other use but to increase our curiosity.

The philosophers; with great reason, send us back to the rules of nature;

but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify

them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a

complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a

subject. As she has given us feet to walk with, so has she given us

prudence to guide us in life: not so ingenious, robust, and pompous a

prudence as that of their invention; but yet one that is easy, quiet, and

salutary, and that very well performs what the other promises, in him who

has the good luck to know how to employ it sincerely and regularly, that

is to say, according to nature. The most simply to commit one’s self to

nature is to do it most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome

pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered

head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero. Of the

experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but

a good scholar: whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger,

and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity

of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred

against it; whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that

have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from

one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes,

and the knowledge of his condition. The life of Caesar has no greater

example for us than our own: though popular and of command, ‘tis still a

life subject to all human accidents. Let us but listen to it; we apply

to ourselves all whereof we have principal need; whoever shall call to

memory how many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment,

is he not a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it? When I find

myself convinced, by the reason of another, of a false opinion, I do not

so much learn what he has said to me that is new and the particular

ignorance--that would be no great acquisition--as, in general, I learn my

own debility and the treachery of my understanding, whence I extract the

reformation of the whole mass. In all my other errors I do the same, and

find from this rule great utility to life; I regard not the species and

individual as a stone that I have stumbled at; I learn to suspect my

steps throughout, and am careful to place them right. To learn that a

man has said or done a foolish thing is nothing: a man must learn that he

is nothing but a fool, a much more ample, and important instruction. The

false steps that my memory has so often made, even then when it was most

secure and confident of itself, are not idly thrown away; it vainly

swears and assures me I shake my ears; the first opposition that is made

to its testimony puts me into suspense, and I durst not rely upon it in

anything of moment, nor warrant it in another person’s concerns: and were

it not that what I do for want of memory, others do more often for want

of good faith, I should always, in matter of fact, rather choose to take

the truth from another’s mouth than from my own. If every one would pry

into the effects and circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I

have done into those which I am most subject to, he would see them

coming, and would a little break their impetuosity and career; they do

not always seize us on a sudden; there is threatening and degrees

“Fluctus uti primo coepit cum albescere vento,

Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas

Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad aethera fundo.”

[“As with the first wind the sea begins to foam, and swells, thence

higher swells, and higher raises the waves, till the ocean rises

from its depths to the sky.”--AEneid, vii. 528.]

Judgment holds in me a magisterial seat; at least it carefully endeavours

to make it so: it leaves my appetites to take their own course, hatred

and friendship, nay, even that I bear to myself, without change or

corruption; if it cannot reform the other parts according to its own

model, at least it suffers not itself to be corrupted by them, but plays

its game apart.

The advice to every one, “to know themselves,” should be of important

effect, since that god of wisdom and light’ caused it to be written on

the front of his temple,--[At Delphi]--as comprehending all he had to

advise us. Plato says also, that prudence is no other thing than the

execution of this ordinance; and Socrates minutely verifies it in

Xenophon. The difficulties and obscurity are not discerned in any

science but by those who are got into it; for a certain degree of

intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not, and we

must push against a door to know whether it be bolted against us or no:

whence this Platonic subtlety springs, that “neither they who know are to

enquire, forasmuch as they know; nor they who do not know, forasmuch as

to inquire they must know what they inquire of.” So in this, “of knowing

a man’s self,” that every man is seen so resolved and satisfied with

himself, that every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent,

signifies that every one knows nothing about the matter; as Socrates

gives Euthydemus to understand. I, who profess nothing else, therein

find so infinite a depth and variety, that all the fruit I have reaped

from my learning serves only to make me sensible how much I have to

learn. To my weakness, so often confessed, I owe the propension I have

to modesty, to the obedience of belief prescribed me, to a constant

coldness and moderation of opinions, and a hatred of that troublesome and

wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself, the capital

enemy of discipline and truth. Do but hear them domineer; the first

fopperies they utter, ‘tis in the style wherewith men establish religions

and laws:

“Nihil est turpius, quam cognitioni et perceptions

assertionem approbationemque praecurrere.”

[“Nothing is worse than that assertion and decision should precede

knowledge and perception.”--Cicero, Acad., i. 13.]

Aristarchus said that anciently there were scarce seven sages to be found

in the world, and in his time scarce so many fools: have not we more

reason than he to say so in this age of ours? Affirmation and obstinacy

are express signs of want of wit. This fellow may have knocked his nose

against the ground a hundred times in a day, yet he will be at his Ergo’s

as resolute and sturdy as before. You would say he had had some new soul

and vigour of understanding infused into him since, and that it happened

to him, as to that ancient son of the earth, who took fresh courage and

vigour by his fall;

“Cui cum tetigere parentem,

jam defecta vigent renovata robore membra:”

[“Whose broken limbs, when they touched his mother earth,

immediately new force acquired.”--Lucan, iv. 599.]

does not this incorrigible coxcomb think that he assumes a new

understanding by undertaking a new dispute? ‘Tis by my own experience

that I accuse human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the surest part

of the world’s school. Such as will not conclude it in themselves, by so

vain an example as mine, or their own, let them believe it from Socrates,

the master of masters; for the philosopher Antisthenes said to his

disciples, “Let us go and hear Socrates; there I will be a pupil with you”;

and, maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, “that virtue was

sufficient to make a life completely happy, having no need of any other

thing whatever”; except of the force of Socrates, added he.

That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits rile

to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I

speak better and with better excuse. I happen very often more exactly to

see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves:

I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have

given them warning of themselves. By having from my infancy been

accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired

a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once interit upon

it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours,

or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me. I study all,

both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow. Also in my friends,

I discover by their productions their inward inclinations; not by

arranging this infinite variety of so diverse and unconnected actions

into certain species and chapters, and distinctly distributing my parcels

and divisions under known heads and classes;

“Sed neque quam multae species, nec nomina quae sint,

Est numerus.”

