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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+#19 in our series by Michel de Montaigne
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+Title: The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+
+Author: Michel de Montaigne
+
+Editor: William Carew Hazlitt, 1877
+
+Translator: Charles Cotton
+
+Official Release Date: December, 2002 [Etext #3599]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 06/15/01]
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V19
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+
+ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
+
+Translated by Charles Cotton
+
+Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
+
+1877
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+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.]
+
+Plato, moreover, says, that 'tis the office of prudence to draw
+instructions of divination of future things from dreams: I don't know
+about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates,
+Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.
+Historians say that the Atlantes never dream; who also never eat any
+animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason
+why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of
+diet to beget appropriate dreams.  Mine are very gentle, without any
+agitation of body or expression of voice.  I have seen several of my time
+wonderfully disturbed by them.  Theon the philosopher walked in his
+sleep, and so did Pericles servant, and that upon the tiles and top of
+the house.
+
+I hardly ever choose my dish at table, but take the next at hand, and
+unwillingly change it for another.  A confusion of meats and a clatter of
+dishes displease me as much as any other confusion: I am easily satisfied
+with few dishes: and am an enemy to the opinion of Favorinus, that in a
+feast they should snatch from you the meat you like, and set a plate of
+another sort before you; and that 'tis a pitiful supper, if you do not
+sate your guests with the rumps of various fowls, the beccafico only
+deserving to be all eaten.  I usually eat salt meats, yet I prefer bread
+that has no salt in it; and my baker never sends up other to my table,
+contrary to the custom of the country.  In my infancy, what they had most
+to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best
+love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes.  My tutor contended with
+this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety; and indeed
+'tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies
+itself to.  Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread,
+bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate.  There are some
+who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst
+the partridges; 'tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate;
+'tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary and
+accustomed things.
+
+               "Per qux luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit."
+
+     ["By which the luxury of wealth causes tedium."--Seneca, Ep., 18.]
+
+Not to make good cheer with what another is enjoying, and to be curious
+in what a man eats, is the essence of this vice:
+
+               "Si modica coenare times olus omne patella."
+
+     ["If you can't be content with herbs in a small dish for supper."
+     --Horace, Ep., i. 5, 2.]
+
+There is indeed this difference, that 'tis better to oblige one's
+appetite to things that are most easy to be had; but 'tis always vice to
+oblige one's self.  I formerly said a kinsman of mine was overnice, who,
+by being in our galleys, had unlearned the use of beds and to undress
+when he went to sleep.
+
+If I had any sons, I should willingly wish them my fortune.  The good
+father that God gave me (who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of
+his goodness, but truly 'tis a very hearty one) sent me from my cradle to
+be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the
+while I was at nurse, and still longer, bringing me up to the meanest and
+most common way of living:
+
+          "Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter."
+
+          ["A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty."
+          --Seneca,Ep., 123.]
+
+Never take upon yourselves, and much less give up to your wives, the care
+of their nurture; leave the formation to fortune, under popular and
+natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and
+hardship, that they may rather descend from rigour than mount up to it.
+This humour of his yet aimed at another end, to make me familiar with the
+people and the condition of men who most need our assistance; considering
+that I should rather regard them who extend their arms to me, than those
+who turn their backs upon me; and for this reason it was that he provided
+to hold me at the font persons of the meanest fortune, to oblige and
+attach me to them.
+
+Nor has his design succeeded altogether ill; for, whether upon the
+account of the more honour in such a condescension, or out of a natural
+compassion that has a very great power over me, I have an inclination
+towards the meaner sort of people.  The faction which I should condemn in
+our wars, I should more sharply condemn, flourishing and successful; it
+will somewhat reconcile me to it, when I shall see it miserable and
+overwhelmed.  How willingly do I admire the fine humour of Cheilonis,
+daughter and wife to kings of Sparta.  Whilst her husband Cleombrotus, in
+the commotion of her city, had the advantage over Leonidas her father,
+she, like a good daughter, stuck close to her father in all his misery
+and exile, in opposition to the conqueror.  But so soon as the chance of
+war turned, she changed her will with the change of fortune, and bravely
+turned to her husband's side, whom she accompanied throughout, where his
+ruin carried him: admitting, as it appears to me, no other choice than to
+cleave to the side that stood most in need of her, and where she could
+best manifest her compassion.  I am naturally more apt to follow the
+example of Flaminius, who rather gave his assistance to those who had
+most need of him than to those who had power to do him good, than I do to
+that of Pyrrhus, who was of an humour to truckle under the great and to
+domineer over the poor.
+
+Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm; for, be it that I
+was so accustomed when a child, I eat all the while I sit.  Therefore it
+is that at my own house, though the meals there are of the shortest, I
+usually sit down a little while after the rest, after the manner of
+Augustus, but I do not imitate him in rising also before the rest; on the
+contrary, I love to sit still a long time after, and to hear them talk,
+provided I am none of the talkers: for I tire and hurt myself with
+speaking upon a full stomach, as much as I find it very wholesome and
+pleasant to argue and to strain my voice before dinner.
+
+The ancient Greeks and Romans had more reason than we in setting apart
+for eating, which is a principal action of life, if they were not
+prevented by other extraordinary business, many hours and the greatest
+part of the night; eating and drinking more deliberately than we do, who
+perform all our actions post-haste; and in extending this natural
+pleasure to more leisure and better use, intermixing with profitable
+conversation.
+
+They whose concern it is to have a care of me, may very easily hinder me
+from eating anything they think will do me harm; for in such matters I
+never covet nor miss anything I do not see; but withal, if it once comes
+in my sight, 'tis in vain to persuade me to forbear; so that when I
+design to fast I must be kept apart from the suppers, and must have only
+so much given me as is required for a prescribed collation; for if to
+table, I forget my resolution.  When I order my cook to alter the manner
+of dressing any dish, all my family know what it means, that my stomach
+is out of order, and that I shall not touch it.
+
+I love to have all meats, that will endure it, very little boiled or
+roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone.
+Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as
+patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to
+the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both
+too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good,
+even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have
+always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and
+after dinner.  God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by
+degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much
+the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man.  There
+is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was
+the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several
+others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most
+active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; 'tis so I melt and
+steal away from myself.  What a folly it would be in my understanding to
+apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it
+were from the very top!  I hope I shall not.  I, in truth, receive a
+principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and
+natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope
+from Destiny any other but unlawful favour.  Men make themselves believe
+that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature.  But they
+deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the
+duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so
+universally adored that "The mean is best," of the passed time, and who
+have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall
+I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age?  Whatever happens
+contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes
+according to her should always be pleasant:
+
+     "Omnia, quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis."
+
+     ["All things that are done according to nature
+     are to be accounted good."--Cicero, De Senect., c. 19.]
+
+And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases
+is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is
+of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:
+
+          "Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas."
+
+     ["Young men are taken away by violence, old men by maturity."
+     --Cicero, ubi sup.]
+
+Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates
+its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance.
+I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty
+years of age.  I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is
+it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former,
+than unlike my dying one?  It is too much to abuse nature, to make her
+trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct,
+our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and
+haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary
+of following us herself.
+
+I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons.  My
+father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all.  Eating too much hurts
+me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
+that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
+either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
+me.  We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
+I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
+now again grateful.  In several other things, I find my stomach and
+appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
+white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.
+
+I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
+feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
+digestion than flesh.  As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon fish-
+days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh; the
+difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.
+
+From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
+sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
+made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
+I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
+cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
+the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
+other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
+things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
+goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
+liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
+or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
+same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
+with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
+Periander's feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
+guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
+that which is extracted from society.  I think it more wholesome to eat
+more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
+and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
+four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
+will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
+have the same at supper?  But we old fellows especially, let us take the
+first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and
+prognostics.  The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold
+of the present and known.  I avoid the invariable in these laws of
+fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the
+continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied
+and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured
+to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing
+otherwise but to your prejudice.
+
+I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one
+simple pair of silk stockings is all.  I have suffered myself, for the
+relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account
+of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and
+disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief
+over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet
+must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare's skin or
+a vulture's skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you
+will go a very fine way to work.  I will do nothing of the sort, and
+would willingly leave off what I have begun.  If you fall into any new
+inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek
+out some other.  Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be
+pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add
+something more, and something more after that; there is no end on't.
+
+For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious,
+as the ancients did, to lose one's dinner, and defer making good cheer
+till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so
+was I formerly used to do.  As to health, I since by experience find, on
+the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better
+while awake.  I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my
+mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never
+drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal;
+I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing
+meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice
+precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should
+stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth
+glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites,
+and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming
+thing.  I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part
+water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father's
+physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is
+designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before 'tis brought
+in.  'Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this
+custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed.
+I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till
+after sixteen or eighteen years of age.  The most usual and common method
+of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to
+be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his
+wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure.  Public usage gives the
+law in these things.
+
+I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I
+fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the
+common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the
+difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a
+whole day together.  I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for
+the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.
+
+The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for,
+besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides
+the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light
+offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a
+flaming fire.
+
+To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to
+read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much
+relieved by it.  I am to this hour--to the age of fifty-four--Ignorant of
+the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other.
+'Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and
+weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found
+troublesome, especially by night.  Here is one step back, and a very
+manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and
+so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall
+be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the
+Fatal Sisters untwist our lives.  And so I doubt whether my hearing
+begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I
+shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.  A man
+must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs
+away.
+
+My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or
+my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state.  That preacher is
+very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in
+places of ceremony, where every one's countenance is so starched, where I
+have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order
+it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I
+was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never
+without a switch in my hand, walking or riding.  As the philosopher
+Chrysippus' maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs,
+for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place
+soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his
+companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have
+been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver
+in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever
+they are placed.
+
+'Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one's health, and even to the
+pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and
+sometimes my fingers, in my haste.  Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after
+that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear!  There were men at Rome
+that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace.  I
+lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the
+table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.
+
+There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder
+one another.  Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good
+cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the
+entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, "that it
+is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to
+feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of
+understanding know how to entertain one another."  Varro requires all
+this in entertainments: "Persons of graceful presence and agreeable
+conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and
+delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather."  The art of dining
+well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the
+greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
+science of eating well.  My imagination has delivered three repasts to
+the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
+upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
+excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
+wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
+grace and savour.  I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
+wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
+look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
+too much in love with them.  Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
+all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
+but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
+nature has provided for him.  A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
+but receive them.  I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
+kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions.  We
+have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
+sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
+puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
+all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
+insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:
+
+         "Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit."
+
+          ["Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
+          you put into it."--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]
+
+I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
+conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
+little more than wind.  But what?  We are all wind throughout; and,
+moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
+shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
+without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.
+
+The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
+say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
+Critolaiis.  'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
+them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
+and, peradventure, to be desired.  But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
+condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
+negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
+of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
+intellectual.  The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
+pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
+more just.  There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
+of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
+same.  Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing?  why do they not
+live of their own?  why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
+costs them neither invention nor exertion?  Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury
+afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and
+Bacchus.  These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what
+will not fancy do?  But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it.  Will they
+not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives?  I hate
+that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our
+bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow
+there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.
+Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno
+comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily.
+Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation,
+Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt
+the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking.  The true
+temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than
+Pythagoric, and it becomes him better.  When I dance, I dance; when I
+sleep, I sleep.  Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my
+thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences,
+I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard,
+to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.
+
+Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined
+us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us
+to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and 'tis ,injustice to
+infringe her laws.  When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst
+of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I
+do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by
+vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious
+thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last
+was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation.  We are great
+fools.  "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done
+nothing to-day."  What? have you not lived?  that is not only the
+fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.  "Had I been
+put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
+could do."  "Have you known how to meditate and manage your life?  you
+have performed the greatest work of all."  In order to shew and develop
+herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
+stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one.  Have you known how
+to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
+composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
+than he who has taken empires and cities.
