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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Essays of Montaigne, V9, by Montaigne
+#9 in our series by Michel de Montaigne, Translated by Charles Cotton,
+Edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877
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+Title: The Essays of Montaigne, V9
+
+Author: Michel de Montaigne
+
+Official Release Date: October, 2002 [Etext #3589]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 06/03/01]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Essays of Montaigne, V9, by Montaigne
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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 9.
+
+I.        Of the inconstancy of our actions.
+II.       Of drunkenness.
+III.      A custom of the Isle of Cea.
+IV.       To-morrow's a new day.
+V.        Of conscience.
+VI.       Use makes perfect.
+
+
+
+ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS
+
+Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
+themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
+them into the world's eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
+commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
+they should proceed from one and the same person.  We find the younger
+Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus.  Pope Boniface
+VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
+it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
+same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
+a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
+"O that I had never been taught to write!" so much it went to his heart
+to condemn a man to death.  All story is full of such examples, and every
+man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
+observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
+themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
+irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
+nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:
+
+          "Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest."
+
+          ["'Tis evil counsel that will admit no change."
+          --Pub.  Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]
+
+There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
+usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
+our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
+little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
+solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
+that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
+uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
+Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
+continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
+has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics.  I can
+more hardly believe a man's constancy than any other virtue, and believe
+nothing sooner than the contrary.  He that would judge of a man in detail
+and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth.  It
+is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
+formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
+principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
+of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
+"it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
+not vouchsafe," says he, "to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
+not just, it is impossible it should be always one."  I have indeed
+formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
+measure, and therefore 'tis impossible to fix constancy to it.  'Tis a
+saying of.  Demosthenes, "that the beginning oh all virtue is
+consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy."  If we
+would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
+best, but nobody has thought on't:
+
+          "Quod petiit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
+          AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto."
+
+     ["That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
+     again.  He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
+     life.!--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]
+
+Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
+it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
+by the breath of occasion.  We never meditate what we would have till the
+instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
+which receives its colour from what it is laid upon.  What we but just
+now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
+again to it; 'tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:
+
+               "Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum."
+
+     ["We are turned about like the top with the thong of others."
+     --Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]
+
+We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
+with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:
+
+                         "Nonne videmus,
+          Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
+          Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?"
+
+     ["Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
+     for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 1070.
+
+Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.
+
+         "Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
+          Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras."
+
+     ["Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
+     which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth."
+     --Cicero, Frag.  Poet, lib. x.]
+
+We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely,
+nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.  In any one who had prescribed
+and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own
+conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an
+infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his
+whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines,
+that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last,
+and built as if they had been to live for ever.  The judgment would not
+be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein
+has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; 'tis a harmony of
+very according sounds, that cannot jar.  But with us 't is quite
+contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment.  The
+surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from
+the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer
+inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence.  I was told,
+during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the
+place where I then was, had thrown herself out of a window to avoid being
+forced by a common soldier who was quartered in the house; she was not
+killed by the fall, and therefore, repeating her attempt would have cut
+her own throat, had she not been prevented; but having, nevertheless,
+wounded herself to some show of danger, she voluntarily confessed that
+the soldier had not as yet importuned her otherwise; than by courtship,
+earnest solicitation, and presents; but that she was afraid that in the
+end he would have proceeded to violence, all which she delivered with
+such a countenance and accent, and withal embrued in her own blood, the
+highest testimony of her virtue, that she appeared another Lucretia; and
+yet I have since been very well assured that both before and after she
+was not so difficult a piece.  And, according to my host's tale in
+Ariosto, be as handsome a man and as worthy a gentleman as you will, do
+not conclude too much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity for having
+been repulsed; you do not know but she may have a better stomach to your
+muleteer.
+
+Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favour
+and esteem for his valour, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him
+of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished,
+and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than
+before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: "Yourself, sir,"
+replied the other, "by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of
+my life."  Lucullus's soldier having been rifled by the enemy, performed
+upon them in revenge a brave exploit, by which having made himself a
+gainer, Lucullus, who had conceived a good opinion of him from that
+action, went about to engage him in some enterprise of very great danger,
+with all the plausible persuasions and promises he could think of;
+
+          "Verbis, quae timido quoque possent addere mentem"
+
+          ["Words which might add courage to any timid man."
+          --Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 1, 2.]
+
+"Pray employ," answered he, "some miserable plundered soldier in that
+affair":
+
+                         "Quantumvis rusticus, ibit,
+               Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit;"
+
+     ["Some poor fellow, who has lost his purse, will go whither you
+     wish, said he."--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 39.]
+
+and flatly refused to go.  When we read that Mahomet having furiously
+rated Chasan, Bassa of the Janissaries, because he had seen the
+Hungarians break into his squadrons, and himself behave very ill in the
+business, and that Chasan, instead of any other answer, rushed furiously
+alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of the enemy, where he was
+presently cut to pieces, we are not to look upon that action,
+peradventure, so much as vindication as a turn of mind, not so much
+natural valour as a sudden despite.  The man you saw yesterday so
+adventurous and brave, you must not think it strange to see him as great
+a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the
+trumpet had roused his spirits; this is no valour formed and established
+by reason, but accidentally created by such circumstances, and therefore
+it is no wonder if by contrary circumstances it appear quite another
+thing.
+
+These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given
+occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct
+powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the
+other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so
+abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same
+source.
+
+For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it
+according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble
+myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look
+narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same
+condition.  I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another,
+according to the side I turn her to.  If I speak variously of myself, it
+is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there
+to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another:
+bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
+ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant;
+liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less,
+according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the
+bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this
+volubility and discordance.  I have nothing to say of myself entirely,
+simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion.  'Distinguo' is the
+most universal member of my logic.  Though I always intend to speak well
+of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the
+best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition,
+that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice itself, if well-doing
+were not judged by the intention only.  One gallant action, therefore,
+ought not to conclude a man valiant; if a man were brave indeed, he would
+be always so, and upon all occasions.  If it were a habit of valour and
+not a sally, it would render a man equally resolute in all accidents; the
+same alone as in company; the same in lists as in a battle: for, let them
+say what they will, there is not one valour for the pavement and another
+for the field; he would bear a sickness in his bed as bravely as a wound
+in the field, and no more fear death in his own house than at an assault.
+We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with a brave
+assurance, and afterwards torment himself like a woman for the loss of a
+trial at law or the death of a child; when, being an infamous coward, he
+is firm in the necessities of poverty; when he shrinks at the sight of a
+barber's razor, and rushes fearless upon the swords of the enemy, the
+action is commendable, not the man.
+
+Many of the Greeks, says Cicero, --[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 27.]--
+cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness;
+the Cimbrians and Celtiberians quite contrary;
+
+              "Nihil enim potest esse aequabile,
+               quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur."
+
+     ["Nothing can be regular that does not proceed from a fixed ground
+     of reason."-- Idem, ibid., c. 26.]
+
+No valour can be more extreme in its kind than that of Alexander: but it
+is of but one kind, nor full enough throughout, nor universal.
+Incomparable as it is, it has yet some blemishes; of which his being so
+often at his wits' end upon every light suspicion of his captains
+conspiring against his life, and the carrying himself in that inquisition
+with so much vehemence and indiscreet injustice, and with a fear that
+subverted his natural reason, is one pregnant instance.  The
+superstition, also, with which he was so much tainted, carries along with
+it some image of pusillanimity; and the excess of his penitence for the
+murder of Clytus is also a testimony of the unevenness of his courage.
+All we perform is no other than a cento, as a man may say, of several
+pieces, and we would acquire honour by a false title.  Virtue cannot be
+followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some
+other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.  'Tis a vivid and
+strong tincture which, when the soul has once thoroughly imbibed it, will
+not out but with the piece.  And, therefore, to make a right judgment of
+a man, we are long and very observingly to follow his trace: if constancy
+does not there stand firm upon her own proper base,
+
+               "Cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est,"
+
+     ["If the way of his life is thoroughly considered and traced out."
+     --Cicero, Paradox, v. 1.]
+
+if the variety of occurrences makes him alter his pace (his path, I mean,
+for the pace may be faster or slower) let him go; such an one runs before
+the wind, "Avau le dent," as the motto of our Talebot has it.
+
+'Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a
+dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.  It is not possible for
+any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is
+impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form
+already contrived in his imagination.  Of what use are colours to him
+that knows not what he is to paint?  No one lays down a certain design
+for his life, and we only deliberate thereof by pieces.  The archer ought
+first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow,
+string, shaft, and motion to it; our counsels deviate and wander, because
+not levelled to any determinate end.  No wind serves him who addresses
+his voyage to no certain, port.  I cannot acquiesce in the judgment given
+by one in the behalf of Sophocles,  who concluded him capable of the
+management of domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son, from
+having read one of his tragedies.
+
+Neither do I allow of the conjecture of the Parians, sent to regulate the
+Milesians sufficient for such a consequence as they from thence derived
+coming to visit the island, they took notice of such grounds as were best
+husbanded, and such country-houses as were best governed; and having
+taken the names of the owners, when they had assembled the citizens, they
+appointed these farmers for new governors and magistrates; concluding
+that they, who had been so provident in their own private concerns, would
+be so of the public too.  We are all lumps, and of so various and inform
+a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and
+there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and
+others:
+
+               "Magnam rem puta, unum hominem agere."
+
+     ["Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same
+     man."--Seneca, Ep., 150.]
+
+Since ambition can teach man valour, temperance, and liberality, and even
+justice too; seeing that avarice can inspire the courage of a shop-boy,
+bred and nursed up in obscurity and ease, with the assurance to expose
+himself so far from the fireside to the mercy of the waves and angry
+Neptune in a frail boat; that she further teaches discretion and
+prudence; and that even Venus can inflate boys under the discipline of
+the rod with boldness and resolution, and infuse masculine courage into
+the heart of tender virgins in their mothers' arms:
+
+         "Hac duce, custodes furtim transgressa jacentes,
+          Ad juvenem tenebris sola puella venit:"
+
+     ["She leading, the maiden, furtively passing by the recumbent
+     guards, goes alone in the darkness to the youth."
+     --Tibullus, ii. 2, 75.]
+
+'tis not all the understanding has to do, simply to judge us by our
+outward actions; it must penetrate the very soul, and there discover by
+what springs the motion is guided.  But that being a high and hazardous
+undertaking, I could wish that fewer would attempt it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+OF DRUNKENNESS
+
+The world is nothing but variety and disemblance, vices are all alike, as
+they are vices, and peradventure the Stoics understand them so; but
+although they are equally vices, yet they are not all equal vices; and he
+who has transgressed the ordinary bounds a hundred paces:
+
+          "Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,"
+
+          ["Beyond or within which the right cannot exist."
+          --Horace, Sat., i, 1, 107.]
+
+should not be in a worse condition than he that has advanced but ten, is
+not to be believed; or that sacrilege is not worse than stealing a
+cabbage:
+
+         "Nec vincet ratio hoc, tantumdem ut peccet, idemque,
+          Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,
+          Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit."
+
+There is in this as great diversity as in anything whatever.  The
+confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers,
+traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they
+should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle,
+lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion.  Every one overrates the
+offence of his companions, but extenuates his own.  Our very instructors
+themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill.  As Socrates
+said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from
+evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the
+science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that
+very exactly performed, the virtuous and the wicked will remain
+confounded and unrecognised.
+
+Now, amongst the rest, drunkenness seems to me to be a gross and brutish
+vice.  The soul has greater part in the rest, and there are some vices
+that have something, if a man may so say, of generous in them; there are
+vices wherein there is a mixture of knowledge, diligence, valour,
+prudence, dexterity, and address; this one is totally corporeal and
+earthly.  And the rudest nation this day in Europe is that alone where it
+is in fashion.  Other vices discompose the understanding: this totally
+overthrows it and renders the body stupid:
+
+              "Cum vini vis penetravit .  .  .
+               Consequitur gravitas membrorum, praepediuntur
+               Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens,
+               Nant oculi; clamor, singultus, jurgia, gliscunt."
+
+     ["When the power of wine has penetrated us, a heaviness of the limbs
+     follows, the legs of the tottering person are impeded; the tongue
+     grows torpid, the mind is dimmed, the eyes swim; noise, hiccup, and
+     quarrels arise.--"Lucretius, i. 3, 475.]
+
+The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and
+government of himself.  And 'tis said amongst other things upon this
+subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top
+whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond
+measure, vents the most inward secrets:
+
+                   "Tu sapientum
+                    Curas et arcanum jocoso
+                    Consilium retegis Lyaeo."
+
+     ["Thou disclosest to the merry Lyacus the cares and secret
+     counsel of the wise."--Horace, Od., xxi. 1, 114.]
+
+     [Lyacus, a name given to Bacchus.]
+
+Josephus tells us that by giving an ambassador the enemy had sent to him
+his full dose of liquor, he wormed out his secrets.  And yet, Augustus,
+committing the most inward secrets of his affairs to Lucius Piso, who
+conquered Thrace, never found him faulty in the least, no more than
+Tiberias did Cossus, with whom he intrusted his whole counsels, though we
+know they were both so given to drink that they have often been fain to
+carry both the one and the other drunk out of the Senate:
+
+          "Hesterno inflatum venas ut semper, Lyaeo."
+
+     ["Their veins full, as usual, of yesterday's wine."
+     --Virgil, Egl., vi.  15.]
+
+And the design of killing Caesar was as safely communicated to Cimber,
+though he would often be drunk, as to Cassius, who drank nothing but
+water.
+
+     [As to which Cassius pleasantly said: "What, shall I bear
+     a tyrant, I who cannot bear wine?"]
+
+We see our Germans, when drunk as the devil, know their post, remember
+the word, and keep to their ranks:
+
+               "Nec facilis victoria de madidis, et
+               Blaesis, atque mero titubantibus."
+
+     ["Nor is a victory easily obtained over men so drunk, they can
+     scarce speak or stand."--Juvenal, Sat., xv.  47.]
+
+I could not have believed there had been so profound, senseless, and dead
+a degree of drunkenness had I not read in history that Attalus having,
+to put a notable affront upon him, invited to supper the same Pausanias,
+who upon the very same occasion afterwards killed Philip of Macedon,
+a king who by his excellent qualities gave sufficient testimony of his
+education in the house and company of Epaminondas, made him drink to such
+a pitch that he could after abandon his beauty, as of a hedge strumpet,
+to the muleteers and servants of the basest office in the house.  And I
+have been further told by a lady whom I highly honour and esteem, that
+near Bordeaux and about Castres  where she lives, a country woman, a
+widow of chaste repute, perceiving in herself the first symptoms of
+breeding, innocently told her neighbours that if she had a husband she
+should think herself with child; but the causes of suspicion every day
+more and more increasing, and at last growing up to a manifest proof, the
+poor woman was reduced to the necessity of causing it to be proclaimed in
+her parish church, that whoever had done that deed and would frankly
+confess it, she did not only promise to forgive, but moreover to marry
+him, if he liked the motion; whereupon a young fellow that served her in
+the quality of a labourer, encouraged by this proclamation, declared that
+he had one holiday found her, having taken too much of the bottle, so
+fast asleep by the chimney and in so indecent a posture, that he could
+conveniently do his business without waking her; and they yet live
+together man and wife.
+
+It is true that antiquity has not much decried this vice; the writings
+even of several philosophers speak very tenderly of it, and even amongst
+the Stoics there are some who advise folks to give themselves sometimes
+the liberty to drink, nay, to drunkenness, to refresh the soul:
+
+          "Hoc quoque virtutum quondam certamine, magnum
+          Socratem palmam promeruisse ferunt."
+
+     ["In this trial of power formerly they relate that the great
+     Socrates deserved the palm."--Cornet. Gallus, Ep., i. 47.]
+
+That censor and reprover of others, Cato, was reproached that he was a
+hard drinker:
+
+                    Narratur et prisci Catonis
+                    Saepe mero caluisse virtus."
+
+     ["And of old Cato it is said, that his courage was often warmed with
+     wine."--Horace, Od., xxi. 3, 11. --Cato the Elder.]
+
+Cyrus, that so renowned king, amongst the other qualities by which he
+claimed to be preferred before his brother Artaxerxes, urged this
+excellence, that he could drink a great deal more than he.  And in the
+best governed nations this trial of skill in drinking is very much in
+use.  I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that
+lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not
+amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest
+they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the
+Persians used to consult about their most important affairs after being
+well warmed with wine.