[“But neither can we enumerate how many kinds there what are their

names.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 103.]

The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by

piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present

mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by

disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in

gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common

souls as ours. Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every

piece keeps its place and bears its mark:

“Sola sapientia in se tota conversa est.”

[“Wisdom only is wholly within itself”--Cicero, De Fin., iii. 7.]

I leave it to artists, and I know not whether or no they will be able to

bring it about, in so perplexed, minute, and fortuitous a thing, to

marshal into distinct bodies this infinite diversity of faces, to settle

our inconstancy, and set it in order. I do not only find it hard to

piece our actions to one another, but I moreover find it hard properly to

design each by itself by any principal quality, so ambiguous and variform

they are with diverse lights. That which is remarked for rare in

Perseus, king of Macedon, “that his mind, fixing itself to no one

condition, wandered in all sorts of living, and represented manners so

wild and erratic that it was neither known to himself or any other what

kind of man he was,” seems almost to fit all the world; and, especially,

I have seen another of his make, to whom I think this conclusion might

more properly be applied; no moderate settledness, still running headlong

from one extreme to another, upon occasions not to be guessed at; no line

of path without traverse and wonderful contrariety: no one quality simple

and unmixed; so that the best guess men can one day make will be, that he

affected and studied to make himself known by being not to be known. A

man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as

there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who

hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship;

for ‘tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for

our own good. I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are

more than his good ones: Plato requires three things in him who will

examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, boldness.

I was sometimes asked, what I should have thought myself fit for, had any

one designed to make use of me, while I was of suitable years:

“Dum melior vires sanguis dabat, aemula necdum

Temporibus geminis canebat sparsa senectus:”

[“Whilst better blood gave me vigour, and before envious old age

whitened and thinned my temples.”--AEneid, V. 415.]

“for nothing,” said I; and I willingly excuse myself from knowing

anything which enslaves me to others. But I had told the truth to my

master,--[Was this Henri VI.? D.W.]--and had regulated his manners, if

he had so pleased, not in gross, by scholastic lessons, which I

understand not, and from which I see no true reformation spring in those

that do; but by observing them by leisure, at all opportunities, and

simply and naturally judging them as an eye-witness, distinctly one by

one; giving him to understand upon what terms he was in the common

opinion, in opposition to his flatterers. There is none of us who would

not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with

that sort of canaille. How, if Alexander, that great king and

philosopher, cannot defend himself from them!

I should have had fidelity, judgment, and freedom enough for that

purpose. It would be a nameless office, otherwise it would lose its

grace and its effect; and ‘tis a part that is not indifferently fit for

all men; for truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times

and indiscriminately; its use, noble as it is, has its circumspections

and limits. It often falls out, as the world goes, that a man lets it

slip into the ear of a prince, not only to no purpose, but moreover

injuriously and unjustly; and no man shall make me believe that a

virtuous remonstrance may not be viciously applied, and that the interest

of the substance is not often to give way to that of the form.

For such a purpose, I would have a man who is content with his own

fortune:

“Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit,”

[“Who is pleased with what he is and desires nothing further.”

--Martial, x. ii, 18.]

and of moderate station; forasmuch as, on the one hand, he would not be

afraid to touch his master’s heart to the quick, for fear by that means

of losing his preferment: and, on the other hand, being of no high

quality, he would have more easy communication with all sorts of people.

I would have this office limited to only one person; for to allow the

privilege of his liberty and privacy to many, would beget an inconvenient

irreverence; and of that one, I would above all things require the

fidelity of silence.

A king is not to be believed when he brags of his constancy in standing

the shock of the enemy for his glory, if for his profit and amendment he

cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice, which has no other power

but to pinch his ear, the remainder of its effect being still in his own

hands. Now, there is no condition of men whatever who stand in so great

need of true and free advice and warning, as they do: they sustain a

public life, and have to satisfy the opinion of so many spectators, that,

as those about them conceal from them whatever should divert them from

their own way, they insensibly find themselves involved in the hatred and

detestation of their people, often upon occasions which they might have

avoided without any prejudice even of their pleasures themselves, had

they been advised and set right in time. Their favourites commonly have

more regard to themselves than to their master; and indeed it answers

with them, forasmuch as, in truth, most offices of real friendship, when

applied to the sovereign, are under a rude and dangerous hazard, so that

therein there is great need, not only of very great affection and

freedom, but of courage too.

In fine, all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a

register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness,

is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain; but as to

bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience than I,

who present it pure, and no way corrupted and changed by art or opinion.

Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in the subject of physic,

where reason wholly gives it place: Tiberius said that whoever had lived

twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for all things that were

hurtful or wholesome to him, and know how to order himself without

physic;

[All that Suetonius says in his Life of Tiberius is that this

emperor, after he was thirty years old, governed his health without

the aid of physicians; and what Plutarch tells us, in his essay on

the Rules and Precepts of Health, is that Tiberius said that the man

who, having attained sixty years, held out his pulse to a physician

was a fool.]

and he might have learned it of Socrates, who, advising his disciples to

be solicitous of their health as a chief study, added that it was hard if

a man of sense, having a care to his exercise and diet, did not better

know than any physician what was good or ill for him. And physic itself

professes always to have experience for the test of its operations: so

Plato had reason to say that, to be a right physician, it would be

necessary that he who would become such, should first himself have passed

through all the diseases he pretends to cure, and through all the

accidents and circumstances whereof he is to judge. ‘Tis but reason they

should get the pox, if they will know how to cure it; for my part,

I should put myself into such hands; the others but guide us, like him

who paints seas and rocks and ports sitting at table, and there makes the

model of a ship sailing in all security; but put him to the work itself,

he knows not at which end to begin. They make such a description of our

maladies as a town crier does of a lost horse or dog--such a color, such

a height, such an ear--but bring it to him and he knows it not, for all

that. If physic should one day give me some good and visible relief,

then truly I will cry out in good earnest:

“Tandem effcaci do manus scientiae.”