+
+The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
+to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
+props.  I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
+breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
+dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends.  And Brutus, when heaven
+and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
+hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
+security.  'Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
+from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
+lay them aside and take them up again:
+
+                   "O fortes, pejoraque passi
+                    Mecum saepe viri!  nunc vino pellite curas
+                    Cras ingens iterabimus aequor."
+
+     ["O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
+     cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea."
+     --Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]
+
+Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
+wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
+they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
+profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
+schools.  The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
+just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table.  The sages lived after that
+manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
+in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
+to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
+human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their
+sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in
+the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:
+
+               "Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus."
+
+Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a
+strong and generous soul.  Epaminondas did not think that to take part,
+and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of
+his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his
+glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him.
+And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person
+worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that
+gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly
+trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,
+
+     [This game, as the "Dictionnaire de Trevoux" describes it, is one
+     wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some
+     object.]
+
+amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the
+meanest and most popular actions of men.  And his head full of that
+wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in
+Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the
+blind envy of his enemies at Rome.  Nor is there anything more remarkable
+in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself
+taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well
+spent.  This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a
+whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army,
+surprised and absorbed by some profound thought.  He was the first,
+amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of
+Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body,
+and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms.  It was he
+who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his
+horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so
+unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom
+the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and
+desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of
+Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all.  He
+was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain
+at need a severe abstinence.  He was seen ever to go to the wars, and
+walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer;
+to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to
+eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner.  He was seen, for
+seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the
+indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same
+countenance.  And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters,
+and poison.  But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule
+of civility?  he was also the man of the whole army with whom the
+advantage in drinking, remained.  And he never refused to play at
+noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him
+well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour
+a wise man.  We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to
+be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns
+and forms of perfection.  There are very few examples of life, full and
+pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those
+that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather
+pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners.  The people
+deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where
+the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle
+way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature:
+but withal much less nobly and commendably.
+
+Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing
+forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes
+everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in
+preferring moderate to eminent things.  There is nothing so fine and
+legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as
+well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the
+infirmities we have, 'tis the most barbarous to despise our being.
+
+Whoever has a mind to isolate his spirit, when the body is ill at ease,
+to preserve it from the contagion, let him by all means do it if he can:
+but otherwise let him on the contrary favour and assist it, and not
+refuse to participate of its natural pleasures with a conjugal
+complacency, bringing to it, if it be the wiser, moderation, lest by
+indiscretion they should get confounded with displeasure.  Intemperance
+is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather
+its seasoning.  Euxodus, who therein established the sovereign good, and
+his companions, who set so high a value upon it, tasted it in its most
+charming sweetness, by the means of temperance, which in them was
+singular and exemplary.
+
+I enjoin my soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally
+regulated:
+
+          "Eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia
+          quo in dolore contractio,"
+
+     ["For from the same imperfection arises the expansion of the
+     mind in pleasure and its contraction in sorrow."
+     --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., iv. 31.]
+
+and equally firm; but the one gaily and the other severely, and so far as
+it is able, to be careful to extinguish the one as to extend the other.
+The judging rightly of good brings along with it the judging soundly of
+evil: pain has something of the inevitable in its tender beginnings, and
+pleasure something of the evitable in its excessive end.  Plato couples
+them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of
+fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming
+blandishments of pleasure: they are two fountains, from which whoever
+draws, when and as much as he needs, whether city, man, or beast, is very
+fortunate.  The first is to be taken medicinally and upon necessity, and
+more scantily; the other for thirst, but not to, drunkenness.  Pain,
+pleasure, love and hatred are the first things that a child is sensible
+of: if, when reason comes, they apply it to themselves, that is virtue.
+
+I have a special vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill
+and uneasy, but when 'tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over
+again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the
+good.  This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time,
+represents the usage of those wise sort of people who think they cannot
+do better with their lives than to let them run out and slide away, pass
+them over, and baulk them, and, as much as they can, ignore them and shun
+them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality: but I know it to
+be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious, even
+in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it; and nature has delivered it
+into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we have only
+ourselves to blame if it be troublesome to us, or escapes us
+unprofitably:
+
+     "Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur."
+
+     ["The life of a fool is thankless, timorous, and wholly bent upon
+     the future."--Seneca, Ep:, 15.]
+
+Nevertheless I compose myself to lose mine without regret; but withal as
+a thing that is perishable by its condition, not that it molests or
+annoys me.  Nor does it properly well become any not to be displeased
+when they die, excepting such as are pleased to live.  There is good
+husbandry in enjoying it: I enjoy it double to what others do; for the
+measure of its fruition depends upon our more or less application to it.
+Chiefly that I perceive mine to be so short in time, I desire to extend
+it in weight; I will stop the promptitude of its flight by the
+promptitude of my grasp; and by the vigour of using it compensate the
+speed of its running away.  In proportion as the possession of life is
+more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.
+
+Others feel the pleasure of content and prosperity; I feel it too, as
+well as they, but not as it passes and slips by; one should study, taste,
+and ruminate upon it to render condign thanks to Him who grants it to us.
+They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing
+it.  To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from
+me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I
+might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it.  I ponder with
+myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my
+reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it.  Do I find
+myself in any calm composedness?  is there any pleasure that tickles me?
+I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to
+it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to take delight; not
+there to lose itself, but to be present there; and I employ it, on its
+part, to view itself in this prosperous state, to weigh and appreciate
+its happiness and to amplify it.  It reckons how much it stands indebted
+to God that its conscience and the intestine passions are in repose; that
+it has the body in its natural disposition, orderly and competently
+enjoying the soft and soothing functions by which He, of His grace is
+pleased to compensate the sufferings wherewith His justice at His good
+pleasure chastises us.  It reflects how great a benefit it is to be so
+protected, that which way soever it turns its eye the heavens are calm
+around it.  No desire, no fear, no doubt, troubles the air; no
+difficulty, past, present, or to, come, that its imagination may not pass
+over without offence.  This consideration takes great lustre from the
+comparison of different conditions.  So it is that I present to my
+thought, in a thousand aspects, those whom fortune or their own error
+carries away and torments.  And, again, those who, more like to me, so
+negligently and incuriously receive their good fortune.  Those are folks
+who spend their time indeed; they pass over the present and that which
+they possess, to wait on hope, and for shadows and vain images which
+fancy puts before them:
+
+         "Morte obita quales fama est volitare figuras,
+          Aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus:"
+
+     ["Such forms as those which after death are reputed to hover about,
+     or dreams which delude the senses in sleep."--AEneid, x. 641.]