+
+My taste and constitution are greater enemies to this vice than my
+discourse; for besides that I easily submit my belief to the authority of
+ancient opinions, I look upon it indeed as an unmanly and stupid vice,
+but less malicious and hurtful than the others, which, almost all, more
+directly jostle public society.  And if we cannot please ourselves but it
+must cost us something, as they hold, I find this vice costs a man's
+conscience less than the others, besides that it is of no difficult
+preparation, nor hard to be found, a consideration not altogether to be
+despised.  A man well advanced both in dignity and age, amongst three
+principal commodities that he said remained to him of life, reckoned to
+me this for one, and where would a man more justly find it than amongst
+the natural conveniences?  But he did not take it right, for delicacy and
+the curious choice of wines is therein to be avoided.  If you found your
+pleasure upon drinking of the best, you condemn yourself to the penance
+of drinking of the worst.  Your taste must be more indifferent and free;
+so delicate a palate is not required to make a good toper.  The Germans
+drink almost indifferently of all wines with delight; their business is
+to pour down and not to taste; and it's so much the better for them:
+their pleasure is so much the more plentiful and nearer at hand.
+
+Secondly, to drink, after the French fashion, but at two meals, and then
+very moderately, is to be too sparing of the favours of the god.  There
+is more time and constancy required than so.  The ancients spent whole
+nights in this exercise, and ofttimes added the day following to eke it
+out, and therefore we are to take greater liberty and stick closer to our
+work.  I have seen a great lord of my time, a man of high enterprise and
+famous success, that without setting himself to't, and after his ordinary
+rate of drinking at meals, drank not much less than five quarts of wine,
+and at his going away appeared but too wise and discreet, to the
+detriment of our affairs.  The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course
+of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it;
+we should, like shopboys and labourers, refuse no occasion nor omit any
+opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.  Methinks we
+every day abridge and curtail the use of wine, and that the after
+breakfasts, dinner snatches, and collations I used to see in my father's
+house, when I was a boy, were more usual and frequent then than now.
+
+Is it that we pretend to a reformation?  Truly, no: but it may be we are
+more addicted to Venus than our fathers were.  They are two exercises
+that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour.  Lechery weakens our
+stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce
+and amorous for the exercise of love.
+
+'Tis wonderful what strange stories I have heard my father tell of the
+chastity of that age wherein he lived.  It was for him to say it, being
+both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies.
+He spoke well and little: ever mixing his language with some illustration
+out of authors most in use, especially in Spanish, and among the Spanish
+he whom they called Marcus Aurelius --[ Guevara's Golden Book of Marcus
+Aurelius Antoninus.]-- was ordinarily in his mouth.  His behaviour was
+gently grave, humble, and very modest; he was very solicitous of neatness
+and propriety both in his person and clothes, whether on horseback or
+afoot, he was monstrously punctual in his word; and of a conscience and
+religion generally tending rather towards superstition than otherwise.
+For a man of little stature, very strong, well proportioned, and well
+knit; of a pleasing countenance inclining to brown, and very adroit in
+all noble exercises.  I have yet in the house to be seen canes poured
+full of lead, with which they say he exercised his arms for throwing the
+bar or the stone, or in fencing; and shoes with leaden soles to make him
+lighter for running or leaping.  Of his vaulting he has left little
+miracles behind him: I have seen him when past three score laugh at our
+exercises, and throw himself in his furred gown into the saddle, make the
+tour of a table upon his thumbs and scarce ever mount the stairs into his
+chamber without taking three or four steps at a time.  But as to what I
+was speaking of before; he said there was scarce one woman of quality of
+ill fame in the whole province: he would tell of strange confidences, and
+some of them his own, with virtuous women, free from any manner of
+suspicion of ill, and for his own part solemnly swore he was a virgin at
+his marriage; and yet it was after a long practice of arms beyond the
+mountains, of which wars he left us a journal under his own hand, wherein
+he has given a precise account from point to point of all passages, both
+relating to the public and to himself.  And he was, moreover, married at
+a well advanced maturity, in the year 1528, the three-and-thirtieth year
+of his age, upon his way home from Italy.  But let us return to our
+bottles.
+
+The incommodities of old age, that stand in need of some refreshment and
+support, might with reason beget in me a desire of this faculty, it being
+as it were the last pleasure the course of years deprives us of.  The
+natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that
+concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes
+a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of
+human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end,
+like a vapour that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where
+it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.  I do not,
+nevertheless, understand how a man can extend the pleasure of drinking
+beyond thirst, and forge in his imagination an appetite artificial and
+against nature; my stomach would not proceed so far; it has enough to do
+to deal with what it takes in for its necessity.  My constitution is not
+to care for drink but as following eating and washing down my meat, and
+for that reason my last draught is always the greatest.  And seeing that
+in old age we have our palate furred with phlegms or depraved by some
+other ill constitution, the wine tastes better to us as the pores are
+cleaner washed and laid more open.  At least, I seldom taste the first
+glass well.  Anacharsis wondered that the Greeks drank in greater glasses
+towards the end of a meal than at the beginning; which was, I suppose,
+for the same reason the Germans do the same, who then begin the battle of
+drink.
+
+Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk
+till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and
+to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that
+good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their
+youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by
+fire; and in his Lazes allows such merry meetings, provided they have a
+discreet chief to govern and keep them in order, as good and of great
+utility; drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every
+one's nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert
+themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare
+not attempt when sober.  He, moreover, says that wine is able to supply
+the soul with temperance and the body with health.  Nevertheless, these
+restrictions, in part borrowed from the Carthaginians, please him: that
+men forbear excesses in the expeditions of war; that every judge and
+magistrate abstain from it when about the administrations of his place or
+the consultations of the public affairs; that the day is not to be
+employed with it, that being a time due to other occupations, nor the
+night on which a man intends to get children.
+
+'Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely
+hastened his end by drinking pure wine.  The same thing, but not designed
+by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus.
+
+But 'tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can
+be overcome by the strength of wine?
+
+               "Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae."
+
+To what vanity does the good opinion we have of ourselves push us?  The
+most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to
+keep itself upright, and from being overthrown by its own weakness.
+There is not one of a thousand that is right and settled so much as one
+minute in a whole life, and that may not very well doubt, whether
+according to her natural condition she ever can be; but to join constancy
+to it is her utmost perfection; I mean when nothing should jostle and
+discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do.  'Tis to much purpose
+that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy,
+when, behold!  he goes mad with a love philtre.  Is it to be imagined
+that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?  Some men
+have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight
+wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.  Let him be as wise
+as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more
+frail, more miserable, or more nothing?  Wisdom does not force our
+natural dispositions,
+
+               "Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
+               Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
+               Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
+               Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus."
+
+     ["Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is
+     rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
+     there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
+     influence of fear."--Lucretius, iii. 155.]
+
+he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
+tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
+reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
+reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
+he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
+not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:
+
+               "Humani a se nihil alienum putet."
+
+     [" Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
+     men in general."--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]
+
+The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
+greatest heroes of tears:
+
+          "Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas."
+
+     ["Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet."
+     --Aeneid, vi. i.]
+
+'Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
+totally to suppress them is not in him to do.  Even our great Plutarch,
+that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
+and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
+proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
+stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c.  3.]
+-- All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
+interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
+above than with what is below it.
+
+Let us leave that other sect, that sets up an express profession of
+scornful superiority --[The Stoics.]--: but when even in that sect,
+reputed the most quiet and gentle, we hear these rhodomontades of
+Metrodorus:
+
+          "Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi: omnesque aditus tuos
+          interclusi ut ad me aspirare non posses;"
+
+     [Fortune, I have got the better of thee, and have made all the
+     avenues so sure thou canst not come at me."
+     --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 9.]
+
+when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put
+into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say,
+"Strike, batter, break; 'tis not Anaxarchus, 'tis but his sheath that you
+pound and bray so"; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from
+the middle of the flame, "This side is roasted enough, fall to and eat,
+it is enough done; fall to work with the other;" when we hear the child
+in Josephus' torn piece-meal with pincers, defying Antiochus, and crying
+out with a constant and assured voice: "Tyrant, thou losest thy labour,
+I am still at ease; where is the pain, where are the torments with which
+thou didst so threaten me?  Is this all thou canst do?  My constancy
+torments thee more than thy cruelty does me.  O pitiful coward, thou
+faintest, and I grow stronger; make me complain, make me bend, make me
+yield if thou canst; encourage thy guards, cheer up thy executioners;
+see, see they faint, and can do no more; arm them, flesh them anew, spur
+them up"; truly, a man must confess that there is some phrenzy, some
+fury, how holy soever, that at that time possesses those souls.  When we
+come to these Stoical sallies: "I had rather be mad than voluptuous," a
+saying of Antisthenes.  When Sextius tells us, "he had rather be fettered
+with affliction than pleasure": when Epicurus takes upon him to play with
+his gout, and, refusing health and ease, defies all torments, and
+despising the lesser pains, as disdaining to contend with them, he covets
+and calls out for others sharper, more violent, and more worthy of him;
+
+          "Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis
+          Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem:"
+
+     ["And instead of timid beasts, wishes the foaming boar or tawny lion
+     would come from the mountain."--AEneid, iv. 158.]
+
+who but must conclude that these are wild sallies pushed on by a courage
+that has broken loose from its place?  Our soul cannot from her own seat
+reach so high; 'tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and,
+taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall
+afterwards himself be astonished at what he has done; as, in war, the
+heat of battle impels generous soldiers to perform things of so infinite
+danger, as afterwards, recollecting them, they themselves are the first
+to wonder at; as it also fares with the poets, who are often rapt with
+admiration of their own writings, and know not where again to find the
+track through which they performed so fine a Career; which also is in
+them called fury and rapture.  And as Plato says, 'tis to no purpose for
+a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy: so Aristotle says, that
+no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason
+to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own
+judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular
+government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion,
+and for which she is to herself responsible.  Plato argues thus, that the
+faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of
+ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be
+obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some
+celestial rapture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA
+
+          [Cos.  Cea is the form of the name given by Pliny]
+
+If to philosophise be, as 'tis defined, to doubt, much more to write at
+random and play the fool, as I do, ought to be reputed doubting, for it
+is for novices and freshmen to inquire and to dispute, and for the
+chairman to moderate and determine.
+
+My moderator is the authority of the divine will, that governs us without
+contradiction, and that is seated above these human and vain
+contestations.
+
+Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to
+Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they
+did not in time reconcile themselves to his favour:  "Why, you pitiful
+fellow," replied he, "what can they suffer who do not fear to die?"  It
+being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free?  "Why," said
+he, "by despising death."  These, and a thousand other sayings to the
+same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient
+attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several
+accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself.  Witness the
+Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by
+his master commanded to some base employment: "Thou shalt see," says the
+boy, "whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being
+so near the reach of liberty," and having so said, threw himself from the
+top of the house.  Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians,
+that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of
+his: "If thou threatenest us with more than death," replied they, "we
+shall the more willingly die"; and to Philip, having written them word
+that he would frustrate all their enterprises: "What, wilt thou also
+hinder us from dying?"  This is the meaning of the sentence, "That the
+wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the
+most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all
+colour of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own
+custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a
+hundred thousand ways out.  We may be straitened for earth to live upon,
+but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus
+answered the Romans."--[Tacitus, Annal., xiii.  56.]--  Why dost thou
+complain of this world?  it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the
+cause, if thou livest in pain.  There needs no more to die but to will to
+die:
+
+               "Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus.
+               Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
+               At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent."
+
+     ["Death is everywhere: heaven has well provided for that.  Any one
+     may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death.  To death
+     there are a thousand avenues."--Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]
+
+Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure
+of all; 'tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very
+often to be sought.  It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his
+end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before
+his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it
+comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there's
+the end of the clue.  The most voluntary death is the finest.  Life
+depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.  We ought not to
+accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.
+Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; 'tis folly to be
+concerned by any such apprehension. Living is slavery if the liberty of
+dying be wanting.  The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the
+expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and
+amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one
+step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.  Why is not the
+jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein?  For a desperate
+disease a desperate cure.  Servius the grammarian, being tormented with
+the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his
+legs, to deprive them of their sense; let them be gouty at their will, so
+they were insensible of pain.  God gives us leave enough to go when He is
+pleased to reduce us to such a condition that to live is far worse than
+to die.  'Tis weakness to truckle under infirmities, but it's madness to
+nourish them.  The Stoics say, that it is living according to nature in a
+wise man to, take his leave of life, even in the height of prosperity,
+if he do it opportunely; and in a fool to prolong it, though he be
+miserable, provided he be not indigent of those things which they repute
+to be according to nature.  As I do not offend the law against thieves
+when I embezzle my own money and cut my own purse; nor that against
+incendiaries when I burn my own wood; so am I not under the lash of those
+made against murderers for having deprived myself of my own life.
+Hegesias said, that as the condition of life did, so the condition of
+death ought to depend upon our own choice.  And Diogenes meeting the
+philosopher Speusippus, so blown up with an inveterate dropsy that he was
+fain to be carried in a litter, and by him saluted with the compliment,
+"I wish you good health."  "No health to thee," replied the other, " who
+art content to live in such a condition.
+
+And in fact, not long after, Speusippus, weary of so languishing a state
+of life, found a means to die.
+
+But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of
+opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the
+express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to
+God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and
+the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and
+not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for
+ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an
+account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action
+of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of
+the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty:
+
+         "Proxima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi letum
+          Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi
+          Proiecere animas."
+
+     ["Thence the sad ones occupy the next abodes, who, though free
+     from guilt, were by their own hands slain, and, hating light,
+     sought death."--AEneid, vi. 434.]
+
+There is more constancy in suffering the chain we are tied to than in
+breaking it, and more pregnant evidence of fortitude in Regulus than in
+Cato; 'tis indiscretion and impatience that push us on to these
+precipices: no accidents can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks
+and requires evils, pains, and grief, as the things by which she is
+nourished and supported; the menaces of tyrants, racks, and tortures
+serve only to animate and rouse her:
+
+              "Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
+               Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido,
+               Per damma, percmdes, ab ipso
+               Ducit opes, animumque ferro."
+
+     ["As in Mount Algidus, the sturdy oak even from the axe itself
+     derives new vigour and life."--Horace, Od., iv. 4, 57.]
+
+And as another says:
+
+              "Non est, ut putas, virtus, pater,
+               Timere vitam; sed malis ingentibus
+               Obstare, nec se vertere, ac retro dare."
+
+     ["Father, 'tis no virtue to fear life, but to withstand great
+     misfortunes, nor turn back from them."--Seneca, Theb., i. 190.]
+
+Or as this:
+
+          "Rebus in adversis facile est contemnere mortem
+          Fortius ille facit, qui miser esse potest."
+
+     ["It is easy in adversity to despise death; but he acts more
+     bravely, who can live wretched."--Martial, xi. 56, 15.]
+
+'Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a furrow, under a tomb, to
+evade the blows of fortune; virtue never stops nor goes out of her path,
+for the greatest storm that blows:
+
+                    "Si fractus illabatur orbis,
+                    Impavidum ferient ruinae."
+
+     ["Should the world's axis crack, the ruins will but crush
+      a fearless head."--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 7.]
+
+For the most part, the flying from other inconveniences brings us to
+this; nay, endeavouring to evade death, we often run into its very mouth:
+
+          "Hic, rogo, non furor est, ne moriare, mori?"
+
+     ["Tell me, is it not madness, that one should die for fear
+     of dying?"--Martial, ii. 80, 2.]
+
+like those who, from fear of a precipice, throw themselves headlong into
+it;
+
+              "Multos in summa pericula misfit
+               Venturi timor ipse mali: fortissimus ille est,
+               Qui promptus metuenda pati, si cominus instent,
+               Et differre potest."
+
+     ["The fear of future ills often makes men run into extreme danger;
+     he is truly brave who boldly dares withstand the mischiefs he
+     apprehends, when they confront him and can be deferred."
+     --Lucan, vii. 104.]
+
+               "Usque adeo, mortis formidine, vitae
+               Percipit humanos odium, lucisque videndae,
+               Ut sibi consciscant moerenti pectore lethum
+               Obliti fontem curarum hunc esse timorem."
+
+     ["Death to that degree so frightens some men, that causing them to
+     hate both life and light, they kill themselves, miserably forgetting
+     that this same fear is the fountain of their cares."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 79.]
+
+Plato, in his Laws, assigns an ignominious sepulture to him who has
+deprived his nearest and best friend, namely himself, of life and his
+destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment,
+by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable
+disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a
+timorous soul.  And the opinion that makes so little of life, is
+ridiculous; for it is our being, 'tis all we have.  Things of a nobler
+and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against
+nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; 'tis a
+disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to
+hate and despise itself.  And it is a vanity of the same stamp to desire
+to be something else than what we are; the effect of such a desire does
+not at all touch us, forasmuch as it is contradicted and hindered in
+itself.  He that desires of a man to be made an angel, does nothing for
+himself; he would be never the better for it; for, being no more, who
+shall rejoice or be sensible of this benefit for him.
+
+         "Debet enim, misere cui forti, aegreque futurum est,
+          Ipse quoque esse in eo turn tempore, cum male possit
+          Accidere."
+
+     ["For he to whom misery and pain are to be in the future, must
+     himself then exist, when these ills befall him."
+     --Idem, ibid., 874.]
+
+Security, indolence, impassability, the privation of the evils of this
+life, which we pretend to purchase at the price of dying, are of no
+manner of advantage to us: that man evades war to very little purpose who
+can have no fruition of peace; and as little to the purpose does he avoid
+trouble who cannot enjoy repose.