[“Show me and efficacious science, and I will take it by the hand.”

--Horace, xvii. I.]

The arts that promise to keep our bodies and souls in health promise a

great deal; but, withal, there are none that less keep their promise.

And, in our time, those who make profession of these arts amongst us,

less manifest the effects than any other sort of men; one may say of

them, at the most, that they sell medicinal drugs; but that they are

physicians, a man cannot say.

[The edition of 1588 adds: “Judging by themselves, and those

who are ruled by them.”]

I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that

has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster,

I have made the experiment. Here are some of the articles, as my memory

shall supply me with them; I have no custom that has not varied according

to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best

acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of

me.

My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the

same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both

conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or

less, according to my strength and appetite. My health is to maintain my

wonted state without disturbance. I see that sickness puts me off it on

one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off

on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.

I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the

use of things to which I have been so long accustomed. ‘Tis for custom

to give a form to a man’s life, such as it pleases him; she is all in all

in that: ‘tis the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best

pleases. How many nations, and but three steps from us, think the fear

of the night-dew, that so manifestly is hurtful to us, a ridiculous

fancy; and our own watermen and peasants laugh at it. You make a German

sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him

on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire. A Spanish

stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the

Swiss. A German made me very merry at Augsburg, by finding fault with

our hearths, by the same arguments which we commonly make use of in

decrying their stoves: for, to say the truth, the smothered heat, and

then the smell of that heated matter of which the fire is composed, very

much offend such as are not used to them; not me; and, indeed, the heat

being always equal, constant, and universal, without flame, without

smoke, and without the wind that comes down our chimneys, they may many

ways sustain comparison with ours. Why do we not imitate the Roman

architecture? for they say that anciently fires were not made in the

houses, but on the outside, and at the foot of them, whence the heat was

conveyed to the whole fabric by pipes contrived in the wall, which were

drawn twining about the rooms that were to be warmed: which I have seen

plainly described somewhere in Seneca. This German hearing me commend

the conveniences and beauties of his city, which truly deserves it, began

to compassionate me that I had to leave it; and the first inconvenience

he alleged to me was, the heaviness of head that the chimneys elsewhere

would bring upon me. He had heard some one make this complaint, and

fixed it upon us, being by custom deprived of the means of perceiving it

at home. All heat that comes from the fire weakens and dulls me. Evenus

said that fire was the best condiment of life: I rather choose any other

way of making myself warm.

We are afraid to drink our wines, when toward the bottom of the cask; in

Portugal those fumes are reputed delicious, and it is the beverage of

princes. In short, every nation has many customs and usages that are not

only unknown to other nations, but savage and miraculous in their sight.

What should we do with those people who admit of no evidence that is not

in print, who believe not men if they are not in a book, nor truth if it

be not of competent age? we dignify our fopperies when we commit them to

the press: ‘tis of a great deal more weight to say, “I have read such a

thing,” than if you only say, “I have heard such a thing.” But I, who no

more disbelieve a man’s mouth than his pen, and who know that men write

as indiscreetly as they speak, and who look upon this age as one that is

past, as soon quote a friend as Aulus Gelliusor Macrobius; and what I

have seen, as what they have written. And, as ‘tis held of virtue, that

it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth,

that for being older it is none the wiser. I often say, that it is mere

folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their

fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.

But is it not that we seek more honour from the quotation, than from the

truth of the matter in hand? As if it were more to the purpose to borrow

our proofs from the shops of Vascosan or Plantin, than from what is to be

seen in our own village; or else, indeed, that we have not the wit to

cull out and make useful what we see before us, and to judge of it

clearly enough to draw it into example: for if we say that we want

authority to give faith to our testimony, we speak from the purpose;

forasmuch as, in my opinion, of the most ordinary, common, and known

things, could we but find out their light, the greatest miracles of

nature might be formed, and the most wonderful examples, especially upon

the subject of human actions.

Now, upon this subject, setting aside the examples I have gathered from

books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argian, that he travelled

over the arid sands of Lybia without drinking: a gentleman, who has very

well behaved himself in several employments, said, in a place where I

was, that he had ridden from Madrid to Lisbon, in the heat of summer,

without any drink at all. He is very healthful and vigorous for his age,

and has nothing extraordinary in the use of his life, but this, to live

sometimes two or three months, nay, a whole year, as he has told me,

without drinking. He is sometimes thirsty, but he lets it pass over,

and he holds that it is an appetite which easily goes off of itself;

and he drinks more out of caprice than either for need or pleasure.

Here is another example: ‘tis not long ago that I found one of the

learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune,

studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with

tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence. He

told me, and Seneca almost says the same of himself, he made an

advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much

the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation,

and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself.

Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the

rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed

himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of

his studies. Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he

could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, “Why,” said he, “as

those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing

water.” I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily

discomposed; when ‘tis bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly

murders it.

Seneca in his youth having warmly espoused the example of Sextius, of

eating nothing that had died, for a whole year dispensed with such food,

and, as he said, with pleasure, and discontinued it that he might not be

suspected of taking up this rule from some new religion by which it was

prescribed: he adopted, in like manner, from the precepts of Attalus a

custom not to lie upon any sort of bedding that gave way under his

weight, and, even to his old age, made use of such as would not yield to

any pressure. What the usage of his time made him account roughness,

that of ours makes us look upon as effeminacy.

Do but observe the difference betwixt the way of living of my labourers

and my own; the Scythians and Indians have nothing more remote both from

my capacity and my form. I have picked up charity boys to serve me: who

soon after have quitted both my kitchen and livery, only that they might

return to their former course of life; and I found one afterwards,

picking mussels out of the sewer for his dinner, whom I could neither by

entreaties nor threats reclaim from the sweetness he found in indigence.