+
+which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are pursued.
+The fruit and end of their pursuit is to pursue; as Alexander said, that
+the end of his labour was to labour:
+
+          "Nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum."
+
+     ["Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done.
+     --"Lucan, ii. 657.]
+
+For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased
+God to bestow it upon us.  I do not desire it should be without the
+necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less
+excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long;
+
+     "Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus:"
+
+     ["A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches."
+     --Seneca, Ep., 119.]
+
+nor that we should support ourselves by putting only a little of that
+drug into our mouths, by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept
+himself alive; nor that we should stupidly beget children with our
+fingers or heels, but rather; with reverence be it spoken, that we might
+voluptuously beget them with our fingers and heels; nor that the body
+should be without desire and without titillation.  These are ungrateful
+and wicked complaints.  I accept kindly, and with gratitude, what nature
+has done for me; am well pleased with it, and proud of it.  A man does
+wrong to that great and omnipotent giver to refuse, annul, or disfigure
+his gift: all goodness himself, he has made everything good:
+
+     "Omnia quae secundum naturam sunt, aestimatione digna sunt."
+
+     ["All things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem."
+     --Cicero, De Fin., iii. 6.]
+
+Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most
+solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is,
+suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my
+thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that 'tis a
+barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable
+with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the
+dishonest.  That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by
+a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a
+fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action
+according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey.
+Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in
+getting their wives' maidenheads than in its lesson.
+
+This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as
+he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more
+force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity.  This, according to
+him, goes by no means alone--he is not so fantastic--but only it goes
+first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of
+pleasure.  Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than
+prudent and just.
+
+          "Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,
+          quid ea postulet, pervidendum."
+
+     ["A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine
+     what she requires."--Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]
+
+I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial
+traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is "to live
+according to it," becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and
+that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is "to consent to nature."
+Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are
+necessary?  And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not
+a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says
+an ancient, the gods always conspire.  To what end do we dismember by
+divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence?
+Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse
+and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the
+levity of the soul:
+
+     "Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,
+     naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et
+     carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non
+     veritate divina."
+
+     [He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and
+     condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally
+     desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels
+     thus from human vanity, not from divine truth."
+     --St. Augustin, De Civit.  Dei, xiv.  5.]
+
+In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care;
+we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to
+man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and
+the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly
+prescribed it to us.  Authority has power only to work in regard to
+matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language;
+therefore let us again charge at it in this place:
+
+     "Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter
+     facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;
+     distrahique inter diversissimos motus?"
+
+     ["Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and
+     contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body
+     one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly
+     different motions?"--Seneca, Ep., 74.]
+
+To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies
+and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he
+diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in
+eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at
+your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had
+better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses
+and notions are not worth the worst mess there.  Though they were the
+ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then?  I do not here speak of, nor
+mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts
+and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour
+of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of
+divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope,
+prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last
+step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure,
+disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous
+conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual
+and temporal pasture; 'tis a privileged study.  Between ourselves, I have
+ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of
+singular accord.
+
+AEsop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: "What then,"
+said he, "must we drop as we run?"  Let us manage our time; there yet
+remains a great deal idle and ill employed.  The mind has not willingly
+other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating
+itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its
+necessity.  They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from
+being men.  It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels,
+they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay
+themselves lower.  These transcendental humours affright me, like high
+and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life
+of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so
+human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of
+our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are
+highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of
+Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation.  Philotas pleasantly
+quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the
+oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: "Upon thy
+account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live
+with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the
+measure of a man:"
+
+               "Diis to minorem quod geris, imperas."
+
+     ["Because thou carriest thyself lower than the gods, thou rulest."
+     --Horace, Od., iii. 6, 5.]
+
+The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of
+Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: "By so much thou art
+a god, as thou confessest thee a man."  'Tis an absolute and, as it were,
+a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.
+We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our
+own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside.
+'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must
+yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in
+the world, we are but seated upon our breech.  The fairest lives, in my
+opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common
+and human model without miracle, without extravagance.  Old age stands a
+little in need of a more gentle treatment.  Let us recommend that to God,
+the protector of health and wisdom, but let it be gay and sociable:
+
+                   "Frui paratis et valido mihi
+                    Latoe, dones, et precor, integra
+                    Cum mente; nec turpem senectam
+                    Degere, nec Cithara carentem."
+
+     ["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy my possessions in good
+     health; let me be sound in mind; let me not lead a dishonourable
+     old age, nor want the cittern."--Horace, Od., i. 31, 17.]
+
+Or:
+
+     ["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good
+     health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honour when
+     old, nor let music be wanting."]
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY:
+[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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
+Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
+Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
+All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
+As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
+At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
+better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
+Both kings and philosophers go to stool
+Cannot stand the liberty of a friend's advice
+Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
+Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
+Customs and laws make justice
+Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
+Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
+Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
+Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
+First informed who were to be the other guests
+Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
+Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
+Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
+He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
+How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
+"I have done nothing to-day."--"What? have you not lived?"
+If it be a delicious medicine, take it
+Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
+Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
+Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
+Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
+Law: breeder of altercation and division
+Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
+Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.
+Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
+Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
+Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
+Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
+Man after  who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
+Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
+More ado to interpret interpretations
+More books upon books than upon any other subject
+Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
+Nnone that less keep their promise(than physicians)
+Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
+Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
+Our justice presents to us but one hand
+Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
+Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
+Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
+Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
+Prolong your misery an hour or two
+Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
+Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
+Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications
+Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
+So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
+Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
+Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
+Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
+Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
+That we may live, we cease to live
+The mean is best
+There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
+Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
+Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
+Thou diest because thou art living
+Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
+Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
+Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
+We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
+We ought to grant free passage to diseases
+Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
+Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
+Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
+Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+By Michel de Montaigne
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of  The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+#19 in our series by Michel de Montaigne, Translator: Cotton
+Edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877
+
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+Title: The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+
+Author: Michel de Montaigne
+
+Official Release Date: October, 2002 [Etext #3599]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 05/28/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, V19
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+
+
+ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
+
+Translated by Charles Cotton
+
+Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
+
+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.]