+
+Amongst those of the first of these two opinions, there has been great
+debate, what occasions are sufficient to justify the meditation of self-
+murder, which they call "A reasonable exit." --[ Diogenes Laertius, Life
+of Zeno.]-- For though they say that men must often die for trivial
+causes, seeing those that detain us in life are of no very great weight,
+yet there is to be some limit.  There are fantastic and senseless humours
+that have prompted not only individual men, but whole nations to destroy
+themselves, of which I have elsewhere given some examples; and we further
+read of the Milesian virgins, that by a frantic compact they hanged
+themselves one after another till the magistrate took order in it,
+enacting that the bodies of such as should be found so hanged should be
+drawn by the same halter stark naked through the city.  When Therykion
+tried to persuade Cleomenes to despatch himself, by reason of the ill
+posture of his affairs, and, having missed a death of more honour in the
+battle he had lost, to accept of this the second in honour to it, and not
+to give the conquerors leisure to make him undergo either an ignominious
+death or an infamous life; Cleomenes, with a courage truly Stoic and
+Lacedaemonian, rejected his counsel as unmanly and mean; "that," said he,
+"is a remedy that can never be wanting, but which a man is never to make
+use of, whilst there is an inch of hope remaining": telling him, " that
+it was sometimes constancy and valour to live; that he would that even
+his death should be of use to his country, and would make of it an act of
+honour and virtue."  Therykion, notwithstanding, thought himself in the
+right, and did his own business; and Cleomenes afterwards did the same,
+but not till he had first tried the utmost malevolence of fortune.  All
+the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man
+should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden
+and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when
+we are at the end of our hope:
+
+              "Sperat et in saeva victus gladiator arena,
+               Sit licet infesto pollice turba minax."
+
+     ["The gladiator conquered in the lists hopes on, though the
+     menacing spectators, turning their thumb, order him to die."
+     --Pentadius, De Spe, ap. Virgilii Catadecta.]
+
+All things, says an old adage, are to be hoped for by a man whilst he
+lives; ay, but, replies Seneca, why should this rather be always running
+in a man's head that fortune can do all things for the living man, than
+this, that fortune has no power over him that knows how to die?
+Josephus, when engaged in so near and apparent danger, a whole people
+being violently bent against him, that there was no visible means of
+escape, nevertheless, being, as he himself says, in this extremity
+counselled by one of his friends to despatch himself, it was well for him
+that he yet maintained himself in hope, for fortune diverted the accident
+beyond all human expectation, so that he saw himself delivered without
+any manner of inconvenience.  Whereas Brutus and Cassius, on the
+contrary, threw away the remains of the Roman liberty, of which they were
+the sole protectors, by the precipitation and temerity wherewith they
+killed themselves before the due time and a just occasion.  Monsieur
+d'Anguien, at the battle of Serisolles, twice attempted to run himself
+through, despairing of the fortune of the day, which went indeed very
+untowardly on that side of the field where he was engaged, and by that
+precipitation was very near depriving himself of the enjoyment of so
+brave a victory.  I have seen a hundred hares escape out of the very
+teeth of the greyhounds:
+
+               "Aliquis carnifici suo superstes fuit."
+
+     ["Some have survived their executioners."--Seneca, Ep., 13.]
+
+              "Multa dies, variusque labor mutabilis nevi
+               Rettulit in melius; multos alterna revisens
+               Lusit, et in solido rursus fortuna locavit."
+
+     [Length of days, and the various labour of changeful time, have
+     brought things to a better state; fortune turning, shews a reverse
+     face, and again restores men to prosperity."--AEneid, xi. 425.]
+
+Piny says there are but three sorts of diseases, to escape which a man
+has good title to destroy himself; the worst of which is the stone in the
+bladder, when the urine is suppressed.
+
+     ["In the quarto edition of these essays, in 1588, Pliny is said to
+     mention two more, viz., a pain in the stomach and a headache, which,
+     he says (lib. xxv. c. 9.), were the only three distempers almost
+     for which men killed themselves."]
+
+Seneca says those only which for a long time are discomposing the
+functions of the soul.  And some there have been who, to avoid a worse
+death, have chosen one to their own liking.  Democritus, general of the
+AEtolians, being brought prisoner to Rome, found means to make his escape
+by night: but close pursued by his keepers, rather than suffer himself to
+be retaken, he fell upon his own sword and died.  Antinous and Theodotus,
+their city of Epirus being reduced by the Romans to the last extremity,
+gave the people counsel universally to kill themselves; but, these
+preferring to give themselves up to the enemy, the two chiefs went to
+seek the death they desired, rushing furiously upon the enemy, with
+intention to strike home but not to ward a blow.  The Island of Gozzo
+being taken some years ago by the Turks, a Sicilian, who had two
+beautiful daughters marriageable, killed them both with his own hand, and
+their mother, running in to save them, to boot, which having done,
+sallying out of the house with a cross-bow and harquebus, with two shots
+he killed two of the Turks nearest to his door, and drawing his sword,
+charged furiously in amongst the rest, where he was suddenly enclosed and
+cut to pieces, by that means delivering his family and himself from
+slavery and dishonour.  The Jewish women, after having circumcised their
+children, threw them and themselves down a precipice to avoid the cruelty
+of Antigonus.  I have been told of a person of condition in one of our
+prisons, that his friends, being informed that he would certainly be
+condemned, to avoid the ignominy of such a death suborned a priest to
+tell him that the only means of his deliverance was to recommend himself
+to such a saint, under such and such vows, and to fast eight days
+together without taking any manner of nourishment, what weakness or
+faintness soever he might find in himself during the time; he followed
+their advice, and by that means destroyed himself before he was aware,
+not dreaming of death or any danger in the experiment.  Scribonia
+advising her nephew Libo to kill himself rather than await the stroke of
+justice, told him that it was to do other people's business to preserve
+his life to put it after into the hands of those who within three or four
+days would fetch him to execution, and that it was to serve his enemies
+to keep his blood to gratify their malice.
+
+We read in the Bible that Nicanor, the persecutor of the law of God,
+having sent his soldiers to seize upon the good old man Razis, surnamed
+in honour of his virtue the father of the Jews: the good man, seeing no
+other remedy, his gates burned down, and the enemies ready to seize him,
+choosing rather to die nobly than to fall into the hands of his wicked
+adversaries and suffer himself to be cruelly butchered by them, contrary
+to the honour of his rank and quality, stabbed himself with his own
+sword, but the blow, for haste, not having been given home, he ran and
+threw himself from the top of a wall headlong among them, who separating
+themselves and making room, he pitched directly upon his head;
+notwithstanding which, feeling yet in himself some remains of life, he
+renewed his courage, and starting up upon his feet all bloody and wounded
+as he was, and making his way through the crowd to a precipitous rock,
+there, through one of his wounds, drew out his bowels, which, tearing and
+pulling to pieces with both his hands, he threw amongst his pursuers, all
+the while attesting and invoking the Divine vengeance upon them for their
+cruelty and injustice.
+
+Of violences offered to the conscience, that against the chastity of
+woman is, in my opinion, most to be avoided, forasmuch as there is a
+certain pleasure naturally mixed with it, and for that reason the dissent
+therein cannot be sufficiently perfect and entire, so that the violence
+seems to be mixed with a little consent of the forced party.  The
+ecclesiastical history has several examples of devout persons who have
+embraced death to secure them from the outrages prepared by tyrants
+against their religion and honour.  Pelagia and Sophronia, both
+canonised, the first of these precipitated herself with her mother and
+sisters into the river to avoid being forced by some soldiers, and the
+last also killed herself to avoid being ravished by the Emperor
+Maxentius.
+
+It may, peradventure, be an honour to us in future ages, that a learned
+author of this present time, and a Parisian, takes a great deal of pains
+to persuade the ladies of our age rather to take any other course than to
+enter into the horrid meditation of such a despair.  I am sorry he had
+never heard, that he might have inserted it amongst his other stories,
+the saying of a woman, which was told me at Toulouse, who had passed
+through the handling of some soldiers: "God be praised," said she, "that
+once at least in my life I have had my fill without sin."  In truth,
+these cruelties are very unworthy the French good nature, and also, God
+be thanked, our air is very well purged of them since this good advice:
+'tis enough that they say "no" in doing it, according to the rule of the
+good Marot.
+              "Un doulx nenny, avec un doulx sourire
+               Est tant honneste."--Marot.
+
+History is everywhere full of those who by a thousand ways have exchanged
+a painful and irksome life for death.  Lucius Aruntius killed himself, to
+fly, he said, both the future and the past.  Granius Silvanus and Statius
+Proximus, after having been pardoned by Nero, killed themselves; either
+disdaining to live by the favour of so wicked a man, or that they might
+not be troubled, at some other time, to obtain a second pardon,
+considering the proclivity of his nature to suspect and credit
+accusations against worthy men.  Spargapises, son of Queen Tomyris, being
+a prisoner of war to Cyrus, made use of the first favour Cyrus shewed
+him, in commanding him to be unbound, to kill himself, having pretended
+to no other benefit of liberty, but only to be revenged of himself for
+the disgrace of being taken.  Boges, governor in Eion for King Xerxes,
+being besieged by the Athenian army under the conduct of Cimon, refused
+the conditions offered, that he might safe return into Asia with all his
+wealth, impatient to survive the loss of a place his master had given him
+to keep; wherefore, having defended the city to the last extremity,
+nothing being left to eat, he first threw all the gold and whatever else
+the enemy could make booty of into the river Strymon, and then causing a
+great pile to be set on fire, and the throats of all the women, children,
+concubines, and servants to be cut, he threw their bodies into the fire,
+and at last leaped into it himself.
+
+Ninachetuen, an Indian lord, so soon as he heard the first whisper of the
+Portuguese Viceroy's determination to dispossess him, without any
+apparent cause, of his command in Malacca, to transfer it to the King of
+Campar, he took this resolution with himself: he caused a scaffold, more
+long than broad, to be erected, supported by columns royally adorned with
+tapestry and strewed with flowers and abundance of perfumes; all which
+being prepared, in a robe of cloth of gold, set full of jewels of great
+value, he came out into the street, and mounted the steps to the
+scaffold, at one corner of which he had a pile lighted of aromatic wood.
+Everybody ran to see to what end these unusual preparations were made;
+when Ninachetuen, with a manly but displeased countenance, set forth how
+much he had obliged the Portuguese nation, and with how unspotted
+fidelity he had carried himself in his charge; that having so often,
+sword in hand, manifested in the behalf of others, that honour was much
+more dear to him than life, he was not to abandon the concern of it for
+himself: that fortune denying him all means of opposing the affront
+designed to be put upon him, his courage at least enjoined him to free
+himself from the sense of it, and not to serve for a fable to the people,
+nor for a triumph to men less deserving than himself; which having said
+he leaped into the fire.
+
+Sextilia, wife of Scaurus, and Paxaea, wife of Labeo, to encourage their
+husbands to avoid the dangers that pressed upon them, wherein they had no
+other share than conjugal affection, voluntarily sacrificed their own
+lives to serve them in this extreme necessity for company and example.
+What they did for their husbands, Cocceius Nerva did for his country,
+with less utility though with equal affection: this great lawyer,
+flourishing in health, riches, reputation, and favour with the Emperor,
+had no other cause to kill himself but the sole compassion of the
+miserable state of the Roman Republic.  Nothing can be added to the
+beauty of the death of the wife of Fulvius, a familiar favourite of
+Augustus: Augustus having discovered that he had vented an important
+secret he had entrusted him withal, one morning that he came to make his
+court, received him very coldly and looked frowningly upon him.  He
+returned home, full of, despair, where he sorrowfully told his wife that,
+having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself: to
+which she roundly replied, "'tis but reason you should, seeing that
+having so often experienced the incontinence of my tongue, you could not
+take warning: but let me kill myself first," and without any more saying
+ran herself through the body with a sword.  Vibius Virrius, despairing of
+the safety of his city besieged by the Romans and of their mercy, in the
+last deliberation of his city's senate, after many arguments conducing to
+that end, concluded that the most noble means to escape fortune was by
+their own hands: telling them that the enemy would have them in honour,
+and Hannibal would be sensible how many faithful friends he had
+abandoned; inviting those who approved of his advice to come to a good
+supper he had ready at home, where after they had eaten well, they would
+drink together of what he had prepared; a beverage, said he, that will
+deliver our bodies from torments, our souls from insult, and our eyes and
+ears from the sense of so many hateful mischiefs, as the conquered suffer
+from cruel and implacable conquerors.  I have, said he, taken order for
+fit persons to throw our bodies into a funeral pile before my door so
+soon as we are dead.  Many enough approved this high resolution, but few
+imitated it; seven-and-twenty senators followed him, who, after having
+tried to drown the thought of this fatal determination in wine, ended the
+feast with the mortal mess; and embracing one another, after they had
+jointly deplored the misfortune of their country, some retired home to
+their own houses, others stayed to be burned with Vibius in his funeral
+pyre; and were all of them so long in dying, the vapour of the wine
+having prepossessed the veins, and by that means deferred the effect of
+poison, that some of them were within an hour of seeing the enemy inside
+the walls of Capua, which was taken the next morning, and of undergoing
+the miseries they had at so dear a rate endeavoured to avoid.  Jubellius
+Taurea, another citizen of the same country, the Consul Fulvius returning
+from the shameful butchery he had made of two hundred and twenty-five
+senators, called him back fiercely by name, and having made him stop:
+"Give the word," said he, "that somebody may dispatch me after the
+massacre of so many others, that thou mayest boast to have killed a much
+more valiant man than thyself."  Fulvius, disdaining him as a man out of
+his wits, and also having received letters from Rome censuring the
+inhumanity of his execution which tied his hands, Jubellius proceeded:
+"Since my country has been taken, my friends dead, and having with my own
+hands slain my wife and children to rescue them from the desolation of
+this ruin, I am denied to die the death of my fellow-citizens, let me
+borrow from virtue vengeance on this hated life," and therewithal drawing
+a short sword he carried concealed about him, he ran it through his own
+bosom, falling down backward, and expiring at the consul's feet.
+
+Alexander, laying siege to a city of the Indies, those within, finding
+themselves very hardly set, put on a vigorous resolution to deprive him
+of the pleasure of his victory, and accordingly burned themselves in
+general, together with their city, in despite of his humanity: a new kind
+of war, where the enemies sought to save them, and they to destroy
+themselves, doing to make themselves sure of death, all that men do to
+secure life.
+
+Astapa, a city of Spain, finding itself weak in walls and defence to
+withstand the Romans, the inhabitants made a heap of all their riches and
+furniture in the public place; and, having ranged upon this heap all the
+women and children, and piled them round with wood and other combustible
+matter to take sudden fire, and left fifty of their young men for the
+execution of that whereon they had resolved, they made a desperate sally,
+where for want of power to overcome, they caused themselves to be every
+man slain.  The fifty, after having massacred every living soul
+throughout the whole city, and put fire to this pile, threw themselves
+lastly into it, finishing their generous liberty, rather after an
+insensible, than after a sorrowful and disgraceful manner, giving the
+enemy to understand, that if fortune had been so pleased, they had as
+well the courage to snatch from them victory as they had to frustrate and
+render it dreadful, and even mortal to those who, allured by the
+splendour of the gold melting in this flame, having approached it,
+a great number were there suffocated and burned, being kept from retiring
+by the crowd that followed after.
+
+The Abydeans, being pressed by King Philip, put on the same resolution;
+but, not having time, they could not put it 'in effect.  The king, who
+was struck with horror at the rash precipitation of this execution (the
+treasure and movables that they had condemned to the flames being first
+seized), drawing off his soldiers, granted them three days' time to kill
+themselves in, that they might do it with more order and at greater ease:
+which time they filled with blood and slaughter beyond the utmost excess
+of all hostile cruelty, so that not so much as any one soul was left
+alive that had power to destroy itself.  There are infinite examples of
+like popular resolutions which seem the more fierce and cruel in
+proportion as the effect is more universal, and yet are really less so
+than when singly executed; what arguments and persuasion cannot do with
+individual men, they can do with all, the ardour of society ravishing
+particular judgments.
+
+The condemned who would live to be executed in the reign of Tiberius,
+forfeited their goods and were denied the rites of sepulture; those who,
+by killing themselves, anticipated it, were interred, and had liberty to
+dispose of their estates by will.