Beggars have their magnificences and delights, as well as the rich, and,

‘tis said, their dignities and polities. These are the effects of

custom; she can mould us, not only into what form she pleases (the sages

say we ought to apply ourselves to the best, which she will soon make

easy to us), but also to change and variation, which is the most noble

and most useful instruction of all she teaches us. The best of my bodily

conditions is that I am flexible and not very obstinate: I have

inclinations more my own and ordinary, and more agreeable than others;

but I am diverted from them with very little ado, and easily slip into a

contrary course. A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awaken his

vigour and to keep it from growing faint and rusty; and there is no

course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule

and discipline;

“Ad primum lapidem vectari quum placet, hora

Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli

Angulus, inspecta genesi, collyria quaerit;”

[“When he is pleased to have himself carried to the first milestone,

the hour is chosen from the almanac; if he but rub the corner of his

eye, his horoscope having been examined, he seeks the aid of

salves.”---Juvenal, vi. 576.]

he shall often throw himself even into excesses, if he will take my

advice; otherwise the least debauch will destroy him, and render him

troublesome and disagreeable in company. The worst quality in a

well-bred man is over-fastidiousness, and an obligation to a certain

particular way; and it is particular, if not pliable and supple. It is a

kind of reproach, not to be able, or not to dare, to do what we see those

about us do; let such as these stop at home. It is in every man

unbecoming, but in a soldier vicious and intolerable: who, as Philopcemen

said, ought to accustom himself to every variety and inequality of life.

Though I have been brought up, as much as was possible, to liberty and

independence, yet so it is that, growing old, and having by indifference

more settled upon certain forms (my age is now past instruction, and has

henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can),

custom has already, ere I was aware, so imprinted its character in me in

certain things, that I look upon it as a kind of excess to leave them

off; and, without a force upon myself, cannot sleep in the daytime, nor

eat between meals, nor breakfast, nor go to bed, without a great interval

betwixt eating and sleeping,--[Gastroesophogeal Reflux. D.W.]--as of

three hours after supper; nor get children but before I sleep, nor get

them standing; nor endure my own sweat; nor quench my thirst either with

pure water or pure wine; nor keep my head long bare, nor cut my hair

after dinner; and I should be as uneasy without my gloves as without my

shirt, or without washing when I rise from table or out of my bed; and I

could not lie without a canopy and curtains, as if they were essential

things. I could dine without a tablecloth, but without a clean napkin,

after the German fashion, very incommodiously; I foul them more than the

Germans or Italians do, and make but little use either of spoon or fork.

I complain that they did not keep up the fashion, begun after the example

of kings, to change our napkin at every service, as they do our plate.

We are told of that laborious soldier Marius that, growing old, he became

nice in his drink, and never drank but out of a particular cup of his own

I, in like manner, have suffered myself to fancy a certain form of

glasses, and not willingly to drink in common glasses, no more than from

a strange common hand: all metal offends me in comparison of a clear and

transparent matter: let my eyes taste, too, according to their capacity.

I owe several other such niceties to custom. Nature has also, on the

other side, helped me to some of hers: as not to be able to endure more

than two full meals in one day, without overcharging my stomach, nor a

total abstinence from one of those meals without filling myself with

wind, drying up my mouth, and dulling my appetite; the finding great

inconvenience from overmuch evening air; for of late years, in night

marches, which often happen to be all night long, after five or six hours

my stomach begins to be queasy, with a violent pain in my head, so that I

always vomit before the day can break. When the others go to breakfast,

I go to sleep; and when I rise, I am as brisk and gay as before. I had

always been told that the night dew never rises but in the beginning of

the night; but for some years past, long and familiar intercourse with

a lord, possessed with the opinion that the night dew is more sharp and

dangerous about the declining of the sun, an hour or two before it sets,

which he carefully avoids, and despises that of the night, he almost

impressed upon me, not so much his reasoning as his experiences. What,

shall mere doubt and inquiry strike our imagination, so as to change us?

Such as absolutely and on a sudden give way to these propensions, draw

total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who,

through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health

wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by

disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so

great utility. Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant

hours of the day! Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most

part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his

constitution, as Caesar did the falling sickness, by dint of contempt.

A man should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to

them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and

servitude are of profit.

Both kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too; public lives are

bound to ceremony; mine, that is obscure and private, enjoys all natural

dispensation; soldier and Gascon are also qualities a little subject to

indiscretion; wherefore I shall say of this act of relieving nature, that

it is desirable to refer it to certain prescribed and nocturnal hours,

and compel one’s self to this by custom, as I have done; but not to

subject one’s self, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular

convenience of place and seat for that purpose, and make it troublesome

by long sitting; and yet, in the fouler offices, is it not in some

measure excusable to require more care and cleanliness?

“Naturt homo mundum et elegans animal est.”

[“Man is by nature a clean and delicate creature.”--Seneca, Ep., 92.]

Of all the actions of nature, I am the most impatient of being

interrupted in that. I have seen many soldiers troubled with the

unruliness of their bellies; whereas mine and I never fail of our

punctual assignation, which is at leaping out of bed, if some

indispensable business or sickness does not molest us.

I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place

themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course

of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it

will, distempers and puts one out. Do you believe that chestnuts can

hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?

We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change

that the healthful cannot endure. Prescribe water to a Breton of

threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman

to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and

light:

“An vivere tanti est?

Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,

Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus. .

Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer

Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis.”

[“Is life worth so much? We are compelled to withhold the mind

from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we

cease to live . . . . Do I conceive that they still live, to

whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are

governed, is rendered oppressive?”

--Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]

If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare

patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting

off the use of life.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the

appetites that pressed upon me. I give great rein to my desires and

propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate

remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself. To be

subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two

evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the

remedy on the other. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us

rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure. The

world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is

not painful; it has great suspicion of facility. My appetite, in various

things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the

health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me

when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently

followed. Wine is hurtful to sick people, and ‘tis the first thing that

my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike.

Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me that

I eat with appetite and delight. I never received harm by any action

that was very pleasant to me; and accordingly have made all medicinal

conclusions largely give way to my pleasure; and I have, when I was

young,

“Quem circumcursans huc atque huc saepe Cupido

Fulgebat crocink splendidus in tunic.”