+
+Plato, moreover, says, that 'tis the office of prudence to draw
+instructions of divination of future things from dreams: I don't know
+about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates,
+Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.
+Historians say that the Atlantes never dream; who also never eat any
+animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason
+why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of
+diet to beget appropriate dreams.  Mine are very gentle, without any
+agitation of body or expression of voice.  I have seen several of my time
+wonderfully disturbed by them.  Theon the philosopher walked in his
+sleep, and so did Pericles servant, and that upon the tiles and top of
+the house.
+
+I hardly ever choose my dish at table, but take the next at hand, and
+unwillingly change it for another.  A confusion of meats and a clatter of
+dishes displease me as much as any other confusion: I am easily satisfied
+with few dishes: and am an enemy to the opinion of Favorinus, that in a
+feast they should snatch from you the meat you like, and set a plate of
+another sort before you; and that 'tis a pitiful supper, if you do not
+sate your guests with the rumps of various fowls, the beccafico only
+deserving to be all eaten.  I usually eat salt meats, yet I prefer bread
+that has no salt in it; and my baker never sends up other to my table,
+contrary to the custom of the country.  In my infancy, what they had most
+to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best
+love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes.  My tutor contended with
+this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety; and indeed
+'tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies
+itself to.  Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread,
+bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate.  There are some
+who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst
+the partridges; 'tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate;
+'tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary and
+accustomed things.
+
+               "Per qux luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit."
+
+     ["By which the luxury of wealth causes tedium."--Seneca, Ep., 18.]
+
+Not to make good cheer with what another is enjoying, and to be curious
+in what a man eats, is the essence of this vice:
+
+               "Si modica coenare times olus omne patella."
+
+     ["If you can't be content with herbs in a small dish for supper."
+     --Horace, Ep., i. 5, 2.]
+
+There is indeed this difference, that 'tis better to oblige one's
+appetite to things that are most easy to be had; but 'tis always vice to
+oblige one's self.  I formerly said a kinsman of mine was overnice, who,
+by being in our galleys, had unlearned the use of beds and to undress
+when he went to sleep.
+
+If I had any sons, I should willingly wish them my fortune.  The good
+father that God gave me (who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of
+his goodness, but truly 'tis a very hearty one) sent me from my cradle to
+be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the
+while I was at nurse, and still longer, bringing me up to the meanest and
+most common way of living:
+
+          "Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter."
+
+          ["A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty."
+          --Seneca,Ep., 123.]
+
+Never take upon yourselves, and much less give up to your wives, the care
+of their nurture; leave the formation to fortune, under popular and
+natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and
+hardship, that they may rather descend from rigour than mount up to it.
+This humour of his yet aimed at another end, to make me familiar with the
+people and the condition of men who most need our assistance; considering
+that I should rather regard them who extend their arms to me, than those
+who turn their backs upon me; and for this reason it was that he provided
+to hold me at the font persons of the meanest fortune, to oblige and
+attach me to them.
+
+Nor has his design succeeded altogether ill; for, whether upon the
+account of the more honour in such a condescension, or out of a natural
+compassion that has a very great power over me, I have an inclination
+towards the meaner sort of people.  The faction which I should condemn in
+our wars, I should more sharply condemn, flourishing and successful; it
+will somewhat reconcile me to it, when I shall see it miserable and
+overwhelmed.  How willingly do I admire the fine humour of Cheilonis,
+daughter and wife to kings of Sparta.  Whilst her husband Cleombrotus, in
+the commotion of her city, had the advantage over Leonidas her father,
+she, like a good daughter, stuck close to her father in all his misery
+and exile, in opposition to the conqueror.  But so soon as the chance of
+war turned, she changed her will with the change of fortune, and bravely
+turned to her husband's side, whom she accompanied throughout, where his
+ruin carried him: admitting, as it appears to me, no other choice than to
+cleave to the side that stood most in need of her, and where she could
+best manifest her compassion.  I am naturally more apt to follow the
+example of Flaminius, who rather gave his assistance to those who had
+most need of him than to those who had power to do him good, than I do to
+that of Pyrrhus, who was of an humour to truckle under the great and to
+domineer over the poor.
+
+Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm; for, be it that I
+was so accustomed when a child, I eat all the while I sit.  Therefore it
+is that at my own house, though the meals there are of the shortest, I
+usually sit down a little while after the rest, after the manner of
+Augustus, but I do not imitate him in rising also before the rest; on the
+contrary, I love to sit still a long time after, and to hear them talk,
+provided I am none of the talkers: for I tire and hurt myself with
+speaking upon a full stomach, as much as I find it very wholesome and
+pleasant to argue and to strain my voice before dinner.
+
+The ancient Greeks and Romans had more reason than we in setting apart
+for eating, which is a principal action of life, if they were not
+prevented by other extraordinary business, many hours and the greatest
+part of the night; eating and drinking more deliberately than we do, who
+perform all our actions post-haste; and in extending this natural
+pleasure to more leisure and better use, intermixing with profitable
+conversation.
+
+They whose concern it is to have a care of me, may very easily hinder me
+from eating anything they think will do me harm; for in such matters I
+never covet nor miss anything I do not see; but withal, if it once comes
+in my sight, 'tis in vain to persuade me to forbear; so that when I
+design to fast I must be kept apart from the suppers, and must have only
+so much given me as is required for a prescribed collation; for if to
+table, I forget my resolution.  When I order my cook to alter the manner
+of dressing any dish, all my family know what it means, that my stomach
+is out of order, and that I shall not touch it.
+
+I love to have all meats, that will endure it, very little boiled or
+roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone.
+Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as
+patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to
+the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both
+too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good,
+even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have
+always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and
+after dinner.  God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by
+degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much
+the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man.  There
+is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was
+the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several
+others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most
+active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; 'tis so I melt and
+steal away from myself.  What a folly it would be in my understanding to
+apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it
+were from the very top!  I hope I shall not.  I, in truth, receive a
+principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and
+natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope
+from Destiny any other but unlawful favour.  Men make themselves believe
+that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature.  But they
+deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the
+duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so
+universally adored that "The mean is best," of the passed time, and who
+have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall
+I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age?  Whatever happens
+contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes
+according to her should always be pleasant:
+
+     "Omnia, quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis."
+
+     ["All things that are done according to nature
+     are to be accounted good."--Cicero, De Senect., c. 19.]
+
+And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases
+is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is
+of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:
+
+          "Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas."
+
+     ["Young men are taken away by violence, old men by maturity."
+     --Cicero, ubi sup.]
+
+Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates
+its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance.
+I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty
+years of age.  I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is
+it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former,
+than unlike my dying one?  It is too much to abuse nature, to make her
+trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct,
+our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and
+haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary
+of following us herself.
+
+I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons.  My
+father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all.  Eating too much hurts
+me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
+that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
+either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
+me.  We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
+I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
+now again grateful.  In several other things, I find my stomach and
+appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
+white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.
+
+I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
+feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
+digestion than flesh.  As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon fish-
+days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh; the
+difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.
+
+From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
+sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
+made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
+I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
+cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
+the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
+other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
+things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
+goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
+liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
+or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
+same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
+with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
+Periander's feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
+guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
+that which is extracted from society.  I think it more wholesome to eat
+more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
+and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
+four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
+will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
+have the same at supper?  But we old fellows especially, let us take the
+first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and
+prognostics.  The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold
+of the present and known.  I avoid the invariable in these laws of
+fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the
+continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied
+and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured
+to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing
+otherwise but to your prejudice.
+
+I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one
+simple pair of silk stockings is all.  I have suffered myself, for the
+relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account
+of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and
+disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief
+over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet
+must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare's skin or
+a vulture's skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you
+will go a very fine way to work.  I will do nothing of the sort, and
+would willingly leave off what I have begun.  If you fall into any new
+inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek
+out some other.  Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be
+pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add
+something more, and something more after that; there is no end on't.
+
+For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious,
+as the ancients did, to lose one's dinner, and defer making good cheer
+till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so
+was I formerly used to do.  As to health, I since by experience find, on
+the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better
+while awake.  I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my
+mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never
+drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal;
+I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing
+meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice
+precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should
+stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth
+glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites,
+and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming
+thing.  I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part
+water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father's
+physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is
+designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before 'tis brought
+in.  'Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this
+custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed.
+I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till
+after sixteen or eighteen years of age.  The most usual and common method
+of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to
+be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his
+wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure.  Public usage gives the
+law in these things.
+
+I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I
+fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the
+common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the
+difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a
+whole day together.  I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for
+the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.
+
+The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for,
+besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides
+the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light
+offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a
+flaming fire.
+
+To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to
+read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much
+relieved by it.  I am to this hour--to the age of fifty-four--Ignorant of
+the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other.
+'Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and
+weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found
+troublesome, especially by night.  Here is one step back, and a very
+manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and
+so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall
+be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the
+Fatal Sisters untwist our lives.  And so I doubt whether my hearing
+begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I
+shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.  A man
+must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs
+away.
+
+My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or
+my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state.  That preacher is
+very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in
+places of ceremony, where every one's countenance is so starched, where I
+have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order
+it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I
+was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never
+without a switch in my hand, walking or riding.  As the philosopher
+Chrysippus' maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs,
+for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place
+soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his
+companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have
+been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver
+in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever
+they are placed.
+
+'Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one's health, and even to the
+pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and
+sometimes my fingers, in my haste.  Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after
+that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear!  There were men at Rome
+that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace.  I
+lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the
+table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.
+
+There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder
+one another.  Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good
+cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the
+entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, "that it
+is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to
+feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of
+understanding know how to entertain one another."  Varro requires all
+this in entertainments: "Persons of graceful presence and agreeable
+conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and
+delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather."  The art of dining
+well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the
+greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
+science of eating well.  My imagination has delivered three repasts to
+the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
+upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
+excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
+wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
+grace and savour.  I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
+wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
+look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
+too much in love with them.  Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
+all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
+but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
+nature has provided for him.  A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
+but receive them.  I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
+kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions.  We
+have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
+sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
+puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
+all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
+insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:
+
+         "Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit."
+
+          ["Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
+          you put into it."--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]
+
+I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
+conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
+little more than wind.  But what?  We are all wind throughout; and,
+moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
+shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
+without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.
+
+The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
+say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
+Critolaiis.  'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
+them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
+and, peradventure, to be desired.  But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
+condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
+negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
+of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
+intellectual.  The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
+pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
+more just.  There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
+of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
+same.  Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing?  why do they not
+live of their own?  why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
+costs them neither invention nor exertion?  Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury
+afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and
+Bacchus.  These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what
+will not fancy do?  But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it.  Will they
+not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives?  I hate
+that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our
+bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow
+there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.
+Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno
+comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily.
+Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation,
+Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt
+the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking.  The true
+temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than
+Pythagoric, and it becomes him better.  When I dance, I dance; when I
+sleep, I sleep.  Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my
+thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences,
+I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard,
+to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.
+
+Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined
+us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us
+to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and 'tis injustice to
+infringe her laws.  When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst
+of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I
+do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by
+vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious
+thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last
+was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation.  We are great
+fools.  "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done
+nothing to-day."  What? have you not lived?  that is not only the
+fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.  "Had I been
+put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
+could do."  "Have you known how to meditate and manage your life?  you
+have performed the greatest work of all."  In order to shew and develop
+herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
+stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one.  Have you known how
+to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
+composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
+than he who has taken empires and cities.
+
+The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
+to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
+props.  I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
+breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
+dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends.  And Brutus, when heaven
+and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
+hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
+security.  'Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
+from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
+lay them aside and take them up again:
+
+                   "O fortes, pejoraque passi
+                    Mecum saepe viri!  nunc vino pellite curas
+                    Cras ingens iterabimus aequor."