+
+But men sometimes covet death out of hope of a greater good.  "I desire,"
+says St. Paul, "to be with Christ," and "who shall rid me of these
+bands?"  Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato's Pheedo, entered
+into so great a desire of the life to come that, without any other
+occasion, he threw himself into the sea.  By which it appears how
+improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair, to which the
+eagerness of hope often inclines us, and, often, a calm and temperate
+desire proceeding from a mature and deliberate judgment.  Jacques du
+Chastel, bishop of Soissons, in St. Louis's foreign expedition, seeing
+the king and whole army upon the point of returning into France, leaving
+the affairs of religion imperfect, took a resolution rather to go into
+Paradise; wherefore, having taken solemn leave of his friends, he charged
+alone, in the sight of every one, into the enemy's army, where he was
+presently cut to pieces.  In a certain kingdom of the new discovered
+world, upon a day of solemn procession, when the idol they adore is drawn
+about in public upon a chariot of marvellous greatness; besides that many
+are then seen cutting off pieces of their flesh to offer to him, there
+are a number of others who prostrate themselves upon the place, causing
+themselves to be crushed and broken to pieces under the weighty wheels,
+to obtain the veneration of sanctity after death, which is accordingly
+paid them.  The death of the bishop, sword in hand, has more of
+magnanimity in it, and less of sentiment, the ardour of combat taking
+away part of the latter.
+
+There are some governments who have taken upon them to regulate the
+justice and opportunity of voluntary death.  In former times there was
+kept in our city of Marseilles a poison prepared out of hemlock, at the
+public charge, for those who had a mind to hasten their end, having
+first, before the six hundred, who were their senate, given account of
+the reasons and motives of their design, and it was not otherwise lawful,
+than by leave from the magistrate and upon just occasion to do violence
+to themselves. --[Valerius Maximus, ii. 6, 7.]-- The same law was also
+in use in other places.
+
+Sextus Pompeius, in his expedition into Asia, touched at the isle of Cea
+in Negropont: it happened whilst he was there, as we have it from one
+that was with him, that a woman of great quality, having given an account
+to her citizens why she was resolved to put an end to her life, invited
+Pompeius to her death, to render it the more honourable, an invitation
+that he accepted; and having long tried in vain by the power of his
+eloquence, which was very great, and persuasion, to divert her from that
+design, he acquiesced in the end in her own will.  She had passed the age
+of four score and ten in a very happy state, both of body and mind; being
+then laid upon her bed, better dressed than ordinary and leaning upon her
+elbow, "The gods," said she, "O Sextus Pompeius, and rather those I leave
+than those I go to seek, reward thee, for that thou hast not disdained to
+be both the counsellor of my life and the witness of my death.  For my
+part, having always experienced the smiles of fortune, for fear lest the
+desire of living too long may make me see a contrary face, I am going, by
+a happy end, to dismiss the remains of my soul, leaving behind two
+daughters of my body and a legion of nephews"; which having said, with
+some exhortations to her family to live in peace, she divided amongst
+them her goods, and recommending her domestic gods to her eldest
+daughter, she boldly took the bowl that contained the poison, and having
+made her vows and prayers to Mercury to conduct her to some happy abode
+in the other world, she roundly swallowed the mortal poison.  This being
+done, she entertained the company with the progress of its operation, and
+how the cold by degrees seized the several parts of her body one after
+another, till having in the end told them it began to seize upon her
+heart and bowels, she called her daughters to do the last office and
+close her eyes.
+
+Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the
+sweet temperature of the air, lives rarely ended but by the voluntary
+surrender of the inhabitants, who, being weary of and satiated with
+living, had the custom, at a very old age, after having made good cheer,
+to precipitate themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock,
+assigned for that service.  Pain and the fear of a worse death seem to me
+the most excusable incitements.,
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TO-MORROW'S A NEW DAY
+
+I give, as it seems to me, with good reason the palm to Jacques Amyot of
+all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his
+language, wherein he excels all others, nor for his constancy in going
+through so long a work,  nor for the depth of his knowledge, having been
+able so successfully to smooth and unravel so knotty and intricate an
+author (for let people tell me what they will, I understand nothing of
+Greek; but I meet with sense so well united and maintained throughout his
+whole translation, that certainly he either knew the true fancy of the
+author, or having, by being long conversant with him, imprinted a vivid
+and general idea of that of Plutarch in his soul, he has delivered us
+nothing that either derogates from or contradicts him), but above all, I
+am the most taken with him for having made so discreet a choice of a book
+so worthy and of so great utility wherewith to present his country.  We
+ignorant fellows had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the
+dirt; by this favour of his we dare now speak and write; the ladies are
+able to read to schoolmasters; 'tis our breviary.  If this good man be
+yet living, I would recommend to him Xenophon, to do as much by that;
+'tis a much more easy task than the other, and consequently more proper
+for his age.  And, besides, though I know not how, methinks he does
+briskly--and clearly enough trip over steps another would have stumbled
+at, yet nevertheless his style seems to be more his own where he does not
+encounter those difficulties, and rolls away at his own ease.
+
+I was just now reading this passage where Plutarch says of himself, that
+Rusticus being present at a declamation of his at Rome, there received a
+packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for
+which, says he, all the company highly applauded the gravity of this
+person.  'Tis true, that being upon the subject of curiosity and of that
+eager passion for news, which makes us with so much indiscretion and
+impatience leave all to entertain a newcomer, and without any manner of
+respect or outcry, tear open on a sudden, in what company soever, the
+letters that are delivered to us, he had reason to applaud the gravity of
+Rusticus upon this occasion; and might moreover have added to it the
+commendation of his civility and courtesy, that would not interrupt the
+current of his declamation.  But I doubt whether any one can commend his
+prudence; for receiving unexpected letters, and especially from an
+emperor, it might have fallen out that the deferring to read them might
+have been of great prejudice.  The vice opposite to curiosity is
+negligence, to which I naturally incline, and wherein I have seen some
+men so extreme that one might have found letters sent them three or four
+days before, still sealed up in their pockets.
+
+I never open any letters directed to another; not only those intrusted
+with me, but even such as fortune has guided to my hand; and am angry
+with myself if my eyes unawares steal any contents of letters of
+importance he is reading when I stand near a great man.  Never was man
+less inquisitive or less prying into other men's affairs than I.
+
+In our fathers' days, Monsieur de Boutieres had like to have lost Turin
+from having, while engaged in good company at supper, delayed to read
+information that was sent him of the treason plotted against that city
+where he commanded.  And this very Plutarch has given me to understand,
+that Julius Caesar had preserved himself, if, going to the Senate the day
+he was assassinated by the conspirators, he had read a note which was
+presented to him by, the way.  He tells also the story of Archias, the
+tyrant of Thebes, that the night before the execution of the design
+Pelopidas had plotted to kill him to restore his country to liberty, he
+had a full account sent him in writing by another Archias, an Athenian,
+of the whole conspiracy, and that, this packet having been delivered to
+him while he sat at supper, he deferred the opening of it, saying, which
+afterwards turned to a proverb in Greece, "Business to-morrow."
+
+A wise man may, I think, out of respect to another, as not to disturb the
+company, as Rusticus did, or not to break off another affair of
+importance in hand, defer to read or hear any new thing that is brought
+him; but for his own interest or particular pleasure, especially if he be
+a public minister, that he will not interrupt his dinner or break his
+sleep is inexcusable.  And there was anciently at Rome, the consular
+place, as they called it, which was the most honourable at the table, as
+being a place of most liberty, and of more convenient access to those who
+came in to speak to the person seated there; by which it appears, that
+being at meat, they did not totally abandon the concern of other affairs
+and incidents.  But when all is said, it is very hard in human actions to
+give so exact a rule upon moral reasons, that fortune will not therein
+maintain her own right.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OF CONSCIENCE
+
+The Sieur de la Brousse, my brother, and I, travelling one day together
+during the time of our civil wars, met a gentleman of good sort.  He was
+of the contrary party, though I did not know so much, for he pretended
+otherwise: and the mischief on't is, that in this sort of war the cards
+are so shuffled, your enemy not being distinguished from yourself by any
+apparent mark either of language or habit, and being nourished under the
+same law, air, and manners, it is very hard to avoid disorder and
+confusion.  This made me afraid myself of meeting any of our troops in a
+place where I was not known, that I might not be in fear to tell my name,
+and peradventure of something worse; as it had befallen me before, where,
+by such a mistake, I lost both men and horses, and amongst others an
+Italian gentleman my page, whom I bred with the greatest care and
+affection, was miserably slain, in whom a youth of great promise and
+expectation was extinguished.  But the gentleman my brother and I met
+had so desperate, half-dead a fear upon him at meeting with any horse,
+or passing by any of the towns that held for the King, that I at last
+discovered it to be alarms of conscience.  It seemed to the poor man as
+if through his visor and the crosses upon his cassock, one would have
+penetrated into his bosom and read the most secret intentions of his
+heart; so wonderful is the power of conscience.  It makes us betray,
+accuse, and fight against ourselves, and for want of other witnesses, to
+give evidence against ourselves:
+
+               "Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum."
+
+     ["The torturer of the soul brandishing a sharp scourge within."
+     --Juvenal, iii. 195.]
+
+This story is in every child's mouth: Bessus the Paeonian, being
+reproached for wantonly pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing
+them, replied, that he had reason to do so, seeing that those little
+birds never ceased falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father.
+This parricide had till then been concealed and unknown, but the
+revenging fury of conscience caused it to be discovered by him himself,
+who was to suffer for it.  Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that
+punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same
+time with it.  Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever
+has deserved it expects it.  Wickedness contrives torments against
+itself:
+
+               "Malum consilium consultori pessimum:"
+
+               [Ill designs are worst to the contriver."
+               --Apud Aul. Gellium, iv. 5.]
+
+as the wasp stings and hurts another, but most of all itself, for it
+there loses its sting and its use for ever,
+
+                    "Vitasque in vulnere ponunt."
+
+               [And leave their own lives in the wound."
+               --Virgil, Geo., iv. 238.]
+
+Cantharides have somewhere about them, by a contrariety of nature, a
+counterpoison against their poison.  In like manner, at the same time
+that men take delight in vice, there springs in the conscience a
+displeasure that afflicts us sleeping and waking with various tormenting
+imaginations:
+
+              "Quippe ubi se multi, per somnia saepe loquentes,
+               Aut morbo delirantes, protraxe ferantur,
+               Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse."
+
+     ["Surely where many, often talking in their sleep, or raving in
+     disease, are said to have betrayed themselves, and to have given
+     publicity to offences long concealed."--Lucretius, v. 1157.]
+
+Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself flayed by the Scythians and
+afterwards boiled in a cauldron, and that his heart muttered these words
+"I am the cause of all these mischiefs that have befallen thee."
+Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they
+could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience
+discovered them to themselves.
+
+                    "Prima est haec ultio, quod se
+               Judice nemo nocens absohitur."
+
+     ["Tis the first punishment of sin that no man absolves himself." or:
+     "This is the highest revenge, that by its judgment no offender is
+     absolved."--Juvenal, xiii. 2.]
+
+As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater
+confidence and assurance; and I can truly say that I have gone through
+several hazards with a more steady pace in consideration of the secret
+knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my intentions:
+
+         "Conscia mens ut cuique sua est, ita concipit intra
+          Pectora pro facto spemque metumque suo."
+
+     ["As a man's conscience is, so within hope or fear prevails, suiting
+     to his design."--Ovid, Fast., i. 485.]
+
+Of this are a thousand examples; but it will be enough to instance three
+of one and the same person.  Scipio, being one day accused before the
+people of Rome of some crimes of a very high nature, instead of excusing
+himself or flattering his judges: "It will become you well," said he,
+"to sit in judgment upon a head, by whose means you have the power to
+judge all the world."  Another time, all the answer he gave to several
+impeachments brought against him by a tribune of the people, instead of
+making his defence: "Let us go, citizens," said he, "let us go render
+thanks to the gods for the victory they gave me over the Carthaginians as
+this day," and advancing himself before towards the Temple, he had
+presently all the assembly and his very accuser himself following at his
+heels.  And Petilius, having been set on by Cato to demand an account of
+the money that had passed through his hands in the province of Antioch,
+Scipio being come into the senate to that purpose, produced a book from
+under his robe, wherein he told them was an exact account of his receipts
+and disbursements; but being required to deliver it to the prothonotary
+to be examined, he refused, saying, he would not do himself so great a
+disgrace; and in the presence of the whole senate tore the book with his
+own hands to pieces.  I do not believe that the most seared conscience
+could have counterfeited so great an assurance.  He had naturally too
+high a spirit and was accustomed to too high a fortune, says Titius
+Livius, to know how to be criminal, and to lower himself to the meanness
+of defending his innocence.  The putting men to the rack is a dangerous
+invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.
+Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who
+has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than
+force me to say what is not?  And, on the contrary, if he who is not
+guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those
+torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward
+as life being in his prospect?  I believe the ground of this invention
+proceeds from the consideration of the force of conscience: for, to the
+guilty, it seems to assist the rack to make him confess his fault and to
+shake his resolution; and, on the other side, that it fortifies the
+innocent against the torture.  But when all is done, 'tis, in plain
+truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger what would not a man say,
+what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments?
+
+               "Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor."
+
+     ["Pain will make even the innocent lie."--Publius Syrus, De Dolore.]
+
+Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may
+not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked.  A thousand
+and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions, amongst
+whom I place Philotas, considering the circumstances of the trial
+Alexander put upon him and the progress of his torture.  But so it is
+that some say it is the least evil human weakness could invent; very
+inhumanly, notwithstanding, and to very little purpose, in my opinion.
+
+Many nations less barbarous in this than the Greeks and Romans who call
+them so, repute it horrible and cruel to torment and pull a man to pieces
+for a fault of which they are yet in doubt.  How can he help your
+ignorance?  Are not you unjust, that, not to kill him without cause, do
+worse than kill him?  And that this is so, do but observe how often men
+prefer to die without reason than undergo this examination, more painful
+than execution itself; and that oft-times by its extremity anticipates
+execution, and perform it.  I know not where I had this story, but it
+exactly matches the conscience of our justice in this particular.  A
+country-woman, to a general of a very severe discipline, accused one of
+his soldiers that he had taken from her children the little soup meat she
+had left to nourish them withal, the army having consumed all the rest;
+but of this proof there was none.  The general, after having cautioned
+the woman to take good heed to what she said, for that she would make
+herself guilty of a false accusation if she told a lie, and she
+persisting, he presently caused the soldier's belly to be ripped up to
+clear the truth of the fact, and the woman was found to be right.  An
+instructive sentence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+USE MAKES PERFECT
+
+'Tis not to be expected that argument and instruction, though we never so
+voluntarily surrender our belief to what is read to us, should be of
+force to lead us on so far as to action, if we do not, over and above,
+exercise and form the soul by experience to the course for which we
+design it; it will, otherwise, doubtless find itself at a loss when it
+comes to the pinch of the business.  This is the reason why those amongst
+the philosophers who were ambitious to attain to a greater excellence,
+were not contented to await the severities of fortune in the retirement
+and repose of their own habitations, lest he should have surprised them
+raw and inexpert in the combat, but sallied out to meet her, and
+purposely threw themselves into the proof of difficulties.  Some of them
+abandoned riches to exercise themselves in a voluntary poverty; others
+sought out labour and an austerity of life, to inure them to hardships
+and inconveniences; others have deprived themselves of their dearest
+members, as of sight, and of the instruments of generation, lest their
+too delightful and effeminate service should soften and debauch the
+stability of their souls.
+
+But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give
+us no assistance at all.  A man may by custom fortify himself against
+pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can
+experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.
+There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that
+they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have
+bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but
+they are none of them come back to tell us the news:
+
+               "Nemo expergitus exstat,
+               Frigida quern semel est vitai pausa sequuta."
+
+     ["No one wakes who has once fallen into the cold sleep of death."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 942]
+
+Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having
+been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many
+marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just
+going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a
+philosopher, a friend of his: "Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now?
+what is she doing?  What are you thinking of?"--"I was thinking," replied
+the other, "to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full
+settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I
+could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and
+whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come
+again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it."  This man philosophises
+not unto death only, but in death itself.  What a strange assurance was
+this, and what bravery of courage, to desire his death should be a lesson
+to him, and to have leisure to think of other things in so great an
+affair:
+
+               "Jus hoc animi morientis habebat."
+
+     ["This mighty power of mind he had dying."-Lucan, viii. 636.]
+
+And yet I fancy, there is a certain way of making it familiar to us, and
+in some sort of making trial what it is.  We may gain experience, if not
+entire and perfect, yet such, at least, as shall not be totally useless
+to us, and that may render us more confident and more assured.  If we
+cannot overtake it, we may approach it and view it, and if we do not
+advance so far as the fort, we may at least discover and make ourselves
+acquainted with the avenues.  It is not without reason that we are taught
+to consider sleep as a resemblance of death: with how great facility do
+we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose
+the knowledge of light and of ourselves.  Peradventure, the faculty of
+sleeping would seem useless and contrary to nature, since it deprives us
+of all action and sentiment, were it not that by it nature instructs us
+that she has equally made us to die as to live; and in life presents to
+us the eternal state she reserves for us after it, to accustom us to it
+and to take from us the fear of it.  But such as have by violent accident
+fallen into a swoon, and in it have lost all sense, these, methinks, have
+been very near seeing the true and natural face of death; for as to the
+moment of the passage, it is not to be feared that it brings with it any
+pain or displeasure, forasmuch as we can have no feeling without leisure;
+our sufferings require time, which in death is so short, and so
+precipitous, that it must necessarily be insensible.  They are the
+approaches that we are to fear, and these may fall within the limits of
+experience.