[“When Cupid, fluttering round me here and there, shone in his rich

purple mantle.”--Catullus, lxvi. 133.]

given myself the rein as licentiously and inconsiderately to the desire

that was predominant in me, as any other whomsoever:

“Et militavi non sine gloria;”

[“And I have played the soldier not ingloriously.”

--Horace, Od., iii. 26, 2.]

yet more in continuation and holding out, than in sally:

“Sex me vix memini sustinuisse vices.”

[“I can scarcely remember six bouts in one night”

--Ovid, Amor., iii. 7, 26.]

‘Tis certainly a misfortune and a miracle at once to confess at what a

tender age I first came under the subjection of love: it was, indeed, by

chance; for it was long before the years of choice or knowledge; I do not

remember myself so far back; and my fortune may well be coupled with that

of Quartilla, who could not remember when she was a maid:

“Inde tragus, celeresque pili, mirandaque matri

Barba meae.”

[“Thence the odour of the arm-pits, the precocious hair, and the

beard which astonished my mother.”--Martial, xi. 22, 7.]

Physicians modify their rules according to the violent longings that

happen to sick persons, ordinarily with good success; this great desire

cannot be imagined so strange and vicious, but that nature must have a

hand in it. And then how easy a thing is it to satisfy the fancy? In my

opinion; this part wholly carries it, at least, above all the rest. The

most grievous and ordinary evils are those that fancy loads us with; this

Spanish saying pleases me in several aspects:

“Defenda me Dios de me.”

[“God defend me from myself.”]

I am sorry when I am sick, that I have not some longing that might give

me the pleasure of satisfying it; all the rules of physic would hardly be

able to divert me from it. I do the same when I am well; I can see very

little more to be hoped or wished for. ‘Twere pity a man should be so

weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him.

The art of physic is not so fixed, that we need be without authority for

whatever we do; it changes according to climates and moons, according to

Fernel and to Scaliger.--[Physicians to Henry II.]--If your physician

does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such

and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that

shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and

opinions embraces all sorts and forms. I saw a miserable sick person

panting and burning for thirst, that he might be cured, who was

afterwards laughed at for his pains by another physician, who condemned

that advice as prejudicial to him: had he not tormented himself to good

purpose? There lately died of the stone a man of that profession, who

had made use of extreme abstinence to contend with his disease: his

fellow-physicians say that, on the contrary, this abstinence had dried

him up and baked the gravel in his kidneys.

I have observed, that both in wounds and sicknesses, speaking discomposes

and hurts me, as much as any irregularity I can commit. My voice pains

and tires me, for ‘tis loud and forced; so that when I have gone to a

whisper some great persons about affairs of consequence, they have often

desired me to moderate my voice.

This story is worth a diversion. Some one in a certain Greek school

speaking loud as I do, the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak

softly: “Tell him, then, he must send me,” replied the other, “the tone

he would have me speak in.” To which the other replied, “That he should

take the tone from the ears of him to whom he spake.” It was well said,

if it is to be understood: “Speak according to the affair you are

speaking about to your auditor,” for if it mean, “‘tis sufficient that he

hear you, or govern yourself by him,” I do not find it to be reason. The

tone and motion of my voice carries with it a great deal of the

expression and signification of my meaning, and ‘tis I who am to govern

it, to make myself understood: there is a voice to instruct, a voice to

flatter, and a voice to reprehend. I will not only that my voice reach

him, but, peradventure, that it strike and pierce him. When I rate my

valet with sharp and bitter language, it would be very pretty for him to

say; “Pray, master, speak lower; I hear you very well”:

“Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata,

non magnitudine, sed proprietate.”

[“There is a certain voice accommodated to the hearing, not by its

loudness, but by its propriety.”--Quintilian, xi. 3.]

Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter

ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with

tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according

as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke

itself.

Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by

impatience. Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their

recovery.

The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of the constitution

of animals; they have their fortune and their days limited from their

birth; he who attempts imperiously to cut them short by force in the

middle of their course, lengthens and multiplies them, and incenses

instead of appeasing them. I am of Crantor’s opinion, that we are

neither obstinately and deafly to oppose evils, nor succumb to them from

want of courage; but that we are naturally to give way to them, according

to their condition and our own. We ought to grant free passage to

diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have

lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay,

without help and without art, and contrary to its rules. Let us a little

permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs

than we. But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that

disease, of another. And how many have not escaped dying, who have had

three physicians at their tails? Example is a vague and universal

mirror, and of various reflections. If it be a delicious medicine, take

it: ‘tis always so much present good. I will never stick at the name nor

the colour, if it be pleasant and grateful to the palate: pleasure is one

of the chiefest kinds of profit. I have suffered colds, gouty

defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, megrims, and other

accidents, to grow old and die in time a natural death. I have so lost

them when I was half fit to keep them: they are sooner prevailed upon by

courtesy than huffing. We must patiently suffer the laws of our

condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in

despite of all medicine. ‘Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their

children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: “Thou art

come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.”

‘Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall

every one:

“Indignare, si quid in to inique proprio constitutum est.”

[“Then be angry, when there is anything unjustly decreed against

thee alone.”--Seneca, Ep., 91.]

See an old man who begs of God that he will maintain his health vigorous

and entire; that is to say, that he restore him to youth:

“Stulte, quid haec frustra votis puerilibus optas?”

[“Fool! why do you vainly form these puerile wishes?”

--Ovid., Trist., 111. 8, II.]

is it not folly? his condition is not capable of it. The gout, the

stone, and indigestion are symptoms of long years; as heat, rains, and

winds are of long journeys. Plato does not believe that AEsculapius

troubled himself to provide by regimen to prolong life in a weak and

wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget

healthful and robust children; and does not think this care suitable to

the Divine justice and prudence, which is to direct all things to

utility. My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you;

they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by

that means prolong your misery an hour or two:

“Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,

Diversis contra nititur obiicibus;

Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,

Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.”