+
+     ["O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
+     cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea."
+     --Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]
+
+Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
+wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
+they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
+profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
+schools.  The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
+just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table.  The sages lived after that
+manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
+in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
+to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
+human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their
+sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in
+the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:
+
+               "Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus."
+
+Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a
+strong and generous soul.  Epaminondas did not think that to take part,
+and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of
+his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his
+glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him.
+And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person
+worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that
+gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly
+trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,
+
+     [This game, as the "Dictionnaire de Trevoux" describes it, is one
+     wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some
+     object.]
+
+amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the
+meanest and most popular actions of men.  And his head full of that
+wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in
+Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the
+blind envy of his enemies at Rome.  Nor is there anything more remarkable
+in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself
+taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well
+spent.  This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a
+whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army,
+surprised and absorbed by some profound thought.  He was the first,
+amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of
+Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body,
+and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms.  It was he
+who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his
+horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so
+unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom
+the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and
+desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of
+Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all.  He
+was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain
+at need a severe abstinence.  He was seen ever to go to the wars, and
+walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer;
+to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to
+eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner.  He was seen, for
+seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the
+indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same
+countenance.  And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters,
+and poison.  But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule
+of civility?  he was also the man of the whole army with whom the
+advantage in drinking, remained.  And he never refused to play at
+noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him
+well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour
+a wise man.  We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to
+be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns
+and forms of perfection.  There are very few examples of life, full and
+pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those
+that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather
+pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners.  The people
+deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where
+the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle
+way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature:
+but withal much less nobly and commendably.
+
+Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing
+forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes
+everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in
+preferring moderate to eminent things.  There is nothing so fine and
+legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as
+well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the
+infirmities we have, 'tis the most barbarous to despise our being.
+
+Whoever has a mind to isolate his spirit, when the body is ill at ease,
+to preserve it from the contagion, let him by all means do it if he can:
+but otherwise let him on the contrary favour and assist it, and not
+refuse to participate of its natural pleasures with a conjugal
+complacency, bringing to it, if it be the wiser, moderation, lest by
+indiscretion they should get confounded with displeasure.  Intemperance
+is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather
+its seasoning.  Euxodus, who therein established the sovereign good, and
+his companions, who set so high a value upon it, tasted it in its most
+charming sweetness, by the means of temperance, which in them was
+singular and exemplary.
+
+I enjoin my soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally
+regulated:
+
+          "Eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia
+          quo in dolore contractio,"
+
+     ["For from the same imperfection arises the expansion of the
+     mind in pleasure and its contraction in sorrow."
+     --Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., iv. 31.]
+
+and equally firm; but the one gaily and the other severely, and so far as
+it is able, to be careful to extinguish the one as to extend the other.
+The judging rightly of good brings along with it the judging soundly of
+evil: pain has something of the inevitable in its tender beginnings, and
+pleasure something of the evitable in its excessive end.  Plato couples
+them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of
+fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming
+blandishments of pleasure: they are two fountains, from which whoever
+draws, when and as much as he needs, whether city, man, or beast, is very
+fortunate.  The first is to be taken medicinally and upon necessity, and
+more scantily; the other for thirst, but not to, drunkenness.  Pain,
+pleasure, love and hatred are the first things that a child is sensible
+of: if, when reason comes, they apply it to themselves, that is virtue.
+
+I have a special vocabulary of my own; I "pass away time," when it is ill
+and uneasy, but when 'tis good I do not pass it away: "I taste it over
+again and adhere to it"; one must run over the ill and settle upon the
+good.  This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time,
+represents the usage of those wise sort of people who think they cannot
+do better with their lives than to let them run out and slide away, pass
+them over, and baulk them, and, as much as they can, ignore them and shun
+them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality: but I know it to
+be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious, even
+in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it; and nature has delivered it
+into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we have only
+ourselves to blame if it be troublesome to us, or escapes us
+unprofitably:
+
+     "Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur."
+
+     ["The life of a fool is thankless, timorous, and wholly bent upon
+     the future."--Seneca, Ep:, 15.]
+
+Nevertheless I compose myself to lose mine without regret; but withal as
+a thing that is perishable by its condition, not that it molests or
+annoys me.  Nor does it properly well become any not to be displeased
+when they die, excepting such as are pleased to live.  There is good
+husbandry in enjoying it: I enjoy it double to what others do; for the
+measure of its fruition depends upon our more or less application to it.
+Chiefly that I perceive mine to be so short in time, I desire to extend
+it in weight; I will stop the promptitude of its flight by the
+promptitude of my grasp; and by the vigour of using it compensate the
+speed of its running away.  In proportion as the possession of life is
+more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.
+
+Others feel the pleasure of content and prosperity; I feel it too, as
+well as they, but not as it passes and slips by; one should study, taste,
+and ruminate upon it to render condign thanks to Him who grants it to us.
+They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing
+it.  To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from
+me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I
+might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it.  I ponder with
+myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my
+reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it.  Do I find
+myself in any calm composedness?  is there any pleasure that tickles me?
+I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to
+it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to take delight; not
+there to lose itself, but to be present there; and I employ it, on its
+part, to view itself in this prosperous state, to weigh and appreciate
+its happiness and to amplify it.  It reckons how much it stands indebted
+to God that its conscience and the intestine passions are in repose; that
+it has the body in its natural disposition, orderly and competently
+enjoying the soft and soothing functions by which He, of His grace is
+pleased to compensate the sufferings wherewith His justice at His good
+pleasure chastises us.  It reflects how great a benefit it is to be so
+protected, that which way soever it turns its eye the heavens are calm
+around it.  No desire, no fear, no doubt, troubles the air; no
+difficulty, past, present, or to, come, that its imagination may not pass
+over without offence.  This consideration takes great lustre from the
+comparison of different conditions.  So it is that I present to my
+thought, in a thousand aspects, those whom fortune or their own error
+carries away and torments.  And, again, those who, more like to me, so
+negligently and incuriously receive their good fortune.  Those are folks
+who spend their time indeed; they pass over the present and that which
+they possess, to wait on hope, and for shadows and vain images which
+fancy puts before them:
+
+         "Morte obita quales fama est volitare figuras,
+          Aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus:"
+
+     ["Such forms as those which after death are reputed to hover about,
+     or dreams which delude the senses in sleep."--AEneid, x. 641.]