+
+Many things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect; I have
+passed a good part of my life in a perfect and entire health; I say, not
+only entire, but, moreover, sprightly and wanton.  This state, so full of
+verdure, jollity, and vigour, made the consideration of sickness so
+formidable to me, that when I came to experience it, I found the attacks
+faint and easy in comparison with what I had apprehended.  Of this I have
+daily experience; if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy
+and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am
+afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do
+not wish to be anywhere else.  This one thing of being always shut up in
+a chamber I fancied insupportable: but I was presently inured to be so
+imprisoned a week, nay a month together, in a very weak, disordered, and
+sad condition; and I have found that, in the time of my health, I much
+more pitied the sick, than I think myself to be pitied when I am so, and
+that the force of my imagination enhances near one-half of the essence
+and reality of the thing.  I hope that when I come to die I shall find it
+the same, and that, after all, it is not worth the pains I take, so much
+preparation and so much assistance as I call in, to undergo the stroke.
+But, at all events, we cannot give ourselves too much advantage.
+
+In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember
+which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own
+house, which is seated in the very centre of all the bustle and mischief
+of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so
+near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had
+taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong.
+Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of
+this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my
+train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had
+a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead
+of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I
+was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse,
+with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over
+and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air: so that there lay the
+horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, and I ten or twelve paces
+from him stretched out at length, with my face all battered and broken,
+my sword which I had had in my hand, above ten paces beyond that, and my
+belt broken all to pieces, without motion or sense any more than a stock.
+'Twas the only swoon I was ever in till that hour in my life.  Those who
+were with me, after having used all the means they could to bring me to
+myself, concluding me dead, took me up in their arms, and carried me with
+very much difficulty home to my house, which was about half a French
+league from thence.  On the way, having been for more than two hours
+given over for a dead man, I began to move and to fetch my breath; for so
+great abundance of blood was fallen into my stomach, that nature had need
+to rouse her forces to discharge it.  They then raised me upon my feet,
+where I threw off a whole bucket of clots of blood, as this I did also
+several times by the way.  This gave me so much ease, that I began to
+recover a little life, but so leisurely and by so small advances, that my
+first sentiments were much nearer the approaches of death than life:
+
+               "Perche, dubbiosa ancor del suo ritorno,
+               Non s'assicura attonita la mente."
+
+    ["For the soul, doubtful as to its return, could not compose itself"
+     --Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., xii. 74.]
+
+The remembrance of this accident, which is very well imprinted in my
+memory, so naturally representing to me the image and idea of death, has
+in some sort reconciled me to that untoward adventure.  When I first
+began to open my eyes, it was with so perplexed, so weak and dead a
+sight, that I could yet distinguish nothing but only discern the light:
+
+               "Come quel ch'or apre, or'chiude
+               Gli occhi, mezzo tra'l sonno e l'esser desto."
+
+     ["As a man that now opens, now shuts his eyes, between sleep
+     and waking."--Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., viii., 26.]
+
+As to the functions of the soul, they advanced with the same pace and
+measure with those of the body.  I saw myself all bloody, my doublet
+being stained all over with the blood I had vomited.  The first thought
+that came into my mind was that I had a harquebuss shot in my head, and
+indeed, at the time there were a great many fired round about us.
+Methought my life but just hung upon my, lips: and I shut my eyes, to
+help, methought, to thrust it out, and took a pleasure in languishing and
+letting myself go.  It was an imagination that only superficially floated
+upon my soul, as tender and weak as all the rest, but really, not only
+exempt from anything displeasing, but mixed with that sweetness that
+people feel when they glide into a slumber.
+
+I believe it is the very same condition those people are in, whom we see
+swoon with weakness in the agony of death we pity them without cause,
+supposing them agitated with grievous dolours, or that their souls suffer
+under painful thoughts.  It has ever been my belief, contrary to the
+opinion of many, and particularly of La Boetie, that those whom we see so
+subdued and stupefied at the approaches of their end, or oppressed with
+the length of the disease, or by accident of an apoplexy or falling
+sickness,
+
+         "Vi morbi saepe coactus
+          Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu,
+          Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et tremit artus;
+          Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat,
+          Inconstanter, et in jactando membra fatigat;"
+
+     ["Often, compelled by the force of disease, some one as
+     thunderstruck falls under our eyes, and foams, groans, and trembles,
+     stretches, twists, breathes irregularly, and in paroxysms wears out
+     his strength."--Lucretius, iii. 485.]
+
+or hurt in the head, whom we hear to mutter, and by fits to utter
+grievous groans; though we gather from these signs by which it seems as
+if they had some remains of consciousness, and that there are movements
+of the body; I have always believed, I say, both the body and the soul
+benumbed and asleep,
+
+               "Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae,"
+
+               ["He lives, and does not know that he is alive."
+               --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 12.]
+
+and could not believe that in so great a stupefaction of the members and
+so great a defection of the senses, the soul could maintain any force
+within to take cognisance of herself, and that, therefore, they had no
+tormenting reflections to make them consider and be sensible of the
+misery of their condition, and consequently were not much to be pitied.
+
+I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as
+to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself; as
+one should say of such as are sent to execution with their tongues first
+cut out (were it not that in this kind of dying, the most silent seems to
+me the most graceful, if accompanied with a grave and constant
+countenance); or if those miserable prisoners, who fall into the hands of
+the base hangman soldiers of this age, by whom they are tormented with
+all sorts of inhuman usage to compel them to some excessive and
+impossible ransom; kept, in the meantime, in such condition and place,
+where they have no means of expressing or signifying their thoughts and
+their misery.  The poets have feigned some gods who favour the
+deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death:
+
+                              "Hunc ego Diti
+               Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo."
+
+     ["I bidden offer this sacred thing to Pluto, and from that body
+     dismiss thee."--AEneid, iv. 782.]
+
+both the interrupted words, and the short and irregular answers one gets
+from them sometimes, by bawling and keeping a clutter about them; or the
+motions which seem to yield some consent to what we would have them do,
+are no testimony, nevertheless, that they live, an entire life at least.
+So it happens to us in the yawning of sleep, before it has fully
+possessed us, to perceive, as in a dream, what is done about us, and to
+follow the last things that are said with a perplexed and uncertain
+hearing which seems but to touch upon the borders of the soul; and to
+make answers to the last words that have been spoken to us, which have
+more in them of chance than sense.
+
+Now seeing I have in effect tried it, I have no doubt but I have hitherto
+made a right judgment; for first, being in a swoon, I laboured to rip
+open the buttons of my doublet with my nails, for my sword was gone; and
+yet I felt nothing in my imagination that hurt me; for we have many
+motions in us that do not proceed from our direction;
+
+          "Semianimesque micant digiti, ferrumque retractant;"
+
+     ["Half-dead fingers grope about, and grasp again the sword."
+     --AEneid, x. 396.]
+
+so falling people extend their arms before them by a natural impulse,
+which prompts our limbs to offices and motions without any commission
+from our reason.
+
+         "Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra .  .  .
+          Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
+          Decidit abscissum; cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
+          Mobilitate mali, non quit sentire dolorem."
+
+     ["They relate that scythe-bearing chariots mow off limbs, so that
+     they quiver on the ground; and yet the mind of him from whom the
+     limb is taken by the swiftness of the blow feels no pain."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 642.]
+
+My stomach was so oppressed with the coagulated blood, that my hands
+moved to that part, of their own voluntary motion, as they frequently do
+to the part that itches, without being directed by our will.  There are
+several animals, and even men, in whom one may perceive the muscles to
+stir and tremble after they are dead.  Every one experimentally knows
+that there are some members which grow stiff and flag without his leave.
+Now, those passions which only touch the outward bark of us, cannot be
+said to be ours: to make them so, there must be a concurrence of the
+whole man; and the pains which are felt by the hand or the foot while
+we are sleeping, are none of ours.
+
+As I drew near my own house, where the alarm of my fall was already got
+before me, and my family were come out to meet me, with the hubbub usual
+in such cases, not only did I make some little answer to some questions
+which were asked me; but they moreover tell me, that I was sufficiently
+collected to order them to bring a horse to my wife whom on the road,
+I saw struggling and tiring herself which is hilly and rugged.  This
+should seem to proceed from a soul its functions; but it was nothing so
+with me. I knew not what I said or did, and they were nothing but idle
+thoughts in the clouds, that were stirred up by the senses of the eyes
+and ears, and proceeded not from me.  I knew not for all that, whence I
+came or whither I went, neither was I capable to weigh and consider what
+was said to me: these were light effects, that the senses produced of
+themselves as of custom; what the soul contributed was in a dream,
+lightly touched, licked and bedewed by the soft impression of the senses.
+Notwithstanding, my condition was, in truth, very easy and quiet; I had
+no affliction upon me, either for others or myself; it was an extreme
+languor and weakness, without any manner of pain.  I saw my own house,
+but knew it not.  When they had put me to bed I found an inexpressible
+sweetness in that repose; for I had been desperately tugged and lugged by
+those poor people who had taken the pains to carry me upon their arms a
+very great and a very rough way, and had in so doing all quite tired out
+themselves, twice or thrice one after another.  They offered me several
+remedies, but I would take none, certainly believing that I was mortally
+wounded in the head.  And, in earnest, it had been a very happy death,
+for the weakness of my understanding deprived me of the faculty of
+discerning, and that of my body of the sense of feeling; I was suffering
+myself to glide away so sweetly and after so soft and easy a manner, that
+I scarce find any other action less troublesome than that was.  But when
+I came again to myself and to resume my faculties:
+
+               "Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei,"
+
+          ["When at length my lost senses again returned."
+          --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 14.]
+
+which was two or three hours after, I felt myself on a sudden involved in
+terrible pain, having my limbs battered and ground with my fall, and was.
+so ill for two or three nights after, that I thought I was once more
+dying again, but a more painful death, having concluded myself as good as
+dead before, and to this hour am sensible of the bruises of that terrible
+shock.  I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat
+into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over
+again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at
+what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend
+it.  As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favour to
+him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented.  But a
+long time after, and the very next day that my memory began to return and
+to represent to me the state wherein I was, at the instant that I
+perceived this horse coming full drive upon me (for I had seen him at my
+heels, and gave myself for gone, but this thought had been so sudden,
+that fear had had no leisure to introduce itself) it seemed to me like a
+flash of lightning that had pierced my soul, and that I came from the
+other world.
+
+This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it
+not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really
+find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to
+approach it.  Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself,
+provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand.  Here, this
+is not my doctrine, 'tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but
+my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that
+which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.  As
+to the rest, I spoil nothing, I make use of nothing but my own; and if I
+play the fool, 'tis at my own expense, and nobody else is concerned in't;
+for 'tis a folly that will die with me, and that no one is to inherit.
+We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path,
+and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them
+but their names.  No one since has followed the track: 'tis a rugged
+road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
+as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
+internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
+motions; 'tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
+from the common and most recommended employments of the world.  'Tis now
+many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than
+myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I
+study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself.  And yet
+I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable
+sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very
+well pleased with my own progress.  There is no description so difficult,
+nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man's self: and withal, a
+man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in
+public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon
+my own description.  Custom has made all speaking of a man's self
+vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that
+seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:
+
+                    "In vitium ducit culpae fuga."
+
+     ["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater."
+     Or: "The escape from a fault leads into a vice"
+     --Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]
+
+Instead of blowing the child's nose, this is to take his nose off
+altogether.  I think the remedy worse than the disease.  But, allowing it
+to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people
+with discourses of one's self, I ought not, pursuing my general design,
+to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal
+the fault which I not only practise but profess.  Notwithstanding, to
+speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine,
+because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man
+cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this
+rule has only regard to the popular vice.  They are bits for calves, with
+which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor
+the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am
+as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at
+all events, when the occasions arise, they don't hesitate to put
+themselves on the public highway.  Of what does Socrates treat more
+largely than of himself?  To what does he more direct and address the
+discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of the
+lesson in their book, but of the essence and motion of their souls?  We
+confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our
+neighbours, do to all the people.  But some will answer that we there
+speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for
+our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable.  My trade and art is to
+live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience,
+and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building
+according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour;
+according to the knowledge of another, and not according to his own.  If
+it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero
+prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?
+Peradventure they mean that I should give testimony of myself by works
+and effects, not barely by words.  I chiefly paint my thoughts, a subject
+void of form and incapable of operative production; 'tis all that I can
+do to couch it in this airy body of the voice; the wisest and devoutest
+men have lived in the greatest care to avoid all apparent effects.
+Effects would more speak of fortune than of me; they manifest their own
+office and not mine, but uncertainly and by conjecture; patterns of some
+one particular virtue.  I expose myself entire; 'tis a body where, at one
+view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its
+proper place; here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating,
+very dubiously.  I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.
+
+I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself,
+and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse,
+impartially.  If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle
+it out to some purpose.  To speak less of one's self than what one really
+is is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under
+a man's value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle.
+No virtue assists itself with falsehood; truth is never matter of error.
+To speak more of one's self than is really true is not always mere
+presumption; 'tis, moreover, very often folly; to, be immeasurably
+pleased with what one is, and to fall into an indiscreet self-love, is in
+my opinion the substance of this vice.  The most sovereign remedy to cure
+it, is to do quite contrary to what these people direct who, in
+forbidding men to speak of themselves, consequently, at the same time,
+interdict thinking of themselves too.  Pride dwells in the thought; the
+tongue can have but a very little share in it.
+
+They fancy that to think of one's self is to be delighted with one's
+self; to frequent and converse with one's self, to be overindulgent; but
+this excess springs only in those who take but a superficial view of
+themselves, and dedicate their main inspection to their affairs; who call
+it mere reverie and idleness to occupy one's self with one's self, and
+the building one's self up a mere building of castles in the air; who
+look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger.  If any one be
+in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let
+him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be
+abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him
+under foot.  If he enter into a flattering presumption of his personal
+valour, let him but recollect the lives of Scipio, Epaminondas; so many
+armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them.  No
+particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put
+the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the
+nothingness of human condition to make up the weight.  Because Socrates
+had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, "to know himself,"
+and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought,
+he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage.  Whosoever shall so know
+himself, let him boldly speak it out.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
+All apprentices when we come to it (death)
+Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
+Business to-morrow
+Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
+Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
+Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
+Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
+Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one's nature
+I can more hardly believe a man's constancy than any virtue
+"I wish you good health."  "No health to thee," replied the other
+If to philosophise be, as 'tis defined, to doubt
+Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
+It's madness to nourish infirmity
+Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
+Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.
+Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
+Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
+Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
+No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
+No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
+Not conclude too much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity
+One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
+Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
+Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
+Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
+Speak less of one's self than what one really is is folly
+Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
+The action is commendable, not the man
+The most voluntary death is the finest
+The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
+Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
+Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
+Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
+Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
+We do not go, we are driven
+What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
+Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
+Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V9
+By Michel de Montaigne
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of  The Essays of Montaigne, V9
+#9 in our series by Michel de Montaigne, Translator: Cotton
+Edited by William Carew Hazlitt, 1877
+
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+Title: The Essays of Montaigne, V9
+
+Author: Michel de Montaigne
+
+Official Release Date: October, 2002 [Etext #3589]
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+[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, V9
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+
+
+ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
+
+Translated by Charles Cotton
+
+Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
+
+1877
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.
+
+I.        Of the inconstancy of our actions.
+II.       Of drunkenness.
+III.      A custom of the Isle of Cea.
+IV.       To-morrow's a new day.
+V.        Of conscience.
+VI.       Use makes perfect.
+
+
+
+ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
+
+BOOK THE SECOND
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS
+
+Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
+themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
+them into the world's eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
+commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
+they should proceed from one and the same person.  We find the younger
+Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus.  Pope Boniface
+VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
+it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
+same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
+a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
+"O that I had never been taught to write!" so much it went to his heart
+to condemn a man to death.  All story is full of such examples, and every
+man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
+observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
+themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
+irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
+nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:
+
+          "Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest."
+
+          ["'Tis evil counsel that will admit no change."
+          --Pub.  Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]
+
+There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
+usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
+our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
+little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
+solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
+that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
+uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
+Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
+continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
+has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics.  I can
+more hardly believe a man's constancy than any other virtue, and believe
+nothing sooner than the contrary.  He that would judge of a man in detail
+and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth.  It
+is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
+formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
+principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
+of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
+"it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
+not vouchsafe," says he, "to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
+not just, it is impossible it should be always one."  I have indeed
+formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
+measure, and therefore 'tis impossible to fix constancy to it.  'Tis a
+saying of.  Demosthenes, "that the beginning oh all virtue is
+consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy."  If we
+would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
+best, but nobody has thought on't:
+
+          "Quod petiit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
+          AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto."