[“Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various

props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and

all, giving way, fall together.”--Pseudo-Gallus, i. 171.]

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony

of the world, is composed of contrary things--of diverse tones, sweet and

harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only

affect some of these, what would he be able to do? he must know how to

make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods

and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot

subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it

than the other. To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent

the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.--[Plutarch,

How to restrain Anger, c. 8.]

I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take

advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with

their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness,

injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies--one

while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death.

Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my

place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it

was at least disturbed: ‘tis always agitation and combat.

Now, I use my imagination as gently as I can, and would discharge it, if

I could, of all trouble and contest; a man must assist, flatter, and

deceive it, if he can; my mind is fit for that office; it needs no

appearances throughout: could it persuade as it preaches, it would

successfully relieve me. Will you have an example? It tells me: “that

‘tis for my good to have the stone: that the structure of my age must

naturally suffer some decay, and it is now time it should begin to

disjoin and to confess a breach; ‘tis a common necessity, and there is

nothing in it either miraculous or new; I therein pay what is due to old

age, and I cannot expect a better bargain; that society ought to comfort

me, being fallen into the most common infirmity of my age; I see

everywhere men tormented with the same disease, and am honoured by the

fellowship, forasmuch as men of the best quality are most frequently

afflicted with it: ‘tis a noble and dignified disease: that of such as

are struck with it, few have it to a less degree of pain; that these are

put to the trouble of a strict diet and the daily taking of nauseous

potions, whereas I owe my better state purely to my good fortune; for

some ordinary broths of eringo or burst-wort that I have twice or thrice

taken to oblige the ladies, who, with greater kindness than my pain was

sharp, would needs present me half of theirs, seemed to me equally easy

to take and fruitless in operation, the others have to pay a thousand

vows to AEsculapius, and as many crowns to their physicians, for the

voiding a little gravel, which I often do by the aid of nature: even the

decorum of my countenance is not disturbed in company; and I can hold my

water ten hours, and as long as any man in health. The fear of this

disease,” says my mind, “formerly affrighted thee, when it was unknown to

thee; the cries and despairing groans of those who make it worse by their

impatience, begot a horror in thee. ‘Tis an infirmity that punishes the

members by which thou hast most offended. Thou art a conscientious

fellow;”

“Quae venit indigne poena, dolenda venit:”

[“We are entitled to complain of a punishment that we have not

deserved.”--Ovid, Heroid., v. 8.]

“consider this chastisement: ‘tis very easy in comparison of others, and

inflicted with a paternal tenderness: do but observe how late it comes;

it only seizes on and incommodes that part of thy life which is, one way

and another, sterile and lost; having, as it were by composition, given

time for the licence and pleasures of thy youth. The fear and the

compassion that the people have of this disease serve thee for matter of

glory; a quality whereof if thou bast thy judgment purified, and that thy

reason has somewhat cured it, thy friends notwithstanding, discern some

tincture in thy complexion. ‘Tis a pleasure to hear it said of oneself

what strength of mind, what patience! Thou art seen to sweat with pain,

to turn pale and red, to tremble, to vomit blood, to suffer strange

contractions and convulsions, at times to let great tears drop from thine

eyes, to urine thick, black, and dreadful water, or to have it suppressed

by some sharp and craggy stone, that cruelly pricks and tears the neck of

the bladder, whilst all the while thou entertainest the company with an

ordinary countenance; droning by fits with thy people; making one in a

continuous discourse, now and then making excuse for thy pain, and

representing thy suffering less than it is. Dost thou call to mind the

men of past times, who so greedily sought diseases to keep their virtue

in breath and exercise? Put the case that nature sets thee on and impels

thee to this glorious school, into which thou wouldst never have entered

of thy own free will. If thou tellest me that it is a dangerous and

mortal disease, what others are not so? for ‘tis a physical cheat to

expect any that they say do not go direct to death: what matters if they

go thither by accident, or if they easily slide and slip into the path

that leads us to it? But thou dost not die because thou art sick; thou

diest because thou art living: death kills thee without the help of

sickness: and sickness has deferred death in some, who have lived longer

by reason that they thought themselves always dying; to which may be

added, that as in wounds, so in diseases, some are medicinal and

wholesome. The stone is often no less long-lived than you; we see men

with whom it has continued from their infancy even to their extreme old

age; and if they had not broken company, it would have been with them

longer still; you more often kill it than it kills you. And though it

should present to you the image of approaching death, were it not a good

office to a man of such an age, to put him in mind of his end? And,

which is worse, thou hast no longer anything that should make thee desire

to be cured. Whether or no, common necessity will soon call thee away.

Do but consider how skilfully and gently she puts thee out of concern

with life, and weans thee from the world; not forcing thee with a

tyrannical subjection, like so many other infirmities which thou seest

old men afflicted withal, that hold them in continual torment, and keep

them in perpetual and unintermitted weakness and pains, but by warnings

and instructions at intervals, intermixing long pauses of repose, as it

were to give thee opportunity to meditate and ruminate upon thy lesson,

at thy own ease and leisure. To give thee means to judge aright, and to

assume the resolution of a man of courage, it presents to thee the state

of thy entire condition, both in good and evil; and one while a very

cheerful and another an insupportable life, in one and the same day. If

thou embracest not death, at least thou shakest hands with it once a

month; whence thou hast more cause to hope that it will one day surprise

thee without menace; and that being so often conducted to the water-side,

but still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy

confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over. A

man cannot reasonably complain of diseases that fairly divide the time

with health.”