+
+which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are pursued.
+The fruit and end of their pursuit is to pursue; as Alexander said, that
+the end of his labour was to labour:
+
+          "Nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum."
+
+     ["Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done.
+     --"Lucan, ii. 657.]
+
+For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased
+God to bestow it upon us.  I do not desire it should be without the
+necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less
+excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long;
+
+     "Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus:"
+
+     ["A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches."
+     --Seneca, Ep., 119.]
+
+nor that we should support ourselves by putting only a little of that
+drug into our mouths, by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept
+himself alive; nor that we should stupidly beget children with our
+fingers or heels, but rather; with reverence be it spoken, that we might
+voluptuously beget them with our fingers and heels; nor that the body
+should be without desire and without titillation.  These are ungrateful
+and wicked complaints.  I accept kindly, and with gratitude, what nature
+has done for me; am well pleased with it, and proud of it.  A man does
+wrong to that great and omnipotent giver to refuse, annul, or disfigure
+his gift: all goodness himself, he has made everything good:
+
+     "Omnia quae secundum naturam sunt, aestimatione digna sunt."
+
+     ["All things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem."
+     --Cicero, De Fin., iii. 6.]
+
+Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most
+solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is,
+suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my
+thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that 'tis a
+barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable
+with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the
+dishonest.  That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by
+a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a
+fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action
+according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey.
+Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in
+getting their wives' maidenheads than in its lesson.
+
+This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as
+he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more
+force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity.  This, according to
+him, goes by no means alone--he is not so fantastic--but only it goes
+first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of
+pleasure.  Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than
+prudent and just.
+
+          "Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,
+          quid ea postulet, pervidendum."
+
+     ["A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine
+     what she requires."--Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]
+
+I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial
+traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is "to live
+according to it," becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and
+that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is "to consent to nature."
+Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are
+necessary?  And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not
+a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says
+an ancient, the gods always conspire.  To what end do we dismember by
+divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence?
+Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse
+and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the
+levity of the soul:
+
+     "Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,
+     naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et
+     carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non
+     veritate divina."
+
+     ["He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and
+     condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally
+     desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels
+     thus from human vanity, not from divine truth."
+     --St. Augustin, De Civit.  Dei, xiv.  5.]
+
+In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care;
+we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to
+man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and
+the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly
+prescribed it to us.  Authority has power only to work in regard to
+matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language;
+therefore let us again charge at it in this place:
+
+     "Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter
+     facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;
+     distrahique inter diversissimos motus?"
+
+     ["Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and
+     contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body
+     one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly
+     different motions?"--Seneca, Ep., 74.]
+
+To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies
+and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he
+diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in
+eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at
+your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had
+better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses
+and notions are not worth the worst mess there.  Though they were the
+ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then?  I do not here speak of, nor
+mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts
+and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour
+of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of
+divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope,
+prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last
+step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure,
+disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous
+conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual
+and temporal pasture; 'tis a privileged study.  Between ourselves, I have
+ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of
+singular accord.
+
+AEsop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: "What then,"
+said he, "must we drop as we run?"  Let us manage our time; there yet
+remains a great deal idle and ill employed.  The mind has not willingly
+other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating
+itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its
+necessity.  They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from
+being men.  It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels,
+they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay
+themselves lower.  These transcendental humours affright me, like high
+and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life
+of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so
+human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of
+our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are
+highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of
+Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation.  Philotas pleasantly
+quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the
+oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: "Upon thy
+account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live
+with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the
+measure of a man:"
+
+               "Diis to minorem quod geris, imperas."
+
+     ["Because thou carriest thyself lower than the gods, thou rulest."
+     --Horace, Od., iii. 6, 5.]
+
+The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of
+Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: "By so much thou art
+a god, as thou confessest thee a man."  'Tis an absolute and, as it were,
+a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.
+We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our
+own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside.
+'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must
+yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in
+the world, we are but seated upon our breech.  The fairest lives, in my
+opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common
+and human model without miracle, without extravagance.  Old age stands a
+little in need of a more gentle treatment.  Let us recommend that to God,
+the protector of health and wisdom, but let it be gay and sociable:
+
+                   "Frui paratis et valido mihi
+                    Latoe, dones, et precor, integra
+                    Cum mente; nec turpem senectam
+                    Degere, nec Cithara carentem."
+
+     ["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy my possessions in good
+     health; let me be sound in mind; let me not lead a dishonourable
+     old age, nor want the cittern."--Horace, Od., i. 31, 17.]
+
+Or:
+
+     ["Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good
+     health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honour when
+     old, nor let music be wanting."]
+
+
+
+
+APOLOGY:
+[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.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
+Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
+Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
+All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
+As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
+At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
+better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
+Both kings and philosophers go to stool
+Cannot stand the liberty of a friend's advice
+Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
+Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
+Customs and laws make justice
+Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
+Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
+Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
+Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
+First informed who were to be the other guests
+Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
+Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
+Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
+He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
+How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
+"I have done nothing to-day."--"What? have you not lived?"
+If it be a delicious medicine, take it
+Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
+Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
+Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
+Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
+Law: breeder of altercation and division
+Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
+Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.
+Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
+Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
+Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
+Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
+Man after  who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
+Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
+More ado to interpret interpretations
+More books upon books than upon any other subject
+Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
+Nnone that less keep their promise(than physicians)
+Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
+Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
+Our justice presents to us but one hand
+Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
+Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
+Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
+Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
+Prolong your misery an hour or two
+Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
+Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
+Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications
+Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
+So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
+Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
+Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
+Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
+Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
+That we may live, we cease to live
+The mean is best
+There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
+Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
+Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
+Thou diest because thou art living
+Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
+Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
+Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
+We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
+We ought to grant free passage to diseases
+Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
+Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
+Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
+Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V19
+By Michel de Montaigne
+
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