+
+     ["That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
+     again.  He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
+     life."--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]
+
+Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
+it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
+by the breath of occasion.  We never meditate what we would have till the
+instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
+which receives its colour from what it is laid upon.  What we but just
+now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
+again to it; 'tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:
+
+               "Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum."
+
+     ["We are turned about like the top with the thong of others."
+     --Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]
+
+We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
+with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:
+
+                         "Nonne videmus,
+          Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
+          Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?"
+
+     ["Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
+     for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 1070.]
+
+Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.
+
+         "Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
+          Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras."
+
+     ["Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
+     which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth."
+     --Cicero, Frag.  Poet, lib. x.]
+
+We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely,
+nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.  In any one who had prescribed
+and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own
+conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an
+infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his
+whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines,
+that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last,
+and built as if they had been to live for ever.  The judgment would not
+be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein
+has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; 'tis a harmony of
+very according sounds, that cannot jar.  But with us 't is quite
+contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment.  The
+surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from
+the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer
+inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence.  I was told,
+during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the
+place where I then was, had thrown herself out of a window to avoid being
+forced by a common soldier who was quartered in the house; she was not
+killed by the fall, and therefore, repeating her attempt would have cut
+her own throat, had she not been prevented; but having, nevertheless,
+wounded herself to some show of danger, she voluntarily confessed that
+the soldier had not as yet importuned her otherwise; than by courtship,
+earnest solicitation, and presents; but that she was afraid that in the
+end he would have proceeded to violence, all which she delivered with
+such a countenance and accent, and withal embrued in her own blood, the
+highest testimony of her virtue, that she appeared another Lucretia; and
+yet I have since been very well assured that both before and after she
+was not so difficult a piece.  And, according to my host's tale in
+Ariosto, be as handsome a man and as worthy a gentleman as you will, do
+not conclude too much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity for having
+been repulsed; you do not know but she may have a better stomach to your
+muleteer.
+
+Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favour
+and esteem for his valour, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him
+of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished,
+and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than
+before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: "Yourself, sir,"
+replied the other, "by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of
+my life."  Lucullus's soldier having been rifled by the enemy, performed
+upon them in revenge a brave exploit, by which having made himself a
+gainer, Lucullus, who had conceived a good opinion of him from that
+action, went about to engage him in some enterprise of very great danger,
+with all the plausible persuasions and promises he could think of;
+
+          "Verbis, quae timido quoque possent addere mentem"
+
+          ["Words which might add courage to any timid man."
+          --Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 1, 2.]
+
+"Pray employ," answered he, "some miserable plundered soldier in that
+affair":
+
+                         "Quantumvis rusticus, ibit,
+               Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit;"
+
+     ["Some poor fellow, who has lost his purse, will go whither you
+     wish, said he."--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 39.]
+
+and flatly refused to go.  When we read that Mahomet having furiously
+rated Chasan, Bassa of the Janissaries, because he had seen the
+Hungarians break into his squadrons, and himself behave very ill in the
+business, and that Chasan, instead of any other answer, rushed furiously
+alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of the enemy, where he was
+presently cut to pieces, we are not to look upon that action,
+peradventure, so much as vindication as a turn of mind, not so much
+natural valour as a sudden despite.  The man you saw yesterday so
+adventurous and brave, you must not think it strange to see him as great
+a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the
+trumpet had roused his spirits; this is no valour formed and established
+by reason, but accidentally created by such circumstances, and therefore
+it is no wonder if by contrary circumstances it appear quite another
+thing.
+
+These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given
+occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct
+powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the
+other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so
+abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same
+source.
+
+For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it
+according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble
+myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look
+narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same
+condition.  I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another,
+according to the side I turn her to.  If I speak variously of myself, it
+is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there
+to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another:
+bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
+ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant;
+liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less,
+according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the
+bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this
+volubility and discordance.  I have nothing to say of myself entirely,
+simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion.  'Distinguo' is the
+most universal member of my logic.  Though I always intend to speak well
+of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the
+best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition,
+that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice itself, if well-doing
+were not judged by the intention only.  One gallant action, therefore,
+ought not to conclude a man valiant; if a man were brave indeed, he would
+be always so, and upon all occasions.  If it were a habit of valour and
+not a sally, it would render a man equally resolute in all accidents; the
+same alone as in company; the same in lists as in a battle: for, let them
+say what they will, there is not one valour for the pavement and another
+for the field; he would bear a sickness in his bed as bravely as a wound
+in the field, and no more fear death in his own house than at an assault.
+We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with a brave
+assurance, and afterwards torment himself like a woman for the loss of a
+trial at law or the death of a child; when, being an infamous coward, he
+is firm in the necessities of poverty; when he shrinks at the sight of a
+barber's razor, and rushes fearless upon the swords of the enemy, the
+action is commendable, not the man.
+
+Many of the Greeks, says Cicero,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 27.]--
+cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness;
+the Cimbrians and Celtiberians quite contrary;
+
+              "Nihil enim potest esse aequabile,
+               quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur."
+
+     ["Nothing can be regular that does not proceed from a fixed ground
+     of reason."--Idem, ibid., c. 26.]
+
+No valour can be more extreme in its kind than that of Alexander: but it
+is of but one kind, nor full enough throughout, nor universal.
+Incomparable as it is, it has yet some blemishes; of which his being so
+often at his wits' end upon every light suspicion of his captains
+conspiring against his life, and the carrying himself in that inquisition
+with so much vehemence and indiscreet injustice, and with a fear that
+subverted his natural reason, is one pregnant instance.  The
+superstition, also, with which he was so much tainted, carries along with
+it some image of pusillanimity; and the excess of his penitence for the
+murder of Clytus is also a testimony of the unevenness of his courage.
+All we perform is no other than a cento, as a man may say, of several
+pieces, and we would acquire honour by a false title.  Virtue cannot be
+followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some
+other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.  'Tis a vivid and
+strong tincture which, when the soul has once thoroughly imbibed it, will
+not out but with the piece.  And, therefore, to make a right judgment of
+a man, we are long and very observingly to follow his trace: if constancy
+does not there stand firm upon her own proper base,
+
+               "Cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est,"
+
+     ["If the way of his life is thoroughly considered and traced out."
+     --Cicero, Paradox, v. 1.]
+
+if the variety of occurrences makes him alter his pace (his path, I mean,
+for the pace may be faster or slower) let him go; such an one runs before
+the wind, "Avau le dent," as the motto of our Talebot has it.
+
+'Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a
+dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.  It is not possible for
+any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is
+impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form
+already contrived in his imagination.  Of what use are colours to him
+that knows not what he is to paint?  No one lays down a certain design
+for his life, and we only deliberate thereof by pieces.  The archer ought
+first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow,
+string, shaft, and motion to it; our counsels deviate and wander, because
+not levelled to any determinate end.  No wind serves him who addresses
+his voyage to no certain, port.  I cannot acquiesce in the judgment given
+by one in the behalf of Sophocles,  who concluded him capable of the
+management of domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son, from
+having read one of his tragedies.
+
+Neither do I allow of the conjecture of the Parians, sent to regulate the
+Milesians sufficient for such a consequence as they from thence derived
+coming to visit the island, they took notice of such grounds as were best
+husbanded, and such country-houses as were best governed; and having
+taken the names of the owners, when they had assembled the citizens, they
+appointed these farmers for new governors and magistrates; concluding
+that they, who had been so provident in their own private concerns, would
+be so of the public too.  We are all lumps, and of so various and inform
+a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and
+there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and
+others:
+
+               "Magnam rem puta, unum hominem agere."
+
+     ["Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same
+     man."--Seneca, Ep., 150.]
+
+Since ambition can teach man valour, temperance, and liberality, and even
+justice too; seeing that avarice can inspire the courage of a shop-boy,
+bred and nursed up in obscurity and ease, with the assurance to expose
+himself so far from the fireside to the mercy of the waves and angry
+Neptune in a frail boat; that she further teaches discretion and
+prudence; and that even Venus can inflate boys under the discipline of
+the rod with boldness and resolution, and infuse masculine courage into
+the heart of tender virgins in their mothers' arms:
+
+         "Hac duce, custodes furtim transgressa jacentes,
+          Ad juvenem tenebris sola puella venit:"
+
+     ["She leading, the maiden, furtively passing by the recumbent
+     guards, goes alone in the darkness to the youth."
+     --Tibullus, ii. 2, 75.]
+
+'tis not all the understanding has to do, simply to judge us by our
+outward actions; it must penetrate the very soul, and there discover by
+what springs the motion is guided.  But that being a high and hazardous
+undertaking, I could wish that fewer would attempt it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+OF DRUNKENNESS
+
+The world is nothing but variety and disemblance, vices are all alike, as
+they are vices, and peradventure the Stoics understand them so; but
+although they are equally vices, yet they are not all equal vices; and he
+who has transgressed the ordinary bounds a hundred paces:
+
+          "Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,"
+
+          ["Beyond or within which the right cannot exist."
+          --Horace, Sat., i, 1, 107.]
+
+should not be in a worse condition than he that has advanced but ten, is
+not to be believed; or that sacrilege is not worse than stealing a
+cabbage:
+
+         "Nec vincet ratio hoc, tantumdem ut peccet, idemque,
+          Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,
+          Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit."
+
+There is in this as great diversity as in anything whatever.  The
+confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers,
+traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they
+should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle,
+lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion.  Every one overrates the
+offence of his companions, but extenuates his own.  Our very instructors
+themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill.  As Socrates
+said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from
+evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the
+science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that
+very exactly performed, the virtuous and the wicked will remain
+confounded and unrecognised.
+
+Now, amongst the rest, drunkenness seems to me to be a gross and brutish
+vice.  The soul has greater part in the rest, and there are some vices
+that have something, if a man may so say, of generous in them; there are
+vices wherein there is a mixture of knowledge, diligence, valour,
+prudence, dexterity, and address; this one is totally corporeal and
+earthly.  And the rudest nation this day in Europe is that alone where it
+is in fashion.  Other vices discompose the understanding: this totally
+overthrows it and renders the body stupid:
+
+              "Cum vini vis penetravit .  .  .
+               Consequitur gravitas membrorum, praepediuntur
+               Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens,
+               Nant oculi; clamor, singultus, jurgia, gliscunt."
+
+     ["When the power of wine has penetrated us, a heaviness of the limbs
+     follows, the legs of the tottering person are impeded; the tongue
+     grows torpid, the mind is dimmed, the eyes swim; noise, hiccup, and
+     quarrels arise.--"Lucretius, i. 3, 475.]
+
+The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and
+government of himself.  And 'tis said amongst other things upon this
+subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top
+whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond
+measure, vents the most inward secrets:
+
+                   "Tu sapientum
+                    Curas et arcanum jocoso
+                    Consilium retegis Lyaeo."
+
+     ["Thou disclosest to the merry Lyacus the cares and secret
+     counsel of the wise."--Horace, Od., xxi. 1, 114.]
+
+     [Lyacus, a name given to Bacchus.]
+
+Josephus tells us that by giving an ambassador the enemy had sent to him
+his full dose of liquor, he wormed out his secrets.  And yet, Augustus,
+committing the most inward secrets of his affairs to Lucius Piso, who
+conquered Thrace, never found him faulty in the least, no more than
+Tiberias did Cossus, with whom he intrusted his whole counsels, though we
+know they were both so given to drink that they have often been fain to
+carry both the one and the other drunk out of the Senate:
+
+          "Hesterno inflatum venas ut semper, Lyaeo."
+
+     ["Their veins full, as usual, of yesterday's wine."
+     --Virgil, Egl., vi.  15.]
+
+And the design of killing Caesar was as safely communicated to Cimber,
+though he would often be drunk, as to Cassius, who drank nothing but
+water.
+
+     [As to which Cassius pleasantly said: "What, shall I bear
+     a tyrant, I who cannot bear wine?"]
+
+We see our Germans, when drunk as the devil, know their post, remember
+the word, and keep to their ranks:
+
+               "Nec facilis victoria de madidis, et
+               Blaesis, atque mero titubantibus."
+
+     ["Nor is a victory easily obtained over men so drunk, they can
+     scarce speak or stand."--Juvenal, Sat., xv.  47.]
+
+I could not have believed there had been so profound, senseless, and dead
+a degree of drunkenness had I not read in history that Attalus having,
+to put a notable affront upon him, invited to supper the same Pausanias,
+who upon the very same occasion afterwards killed Philip of Macedon,
+a king who by his excellent qualities gave sufficient testimony of his
+education in the house and company of Epaminondas, made him drink to such
+a pitch that he could after abandon his beauty, as of a hedge strumpet,
+to the muleteers and servants of the basest office in the house.  And I
+have been further told by a lady whom I highly honour and esteem, that
+near Bordeaux and about Castres  where she lives, a country woman, a
+widow of chaste repute, perceiving in herself the first symptoms of
+breeding, innocently told her neighbours that if she had a husband she
+should think herself with child; but the causes of suspicion every day
+more and more increasing, and at last growing up to a manifest proof, the
+poor woman was reduced to the necessity of causing it to be proclaimed in
+her parish church, that whoever had done that deed and would frankly
+confess it, she did not only promise to forgive, but moreover to marry
+him, if he liked the motion; whereupon a young fellow that served her in
+the quality of a labourer, encouraged by this proclamation, declared that
+he had one holiday found her, having taken too much of the bottle, so
+fast asleep by the chimney and in so indecent a posture, that he could
+conveniently do his business without waking her; and they yet live
+together man and wife.
+
+It is true that antiquity has not much decried this vice; the writings
+even of several philosophers speak very tenderly of it, and even amongst
+the Stoics there are some who advise folks to give themselves sometimes
+the liberty to drink, nay, to drunkenness, to refresh the soul:
+
+          "Hoc quoque virtutum quondam certamine, magnum
+          Socratem palmam promeruisse ferunt."
+
+     ["In this trial of power formerly they relate that the great
+     Socrates deserved the palm."--Cornet. Gallus, Ep., i. 47.]
+
+That censor and reprover of others, Cato, was reproached that he was a
+hard drinker:
+
+                    "Narratur et prisci Catonis
+                    Saepe mero caluisse virtus."
+
+     ["And of old Cato it is said, that his courage was often warmed with
+     wine."--Horace, Od., xxi. 3, 11.--Cato the Elder.]
+
+Cyrus, that so renowned king, amongst the other qualities by which he
+claimed to be preferred before his brother Artaxerxes, urged this
+excellence, that he could drink a great deal more than he.  And in the
+best governed nations this trial of skill in drinking is very much in
+use.  I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that
+lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not
+amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest
+they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the
+Persians used to consult about their most important affairs after being
+well warmed with wine.
+
+My taste and constitution are greater enemies to this vice than my
+discourse; for besides that I easily submit my belief to the authority of
+ancient opinions, I look upon it indeed as an unmanly and stupid vice,
+but less malicious and hurtful than the others, which, almost all, more
+directly jostle public society.  And if we cannot please ourselves but it
+must cost us something, as they hold, I find this vice costs a man's
+conscience less than the others, besides that it is of no difficult
+preparation, nor hard to be found, a consideration not altogether to be
+despised.  A man well advanced both in dignity and age, amongst three
+principal commodities that he said remained to him of life, reckoned to
+me this for one, and where would a man more justly find it than amongst
+the natural conveniences?  But he did not take it right, for delicacy and
+the curious choice of wines is therein to be avoided.  If you found your
+pleasure upon drinking of the best, you condemn yourself to the penance
+of drinking of the worst.  Your taste must be more indifferent and free;
+so delicate a palate is not required to make a good toper.  The Germans
+drink almost indifferently of all wines with delight; their business is
+to pour down and not to taste; and it's so much the better for them:
+their pleasure is so much the more plentiful and nearer at hand.
+
+Secondly, to drink, after the French fashion, but at two meals, and then
+very moderately, is to be too sparing of the favours of the god.  There
+is more time and constancy required than so.  The ancients spent whole
+nights in this exercise, and ofttimes added the day following to eke it
+out, and therefore we are to take greater liberty and stick closer to our
+work.  I have seen a great lord of my time, a man of high enterprise and
+famous success, that without setting himself to't, and after his ordinary
+rate of drinking at meals, drank not much less than five quarts of wine,
+and at his going away appeared but too wise and discreet, to the
+detriment of our affairs.  The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course
+of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it;
+we should, like shopboys and labourers, refuse no occasion nor omit any
+opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.  Methinks we
+every day abridge and curtail the use of wine, and that the after
+breakfasts, dinner snatches, and collations I used to see in my father's
+house, when I was a boy, were more usual and frequent then than now.
+
+Is it that we pretend to a reformation?  Truly, no: but it may be we are
+more addicted to Venus than our fathers were.  They are two exercises
+that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour.  Lechery weakens our
+stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce
+and amorous for the exercise of love.
+
+'Tis wonderful what strange stories I have heard my father tell of the
+chastity of that age wherein he lived.  It was for him to say it, being
+both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies.