I am obliged to Fortune for having so often assaulted me with the same

sort of weapons: she forms and fashions me by use, hardens and habituates

me, so that I can know within a little for how much I shall be quit. For

want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom

happens in my disease, I set it down, whence it falls out that, having

now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking

threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline

leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some

favourable prognostic in my past experience. Custom also makes me hope

better for the time to come; for, the conduct of this clearing out having

so long continued, ‘tis to be believed that nature will not alter her

course, and that no other worse accident will happen than what I already

feel. And besides, the condition of this disease is not unsuitable to my

prompt and sudden complexion: when it assaults me gently, I am afraid,

for ‘tis then for a great while; but it has, naturally, brisk and

vigorous excesses; it claws me to purpose for a day or two. My kidneys

held out an age without alteration; and I have almost now lived another,

since they changed their state; evils have their periods, as well as

benefits: peradventure, the infirmity draws towards an end. Age weakens

the heat of my stomach, and, its digestion being less perfect, sends this

crude matter to my kidneys; why, at a certain revolution, may not the

heat of my kidneys be also abated, so that they can no more petrify my

phlegm, and nature find out some other way of purgation. Years have

evidently helped me to drain certain rheums; and why not these excrements

which furnish matter for gravel? But is there anything delightful in

comparison of this sudden change, when from an excessive pain, I come, by

the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the

beautiful light of health, so free and full, as it happens in our sudden

and sharpest colics? Is there anything in the pain suffered, that one

can counterpoise to the pleasure of so sudden an amendment? Oh, how much

does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so

contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another,

in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head

against and dispute it with one another! As the Stoics say that vices

are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can,

with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has

given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence. When

Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that

itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to

consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are

linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow

and mutually beget one another; and cried out to good AEsop, that he

ought out of this consideration to have taken matter for a fine fable.

The worst that I see in other diseases is, that they are not so grievous

in their effect as they are in their issue: a man is a whole year in

recovering, and all the while full of weakness and fear. There is so

much hazard, and so many steps to arrive at safety, that there is no end

on’t before they have unmuffled you of a kerchief, and then of a cap,

before they allow you to walk abroad and take the air, to drink wine, to

lie with your wife, to eat melons, ‘tis odds you relapse into some new

distemper. The stone has this privilege, that it carries itself clean

off: whereas the other maladies always leave behind them some impression

and alteration that render the body subject to a new disease, and lend a

hand to one another. Those are excusable that content themselves with

possessing us, without extending farther and introducing their followers;

but courteous and kind are those whose passage brings us any profitable

issue. Since I have been troubled with the stone, I find myself freed

from all other accidents, much more, methinks, than I was before, and

have never had any fever since; I argue that the extreme and frequent

vomitings that I am subject to purge me: and, on the other hand, my

distastes for this and that, and the strange fasts I am forced to keep,

digest my peccant humours, and nature, with those stones, voids whatever

there is in me superfluous and hurtful. Let them never tell me that it

is a medicine too dear bought: for what avail so many stinking draughts,

so many caustics, incisions, sweats, setons, diets, and so many other

methods of cure, which often, by reason we are not able to undergo their

violence and importunity, bring us to our graves? So that when I have

the stone, I look upon it as physic; when free from it, as an absolute

deliverance.

And here is another particular benefit of my disease; which is, that it

almost plays its game by itself, and lets ‘me play mine, if I have only

courage to do it; for, in its greatest fury, I have endured it ten hours

together on horseback. Do but endure only; you need no other regimen

play, run, dine, do this and t’other, if you can; your debauch will do

you more good than harm; say as much to one that has the pox, the gout,

or hernia! The other diseases have more universal obligations; rack our

actions after another kind of manner, disturb our whole order, and to

their consideration engage the whole state of life: this only pinches the

skin; it leaves the understanding and the will wholly at our own

disposal, and the tongue, the hands, and the feet; it rather awakens than

stupefies you. The soul is struck with the ardour of a fever,

overwhelmed with an epilepsy, and displaced by a sharp megrim, and, in

short, astounded by all the diseases that hurt the whole mass and the

most noble parts; this never meddles with the soul; if anything goes

amiss with her, ‘tis her own fault; she betrays, dismounts, and abandons

herself. There are none but fools who suffer themselves to be persuaded

that this hard and massive body which is baked in our kidneys is to be

dissolved by drinks; wherefore, when it is once stirred, there is nothing

to be done but to give it passage; and, for that matter, it will itself

make one.

I moreover observe this particular convenience in it, that it is a

disease wherein we have little to guess at: we are dispensed from the

trouble into which other diseases throw us by the uncertainty of their

causes, conditions, and progress; a trouble that is infinitely painful:

we have no need of consultations and doctoral interpretations; the senses

well enough inform us both what it is and where it is.

By suchlike arguments, weak and strong, as Cicero with the disease of his

old age, I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its

wounds. If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems.

That this is true: I am come to that pass of late, that the least motion

forces pure blood out of my kidneys: what of that? I move about,

nevertheless, as before, and ride after my hounds with a juvenile and

insolent ardour; and hold that I have very good satisfaction for an

accident of that importance, when it costs me no more but a dull

heaviness and uneasiness in that part; ‘tis some great stone that wastes

and consumes the substance of my kidneys and my life, which I by little

and little evacuate, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement

henceforward superfluous and troublesome. Now if I feel anything

stirring, do not fancy that I trouble myself to consult my pulse or my

urine, thereby to put myself upon some annoying prevention; I shall soon

enough feel the pain, without making it more and longer by the disease of

fear. He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. To

which may be added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon

them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and

the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand

that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great

uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or

threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the

approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future,

whereon we may ground our divination. I only judge of myself by actual

sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring

nothing to it but expectation and patience? Will you know how much I get

by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many

diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon

them without any bodily pain. I have many times amused myself, being

well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in

communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover

themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions,

being all the while quite at my ease, and so much the more obliged to the

favour of God and better satisfied of the vanity of this art.

There is nothing that ought so much to be recommended to youth as

activity and vigilance our life is nothing but movement. I bestir myself

with great difficulty, and am slow in everything, whether in rising,

going to bed, or eating: seven of the clock in the morning is early for

me, and where I rule, I never dine before eleven, nor sup till after six.

I formerly attributed the cause of the fevers and other diseases I fell

into to the heaviness that long sleeping had brought upon me, and have

ever repented going to sleep again in the morning. Plato is more angry

at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking. I love to lie hard and

alone, even without my wife, as kings do; pretty well covered with

clothes. They never warm my bed, but since I have grown old they give me

at need cloths to lay to my feet and stomach. They found fault with the

great Scipio that he was a great sleeper; not, in my opinion, for any

other reason than that men were displeased that he alone should have

nothing in him to be found fault with. If I am anything fastidious in my

way of living ‘tis rather in my lying than anything else; but generally

I give way and accommodate myself as well as any one to necessity.

Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the

age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours at one breath. I wean myself

with utility from this proneness to sloth, and am evidently the better

for so doing. I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days

‘tis over; and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need

requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long

journeys are less troublesome. My body is capable of a firm, but not of

a violent or sudden agitation. I escape of late from violent exercises,

and such as make me sweat: my limbs grow weary before they are warm.

I can stand a whole day together, and am never weary of walking; but from

my youth I have ever preferred to ride upon paved roads; on foot, I get

up to the haunches in dirt, and little fellows as I am are subject in the

streets to be elbowed and jostled for want of presence; I have ever loved

to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or

higher than my seat.

There is no profession as pleasant as the military, a profession both

noble in its execution (for valour is the stoutest, proudest, and most

generous of all virtues), and noble in its cause: there is no utility

either more universal or more just than the protection of the peace and

greatness of one’s country. The company of so many noble, young, and

active men delights you; the ordinary sight of so many tragic spectacles;

the freedom of the conversation, without art; a masculine and

unceremonious way of living, please you; the variety of a thousand

several actions; the encouraging harmony of martial music that ravishes

and inflames both your ears and souls; the honour of this occupation,

nay, even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato holds so light that

in his Republic he makes women and children share in them, are delightful

to you. You put yourself voluntarily upon particular exploits and

hazards, according as you judge of their lustre and importance; and, a

volunteer, find even life itself excusably employed:

“Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.”

[“‘Tis fine to die sword in hand.” (“And he remembers that it

is honourable to die in arms.”)--AEneid, ii. 317.]

To fear common dangers that concern so great a multitude of men; not to

dare to do what so many sorts of souls, what a whole people dare, is for

a heart that is poor and mean beyond all measure: company encourages even

children. If others excel you in knowledge, in gracefulness, in

strength, or fortune, you have alternative resources at your disposal;

but to give place to them in stability of mind, you can blame no one for

that but yourself. Death is more abject, more languishing and

troublesome, in bed than in a fight: fevers and catarrhs as painful and

mortal as a musket-shot. Whoever has fortified himself valiantly to bear

the accidents of common life need not raise his courage to be a soldier:

“Vivere, mi Lucili, militare est.”

[“To live, my Lucilius, is (to make war) to be a soldier.”

--Seneca, Ep., 96.]

I do not remember that I ever had the itch, and yet scratching is one of

nature’s sweetest gratifications, and so much at hand; but repentance

follows too near. I use it most in my ears, which are at intervals apt

to itch.

I came into the world with all my senses entire, even to perfection. My

stomach is commodiously good, as also is my head and my breath; and, for

the most part, uphold themselves so in the height of fevers. I have

passed the age to which some nations, not without reason, have prescribed

so just a term of life that they would not suffer men to exceed it; and

yet I have some intermissions, though short and inconstant, so clean and

sound as to be little inferior to the health and pleasantness of my

youth. I do not speak of vigour and sprightliness; ‘tis not reason they

should follow me beyond their limits:

“Non hoc amplius est liminis, aut aquae

Coelestis, patiens latus.”

[“I am no longer able to stand waiting at a door in the rain.”

--Horace, Od., iii. 10, 9.]

My face and eyes presently discover my condition; all my alterations

begin there, and appear somewhat worse than they really are; my friends

often pity me before I feel the cause in myself. My looking-glass does

not frighten me; for even in my youth it has befallen me more than once

to have a scurvy complexion and of ill augury, without any great

consequence, so that the physicians, not finding any cause within

answerable to that outward alteration, attributed it to the mind and to

some secret passion that tormented me within; but they were deceived.

If my body would govern itself as well, according to my rule, as my mind

does, we should move a little more at our ease. My mind was then not

only free from trouble, but, moreover, full of joy and satisfaction,

as it commonly is, half by its complexion, half by its design:

“Nec vitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis.”

[“Nor do the troubles of the body ever affect my mind.”

--Ovid, Trist., iii. 8, 25.]

I am of the opinion that this temperature of my soul has often raised my

body from its lapses; this is often depressed; if the other be not brisk

and gay, ‘tis at least tranquil and at rest. I had a quartan ague four

or five months, that made me look miserably ill; my mind was always, if

not calm, yet pleasant. If the pain be without me, the weakness and

languor do not much afflict me; I see various corporal faintings, that

beget a horror in me but to name, which yet I should less fear than a

thousand passions and agitations of the mind that I see about me. I make

up my mind no more to run; ‘tis enough that I can crawl along; nor do I

more complain of the natural decadence that I feel in myself:

“Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?”

[“Who is surprised to see a swollen goitre in the Alps?”

--Juvenal, xiii. 162.]

than I regret that my duration shall not be as long and entire as that of

an oak.

I have no reason to complain of my imagination; I have had few thoughts

in my life that have so much as broken my sleep, except those of desire,

which have awakened without afflicting me. I dream but seldom, and then

of chimaeras and fantastic things, commonly produced from pleasant

thoughts, and rather ridiculous than sad; and I believe it to be true

that dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is

art required to sort and understand them

“Res, quae in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident,

Quaeque agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,

Minus mirandum est.”

[“‘Tis less wonder, what men practise, think, care for, see, and do

when waking, (should also run in their heads and disturb them when

they are asleep) and which affect their feelings, if they happen to

any in sleep.”--Attius, cited in Cicero, De Divin., i. 22.]