+He spoke well and little: ever mixing his language with some illustration
+out of authors most in use, especially in Spanish, and among the Spanish
+he whom they called Marcus Aurelius--[ Guevara's Golden Book of Marcus
+Aurelius Antoninus.]--was ordinarily in his mouth.  His behaviour was
+gently grave, humble, and very modest; he was very solicitous of neatness
+and propriety both in his person and clothes, whether on horseback or
+afoot, he was monstrously punctual in his word; and of a conscience and
+religion generally tending rather towards superstition than otherwise.
+For a man of little stature, very strong, well proportioned, and well
+knit; of a pleasing countenance inclining to brown, and very adroit in
+all noble exercises.  I have yet in the house to be seen canes poured
+full of lead, with which they say he exercised his arms for throwing the
+bar or the stone, or in fencing; and shoes with leaden soles to make him
+lighter for running or leaping.  Of his vaulting he has left little
+miracles behind him: I have seen him when past three score laugh at our
+exercises, and throw himself in his furred gown into the saddle, make the
+tour of a table upon his thumbs and scarce ever mount the stairs into his
+chamber without taking three or four steps at a time.  But as to what I
+was speaking of before; he said there was scarce one woman of quality of
+ill fame in the whole province: he would tell of strange confidences, and
+some of them his own, with virtuous women, free from any manner of
+suspicion of ill, and for his own part solemnly swore he was a virgin at
+his marriage; and yet it was after a long practice of arms beyond the
+mountains, of which wars he left us a journal under his own hand, wherein
+he has given a precise account from point to point of all passages, both
+relating to the public and to himself.  And he was, moreover, married at
+a well advanced maturity, in the year 1528, the three-and-thirtieth year
+of his age, upon his way home from Italy.  But let us return to our
+bottles.
+
+The incommodities of old age, that stand in need of some refreshment and
+support, might with reason beget in me a desire of this faculty, it being
+as it were the last pleasure the course of years deprives us of.  The
+natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that
+concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes
+a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of
+human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end,
+like a vapour that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where
+it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.  I do not,
+nevertheless, understand how a man can extend the pleasure of drinking
+beyond thirst, and forge in his imagination an appetite artificial and
+against nature; my stomach would not proceed so far; it has enough to do
+to deal with what it takes in for its necessity.  My constitution is not
+to care for drink but as following eating and washing down my meat, and
+for that reason my last draught is always the greatest.  And seeing that
+in old age we have our palate furred with phlegms or depraved by some
+other ill constitution, the wine tastes better to us as the pores are
+cleaner washed and laid more open.  At least, I seldom taste the first
+glass well.  Anacharsis wondered that the Greeks drank in greater glasses
+towards the end of a meal than at the beginning; which was, I suppose,
+for the same reason the Germans do the same, who then begin the battle of
+drink.
+
+Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk
+till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and
+to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that
+good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their
+youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by
+fire; and in his Lazes allows such merry meetings, provided they have a
+discreet chief to govern and keep them in order, as good and of great
+utility; drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every
+one's nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert
+themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare
+not attempt when sober.  He, moreover, says that wine is able to supply
+the soul with temperance and the body with health.  Nevertheless, these
+restrictions, in part borrowed from the Carthaginians, please him: that
+men forbear excesses in the expeditions of war; that every judge and
+magistrate abstain from it when about the administrations of his place or
+the consultations of the public affairs; that the day is not to be
+employed with it, that being a time due to other occupations, nor the
+night on which a man intends to get children.
+
+'Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely
+hastened his end by drinking pure wine.  The same thing, but not designed
+by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus.
+
+But 'tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can
+be overcome by the strength of wine?
+
+               "Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae."
+
+To what vanity does the good opinion we have of ourselves push us?  The
+most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to
+keep itself upright, and from being overthrown by its own weakness.
+There is not one of a thousand that is right and settled so much as one
+minute in a whole life, and that may not very well doubt, whether
+according to her natural condition she ever can be; but to join constancy
+to it is her utmost perfection; I mean when nothing should jostle and
+discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do.  'Tis to much purpose
+that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy,
+when, behold!  he goes mad with a love philtre.  Is it to be imagined
+that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?  Some men
+have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight
+wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.  Let him be as wise
+as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more
+frail, more miserable, or more nothing?  Wisdom does not force our
+natural dispositions,
+
+               "Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
+               Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
+               Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
+               Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus."
+
+     ["Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is
+     rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
+     there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
+     influence of fear."--Lucretius, iii. 155.]
+
+he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
+tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
+reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
+reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
+he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
+not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:
+
+               "Humani a se nihil alienum putet."
+
+     ["Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
+     men in general."--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]
+
+The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
+greatest heroes of tears:
+
+          "Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas."
+
+     ["Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet."
+     --Aeneid, vi. i.]
+
+'Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
+totally to suppress them is not in him to do.  Even our great Plutarch,
+that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
+and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
+proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
+stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c.  3.]
+--All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
+interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
+above than with what is below it.
+
+Let us leave that other sect, that sets up an express profession of
+scornful superiority--[The Stoics.]--: but when even in that sect,
+reputed the most quiet and gentle, we hear these rhodomontades of
+Metrodorus:
+
+          "Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi: omnesque aditus tuos
+          interclusi ut ad me aspirare non posses;"
+
+     ["Fortune, I have got the better of thee, and have made all the
+     avenues so sure thou canst not come at me."
+     --Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 9.]
+
+when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put
+into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say,
+"Strike, batter, break; 'tis not Anaxarchus, 'tis but his sheath that you
+pound and bray so"; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from
+the middle of the flame, "This side is roasted enough, fall to and eat,
+it is enough done; fall to work with the other;" when we hear the child
+in Josephus' torn piece-meal with pincers, defying Antiochus, and crying
+out with a constant and assured voice: "Tyrant, thou losest thy labour,
+I am still at ease; where is the pain, where are the torments with which
+thou didst so threaten me?  Is this all thou canst do?  My constancy
+torments thee more than thy cruelty does me.  O pitiful coward, thou
+faintest, and I grow stronger; make me complain, make me bend, make me
+yield if thou canst; encourage thy guards, cheer up thy executioners;
+see, see they faint, and can do no more; arm them, flesh them anew, spur
+them up"; truly, a man must confess that there is some phrenzy, some
+fury, how holy soever, that at that time possesses those souls.  When we
+come to these Stoical sallies: "I had rather be mad than voluptuous," a
+saying of Antisthenes.  When Sextius tells us, "he had rather be fettered
+with affliction than pleasure": when Epicurus takes upon him to play with
+his gout, and, refusing health and ease, defies all torments, and
+despising the lesser pains, as disdaining to contend with them, he covets
+and calls out for others sharper, more violent, and more worthy of him;
+
+          "Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis
+          Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem:"
+
+     ["And instead of timid beasts, wishes the foaming boar or tawny lion
+     would come from the mountain."--AEneid, iv. 158.]
+
+who but must conclude that these are wild sallies pushed on by a courage
+that has broken loose from its place?  Our soul cannot from her own seat
+reach so high; 'tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and,
+taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall
+afterwards himself be astonished at what he has done; as, in war, the
+heat of battle impels generous soldiers to perform things of so infinite
+danger, as afterwards, recollecting them, they themselves are the first
+to wonder at; as it also fares with the poets, who are often rapt with
+admiration of their own writings, and know not where again to find the
+track through which they performed so fine a Career; which also is in
+them called fury and rapture.  And as Plato says, 'tis to no purpose for
+a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy: so Aristotle says, that
+no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason
+to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own
+judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular
+government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion,
+and for which she is to herself responsible.  Plato argues thus, that the
+faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of
+ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be
+obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some
+celestial rapture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA
+
+          [Cos.  Cea is the form of the name given by Pliny]
+
+If to philosophise be, as 'tis defined, to doubt, much more to write at
+random and play the fool, as I do, ought to be reputed doubting, for it
+is for novices and freshmen to inquire and to dispute, and for the
+chairman to moderate and determine.
+
+My moderator is the authority of the divine will, that governs us without
+contradiction, and that is seated above these human and vain
+contestations.
+
+Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to
+Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they
+did not in time reconcile themselves to his favour:  "Why, you pitiful
+fellow," replied he, "what can they suffer who do not fear to die?"  It
+being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free?  "Why," said
+he, "by despising death."  These, and a thousand other sayings to the
+same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient
+attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several
+accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself.  Witness the
+Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by
+his master commanded to some base employment: "Thou shalt see," says the
+boy, "whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being
+so near the reach of liberty," and having so said, threw himself from the
+top of the house.  Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians,
+that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of
+his: "If thou threatenest us with more than death," replied they, "we
+shall the more willingly die"; and to Philip, having written them word
+that he would frustrate all their enterprises: "What, wilt thou also
+hinder us from dying?"  This is the meaning of the sentence, "That the
+wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the
+most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all
+colour of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own
+custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a
+hundred thousand ways out.  We may be straitened for earth to live upon,
+but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus
+answered the Romans."--[Tacitus, Annal., xiii.  56.]--Why dost thou
+complain of this world?  it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the
+cause, if thou livest in pain.  There needs no more to die but to will to
+die:
+
+               "Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus.
+               Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
+               At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent."
+
+     ["Death is everywhere: heaven has well provided for that.  Any one
+     may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death.  To death
+     there are a thousand avenues."--Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]
+
+Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure
+of all; 'tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very
+often to be sought.  It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his
+end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before
+his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it
+comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there's
+the end of the clue.  The most voluntary death is the finest.  Life
+depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.  We ought not to
+accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.
+Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; 'tis folly to be
+concerned by any such apprehension. Living is slavery if the liberty of
+dying be wanting.  The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the
+expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and
+amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one
+step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.  Why is not the
+jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein?  For a desperate
+disease a desperate cure.  Servius the grammarian, being tormented with
+the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his
+legs, to deprive them of their sense; let them be gouty at their will, so
+they were insensible of pain.  God gives us leave enough to go when He is
+pleased to reduce us to such a condition that to live is far worse than
+to die.  'Tis weakness to truckle under infirmities, but it's madness to
+nourish them.  The Stoics say, that it is living according to nature in a
+wise man to, take his leave of life, even in the height of prosperity,
+if he do it opportunely; and in a fool to prolong it, though he be
+miserable, provided he be not indigent of those things which they repute
+to be according to nature.  As I do not offend the law against thieves
+when I embezzle my own money and cut my own purse; nor that against
+incendiaries when I burn my own wood; so am I not under the lash of those
+made against murderers for having deprived myself of my own life.
+Hegesias said, that as the condition of life did, so the condition of
+death ought to depend upon our own choice.  And Diogenes meeting the
+philosopher Speusippus, so blown up with an inveterate dropsy that he was
+fain to be carried in a litter, and by him saluted with the compliment,
+"I wish you good health."  "No health to thee," replied the other,
+"who art content to live in such a condition."
+
+And in fact, not long after, Speusippus, weary of so languishing a state
+of life, found a means to die.
+
+But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of
+opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the
+express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to
+God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and
+the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and
+not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for
+ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an
+account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action
+of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of
+the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty:
+
+         "Proxima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi letum
+          Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi
+          Proiecere animas."
+
+     ["Thence the sad ones occupy the next abodes, who, though free
+     from guilt, were by their own hands slain, and, hating light,
+     sought death."--AEneid, vi. 434.]
+
+There is more constancy in suffering the chain we are tied to than in
+breaking it, and more pregnant evidence of fortitude in Regulus than in
+Cato; 'tis indiscretion and impatience that push us on to these
+precipices: no accidents can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks
+and requires evils, pains, and grief, as the things by which she is
+nourished and supported; the menaces of tyrants, racks, and tortures
+serve only to animate and rouse her:
+
+              "Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
+               Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido,
+               Per damma, percmdes, ab ipso
+               Ducit opes, animumque ferro."
+
+     ["As in Mount Algidus, the sturdy oak even from the axe itself
+     derives new vigour and life."--Horace, Od., iv. 4, 57.]
+
+And as another says:
+
+              "Non est, ut putas, virtus, pater,
+               Timere vitam; sed malis ingentibus
+               Obstare, nec se vertere, ac retro dare."
+
+     ["Father, 'tis no virtue to fear life, but to withstand great
+     misfortunes, nor turn back from them."--Seneca, Theb., i. 190.]
+
+Or as this:
+
+          "Rebus in adversis facile est contemnere mortem
+          Fortius ille facit, qui miser esse potest."
+
+     ["It is easy in adversity to despise death; but he acts more
+     bravely, who can live wretched."--Martial, xi. 56, 15.]
+
+'Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a furrow, under a tomb, to
+evade the blows of fortune; virtue never stops nor goes out of her path,
+for the greatest storm that blows:
+
+                    "Si fractus illabatur orbis,
+                    Impavidum ferient ruinae."
+
+     ["Should the world's axis crack, the ruins will but crush
+      a fearless head."--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 7.]
+
+For the most part, the flying from other inconveniences brings us to
+this; nay, endeavouring to evade death, we often run into its very mouth:
+
+          "Hic, rogo, non furor est, ne moriare, mori?"
+
+     ["Tell me, is it not madness, that one should die for fear
+     of dying?"--Martial, ii. 80, 2.]
+
+like those who, from fear of a precipice, throw themselves headlong into
+it;
+
+              "Multos in summa pericula misfit
+               Venturi timor ipse mali: fortissimus ille est,
+               Qui promptus metuenda pati, si cominus instent,
+               Et differre potest."
+
+     ["The fear of future ills often makes men run into extreme danger;
+     he is truly brave who boldly dares withstand the mischiefs he
+     apprehends, when they confront him and can be deferred."
+     --Lucan, vii. 104.]
+
+               "Usque adeo, mortis formidine, vitae
+               Percipit humanos odium, lucisque videndae,
+               Ut sibi consciscant moerenti pectore lethum
+               Obliti fontem curarum hunc esse timorem."
+
+     ["Death to that degree so frightens some men, that causing them to
+     hate both life and light, they kill themselves, miserably forgetting
+     that this same fear is the fountain of their cares."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 79.]
+
+Plato, in his Laws, assigns an ignominious sepulture to him who has
+deprived his nearest and best friend, namely himself, of life and his
+destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment,
+by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable
+disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a
+timorous soul.  And the opinion that makes so little of life, is
+ridiculous; for it is our being, 'tis all we have.  Things of a nobler
+and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against
+nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; 'tis a
+disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to
+hate and despise itself.  And it is a vanity of the same stamp to desire
+to be something else than what we are; the effect of such a desire does
+not at all touch us, forasmuch as it is contradicted and hindered in
+itself.  He that desires of a man to be made an angel, does nothing for
+himself; he would be never the better for it; for, being no more, who
+shall rejoice or be sensible of this benefit for him.
+
+         "Debet enim, misere cui forti, aegreque futurum est,
+          Ipse quoque esse in eo turn tempore, cum male possit
+          Accidere."
+
+     ["For he to whom misery and pain are to be in the future, must
+     himself then exist, when these ills befall him."
+     --Idem, ibid., 874.]
+
+Security, indolence, impassability, the privation of the evils of this
+life, which we pretend to purchase at the price of dying, are of no
+manner of advantage to us: that man evades war to very little purpose who
+can have no fruition of peace; and as little to the purpose does he avoid
+trouble who cannot enjoy repose.
+
+Amongst those of the first of these two opinions, there has been great
+debate, what occasions are sufficient to justify the meditation of self-
+murder, which they call "A reasonable exit."--[ Diogenes Laertius, Life
+of Zeno.]--For though they say that men must often die for trivial
+causes, seeing those that detain us in life are of no very great weight,
+yet there is to be some limit.  There are fantastic and senseless humours
+that have prompted not only individual men, but whole nations to destroy
+themselves, of which I have elsewhere given some examples; and we further
+read of the Milesian virgins, that by a frantic compact they hanged
+themselves one after another till the magistrate took order in it,
+enacting that the bodies of such as should be found so hanged should be
+drawn by the same halter stark naked through the city.  When Therykion
+tried to persuade Cleomenes to despatch himself, by reason of the ill
+posture of his affairs, and, having missed a death of more honour in the
+battle he had lost, to accept of this the second in honour to it, and not
+to give the conquerors leisure to make him undergo either an ignominious
+death or an infamous life; Cleomenes, with a courage truly Stoic and
+Lacedaemonian, rejected his counsel as unmanly and mean; "that," said he,
+"is a remedy that can never be wanting, but which a man is never to make
+use of, whilst there is an inch of hope remaining": telling him, "that
+it was sometimes constancy and valour to live; that he would that even
+his death should be of use to his country, and would make of it an act of
+honour and virtue."  Therykion, notwithstanding, thought himself in the
+right, and did his own business; and Cleomenes afterwards did the same,
+but not till he had first tried the utmost malevolence of fortune.  All
+the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man
+should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden
+and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when
+we are at the end of our hope:
+
+              "Sperat et in saeva victus gladiator arena,
+               Sit licet infesto pollice turba minax."
+
+     ["The gladiator conquered in the lists hopes on, though the
+     menacing spectators, turning their thumb, order him to die."
+     --Pentadius, De Spe, ap. Virgilii Catadecta.]
+
+All things, says an old adage, are to be hoped for by a man whilst he
+lives; ay, but, replies Seneca, why should this rather be always running
+in a man's head that fortune can do all things for the living man, than
+this, that fortune has no power over him that knows how to die?
+Josephus, when engaged in so near and apparent danger, a whole people
+being violently bent against him, that there was no visible means of
+escape, nevertheless, being, as he himself says, in this extremity
+counselled by one of his friends to despatch himself, it was well for him
+that he yet maintained himself in hope, for fortune diverted the accident
+beyond all human expectation, so that he saw himself delivered without
+any manner of inconvenience.  Whereas Brutus and Cassius, on the
+contrary, threw away the remains of the Roman liberty, of which they were
+the sole protectors, by the precipitation and temerity wherewith they
+killed themselves before the due time and a just occasion.  Monsieur
+d'Anguien, at the battle of Serisolles, twice attempted to run himself
+through, despairing of the fortune of the day, which went indeed very
+untowardly on that side of the field where he was engaged, and by that
+precipitation was very near depriving himself of the enjoyment of so
+brave a victory.  I have seen a hundred hares escape out of the very
+teeth of the greyhounds:
+
+               "Aliquis carnifici suo superstes fuit."
+
+     ["Some have survived their executioners."--Seneca, Ep., 13.]
+
+              "Multa dies, variusque labor mutabilis nevi
+               Rettulit in melius; multos alterna revisens
+               Lusit, et in solido rursus fortuna locavit."
+
+     ["Length of days, and the various labour of changeful time, have
+     brought things to a better state; fortune turning, shews a reverse
+     face, and again restores men to prosperity."--AEneid, xi. 425.]
+
+Piny says there are but three sorts of diseases, to escape which a man
+has good title to destroy himself; the worst of which is the stone in the
+bladder, when the urine is suppressed.
+
+     ["In the quarto edition of these essays, in 1588, Pliny is said to
+     mention two more, viz., a pain in the stomach and a headache, which,
+     he says (lib. xxv. c. 9.), were the only three distempers almost
+     for which men killed themselves."]
+
+Seneca says those only which for a long time are discomposing the
+functions of the soul.  And some there have been who, to avoid a worse
+death, have chosen one to their own liking.  Democritus, general of the
+AEtolians, being brought prisoner to Rome, found means to make his escape
+by night: but close pursued by his keepers, rather than suffer himself to
+be retaken, he fell upon his own sword and died.  Antinous and Theodotus,
+their city of Epirus being reduced by the Romans to the last extremity,
+gave the people counsel universally to kill themselves; but, these
+preferring to give themselves up to the enemy, the two chiefs went to
+seek the death they desired, rushing furiously upon the enemy, with
+intention to strike home but not to ward a blow.  The Island of Gozzo
+being taken some years ago by the Turks, a Sicilian, who had two
+beautiful daughters marriageable, killed them both with his own hand, and
+their mother, running in to save them, to boot, which having done,
+sallying out of the house with a cross-bow and harquebus, with two shots
+he killed two of the Turks nearest to his door, and drawing his sword,
+charged furiously in amongst the rest, where he was suddenly enclosed and
+cut to pieces, by that means delivering his family and himself from
+slavery and dishonour.  The Jewish women, after having circumcised their
+children, threw them and themselves down a precipice to avoid the cruelty
+of Antigonus.  I have been told of a person of condition in one of our
+prisons, that his friends, being informed that he would certainly be
+condemned, to avoid the ignominy of such a death suborned a priest to
+tell him that the only means of his deliverance was to recommend himself
+to such a saint, under such and such vows, and to fast eight days
+together without taking any manner of nourishment, what weakness or
+faintness soever he might find in himself during the time; he followed
+their advice, and by that means destroyed himself before he was aware,
+not dreaming of death or any danger in the experiment.  Scribonia
+advising her nephew Libo to kill himself rather than await the stroke of
+justice, told him that it was to do other people's business to preserve
+his life to put it after into the hands of those who within three or four
+days would fetch him to execution, and that it was to serve his enemies
+to keep his blood to gratify their malice.
+
+We read in the Bible that Nicanor, the persecutor of the law of God,
+having sent his soldiers to seize upon the good old man Razis, surnamed
+in honour of his virtue the father of the Jews: the good man, seeing no
+other remedy, his gates burned down, and the enemies ready to seize him,
+choosing rather to die nobly than to fall into the hands of his wicked
+adversaries and suffer himself to be cruelly butchered by them, contrary
+to the honour of his rank and quality, stabbed himself with his own
+sword, but the blow, for haste, not having been given home, he ran and
+threw himself from the top of a wall headlong among them, who separating
+themselves and making room, he pitched directly upon his head;
+notwithstanding which, feeling yet in himself some remains of life, he
+renewed his courage, and starting up upon his feet all bloody and wounded
+as he was, and making his way through the crowd to a precipitous rock,
+there, through one of his wounds, drew out his bowels, which, tearing and
+pulling to pieces with both his hands, he threw amongst his pursuers, all
+the while attesting and invoking the Divine vengeance upon them for their
+cruelty and injustice.
+
+Of violences offered to the conscience, that against the chastity of
+woman is, in my opinion, most to be avoided, forasmuch as there is a
+certain pleasure naturally mixed with it, and for that reason the dissent
+therein cannot be sufficiently perfect and entire, so that the violence
+seems to be mixed with a little consent of the forced party.  The
+ecclesiastical history has several examples of devout persons who have
+embraced death to secure them from the outrages prepared by tyrants
+against their religion and honour.  Pelagia and Sophronia, both
+canonised, the first of these precipitated herself with her mother and
+sisters into the river to avoid being forced by some soldiers, and the
+last also killed herself to avoid being ravished by the Emperor
+Maxentius.
+
+It may, peradventure, be an honour to us in future ages, that a learned
+author of this present time, and a Parisian, takes a great deal of pains
+to persuade the ladies of our age rather to take any other course than to
+enter into the horrid meditation of such a despair.  I am sorry he had
+never heard, that he might have inserted it amongst his other stories,
+the saying of a woman, which was told me at Toulouse, who had passed
+through the handling of some soldiers: "God be praised," said she, "that
+once at least in my life I have had my fill without sin."  In truth,
+these cruelties are very unworthy the French good nature, and also, God
+be thanked, our air is very well purged of them since this good advice:
+'tis enough that they say "no" in doing it, according to the rule of the
+good Marot.
+              "Un doulx nenny, avec un doulx sourire
+               Est tant honneste."--Marot.
+
+History is everywhere full of those who by a thousand ways have exchanged
+a painful and irksome life for death.  Lucius Aruntius killed himself, to
+fly, he said, both the future and the past.  Granius Silvanus and Statius
+Proximus, after having been pardoned by Nero, killed themselves; either
+disdaining to live by the favour of so wicked a man, or that they might
+not be troubled, at some other time, to obtain a second pardon,
+considering the proclivity of his nature to suspect and credit
+accusations against worthy men.  Spargapises, son of Queen Tomyris, being
+a prisoner of war to Cyrus, made use of the first favour Cyrus shewed
+him, in commanding him to be unbound, to kill himself, having pretended
+to no other benefit of liberty, but only to be revenged of himself for
+the disgrace of being taken.  Boges, governor in Eion for King Xerxes,
+being besieged by the Athenian army under the conduct of Cimon, refused
+the conditions offered, that he might safe return into Asia with all his
+wealth, impatient to survive the loss of a place his master had given him
+to keep; wherefore, having defended the city to the last extremity,
+nothing being left to eat, he first threw all the gold and whatever else
+the enemy could make booty of into the river Strymon, and then causing a
+great pile to be set on fire, and the throats of all the women, children,
+concubines, and servants to be cut, he threw their bodies into the fire,
+and at last leaped into it himself.
+
+Ninachetuen, an Indian lord, so soon as he heard the first whisper of the
+Portuguese Viceroy's determination to dispossess him, without any
+apparent cause, of his command in Malacca, to transfer it to the King of
+Campar, he took this resolution with himself: he caused a scaffold, more
+long than broad, to be erected, supported by columns royally adorned with
+tapestry and strewed with flowers and abundance of perfumes; all which
+being prepared, in a robe of cloth of gold, set full of jewels of great
+value, he came out into the street, and mounted the steps to the
+scaffold, at one corner of which he had a pile lighted of aromatic wood.
+Everybody ran to see to what end these unusual preparations were made;
+when Ninachetuen, with a manly but displeased countenance, set forth how
+much he had obliged the Portuguese nation, and with how unspotted
+fidelity he had carried himself in his charge; that having so often,
+sword in hand, manifested in the behalf of others, that honour was much
+more dear to him than life, he was not to abandon the concern of it for
+himself: that fortune denying him all means of opposing the affront
+designed to be put upon him, his courage at least enjoined him to free
+himself from the sense of it, and not to serve for a fable to the people,
+nor for a triumph to men less deserving than himself; which having said
+he leaped into the fire.
+
+Sextilia, wife of Scaurus, and Paxaea, wife of Labeo, to encourage their
+husbands to avoid the dangers that pressed upon them, wherein they had no
+other share than conjugal affection, voluntarily sacrificed their own
+lives to serve them in this extreme necessity for company and example.
+What they did for their husbands, Cocceius Nerva did for his country,
+with less utility though with equal affection: this great lawyer,
+flourishing in health, riches, reputation, and favour with the Emperor,
+had no other cause to kill himself but the sole compassion of the
+miserable state of the Roman Republic.  Nothing can be added to the
+beauty of the death of the wife of Fulvius, a familiar favourite of
+Augustus: Augustus having discovered that he had vented an important
+secret he had entrusted him withal, one morning that he came to make his
+court, received him very coldly and looked frowningly upon him.  He
+returned home, full of, despair, where he sorrowfully told his wife that,
+having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself: to
+which she roundly replied, "'tis but reason you should, seeing that
+having so often experienced the incontinence of my tongue, you could not
+take warning: but let me kill myself first," and without any more saying
+ran herself through the body with a sword.  Vibius Virrius, despairing of
+the safety of his city besieged by the Romans and of their mercy, in the
+last deliberation of his city's senate, after many arguments conducing to
+that end, concluded that the most noble means to escape fortune was by
+their own hands: telling them that the enemy would have them in honour,
+and Hannibal would be sensible how many faithful friends he had
+abandoned; inviting those who approved of his advice to come to a good
+supper he had ready at home, where after they had eaten well, they would
+drink together of what he had prepared; a beverage, said he, that will
+deliver our bodies from torments, our souls from insult, and our eyes and
+ears from the sense of so many hateful mischiefs, as the conquered suffer
+from cruel and implacable conquerors.  I have, said he, taken order for
+fit persons to throw our bodies into a funeral pile before my door so
+soon as we are dead.  Many enough approved this high resolution, but few
+imitated it; seven-and-twenty senators followed him, who, after having
+tried to drown the thought of this fatal determination in wine, ended the
+feast with the mortal mess; and embracing one another, after they had
+jointly deplored the misfortune of their country, some retired home to
+their own houses, others stayed to be burned with Vibius in his funeral
+pyre; and were all of them so long in dying, the vapour of the wine
+having prepossessed the veins, and by that means deferred the effect of
+poison, that some of them were within an hour of seeing the enemy inside
+the walls of Capua, which was taken the next morning, and of undergoing
+the miseries they had at so dear a rate endeavoured to avoid.  Jubellius
+Taurea, another citizen of the same country, the Consul Fulvius returning
+from the shameful butchery he had made of two hundred and twenty-five
+senators, called him back fiercely by name, and having made him stop:
+"Give the word," said he, "that somebody may dispatch me after the
+massacre of so many others, that thou mayest boast to have killed a much
+more valiant man than thyself."  Fulvius, disdaining him as a man out of
+his wits, and also having received letters from Rome censuring the
+inhumanity of his execution which tied his hands, Jubellius proceeded:
+"Since my country has been taken, my friends dead, and having with my own
+hands slain my wife and children to rescue them from the desolation of
+this ruin, I am denied to die the death of my fellow-citizens, let me
+borrow from virtue vengeance on this hated life," and therewithal drawing
+a short sword he carried concealed about him, he ran it through his own
+bosom, falling down backward, and expiring at the consul's feet.
+
+Alexander, laying siege to a city of the Indies, those within, finding
+themselves very hardly set, put on a vigorous resolution to deprive him
+of the pleasure of his victory, and accordingly burned themselves in
+general, together with their city, in despite of his humanity: a new kind
+of war, where the enemies sought to save them, and they to destroy
+themselves, doing to make themselves sure of death, all that men do to
+secure life.
+
+Astapa, a city of Spain, finding itself weak in walls and defence to
+withstand the Romans, the inhabitants made a heap of all their riches and
+furniture in the public place; and, having ranged upon this heap all the
+women and children, and piled them round with wood and other combustible
+matter to take sudden fire, and left fifty of their young men for the
+execution of that whereon they had resolved, they made a desperate sally,
+where for want of power to overcome, they caused themselves to be every
+man slain.  The fifty, after having massacred every living soul
+throughout the whole city, and put fire to this pile, threw themselves
+lastly into it, finishing their generous liberty, rather after an
+insensible, than after a sorrowful and disgraceful manner, giving the
+enemy to understand, that if fortune had been so pleased, they had as
+well the courage to snatch from them victory as they had to frustrate and
+render it dreadful, and even mortal to those who, allured by the
+splendour of the gold melting in this flame, having approached it,
+a great number were there suffocated and burned, being kept from retiring
+by the crowd that followed after.
+
+The Abydeans, being pressed by King Philip, put on the same resolution;
+but, not having time, they could not put it 'in effect.  The king, who
+was struck with horror at the rash precipitation of this execution (the
+treasure and movables that they had condemned to the flames being first
+seized), drawing off his soldiers, granted them three days' time to kill
+themselves in, that they might do it with more order and at greater ease:
+which time they filled with blood and slaughter beyond the utmost excess
+of all hostile cruelty, so that not so much as any one soul was left
+alive that had power to destroy itself.  There are infinite examples of
+like popular resolutions which seem the more fierce and cruel in
+proportion as the effect is more universal, and yet are really less so
+than when singly executed; what arguments and persuasion cannot do with
+individual men, they can do with all, the ardour of society ravishing
+particular judgments.
+
+The condemned who would live to be executed in the reign of Tiberius,
+forfeited their goods and were denied the rites of sepulture; those who,
+by killing themselves, anticipated it, were interred, and had liberty to
+dispose of their estates by will.
+
+But men sometimes covet death out of hope of a greater good.  "I desire,"
+says St. Paul, "to be with Christ," and "who shall rid me of these
+bands?"  Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato's Pheedo, entered
+into so great a desire of the life to come that, without any other
+occasion, he threw himself into the sea.  By which it appears how
+improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair, to which the
+eagerness of hope often inclines us, and, often, a calm and temperate
+desire proceeding from a mature and deliberate judgment.  Jacques du
+Chastel, bishop of Soissons, in St. Louis's foreign expedition, seeing
+the king and whole army upon the point of returning into France, leaving
+the affairs of religion imperfect, took a resolution rather to go into
+Paradise; wherefore, having taken solemn leave of his friends, he charged
+alone, in the sight of every one, into the enemy's army, where he was
+presently cut to pieces.  In a certain kingdom of the new discovered
+world, upon a day of solemn procession, when the idol they adore is drawn
+about in public upon a chariot of marvellous greatness; besides that many
+are then seen cutting off pieces of their flesh to offer to him, there
+are a number of others who prostrate themselves upon the place, causing
+themselves to be crushed and broken to pieces under the weighty wheels,
+to obtain the veneration of sanctity after death, which is accordingly
+paid them.  The death of the bishop, sword in hand, has more of
+magnanimity in it, and less of sentiment, the ardour of combat taking
+away part of the latter.
+
+There are some governments who have taken upon them to regulate the
+justice and opportunity of voluntary death.  In former times there was
+kept in our city of Marseilles a poison prepared out of hemlock, at the
+public charge, for those who had a mind to hasten their end, having
+first, before the six hundred, who were their senate, given account of
+the reasons and motives of their design, and it was not otherwise lawful,
+than by leave from the magistrate and upon just occasion to do violence
+to themselves.--[Valerius Maximus, ii. 6, 7.]--The same law was also
+in use in other places.
+
+Sextus Pompeius, in his expedition into Asia, touched at the isle of Cea
+in Negropont: it happened whilst he was there, as we have it from one
+that was with him, that a woman of great quality, having given an account
+to her citizens why she was resolved to put an end to her life, invited
+Pompeius to her death, to render it the more honourable, an invitation
+that he accepted; and having long tried in vain by the power of his
+eloquence, which was very great, and persuasion, to divert her from that
+design, he acquiesced in the end in her own will.  She had passed the age
+of four score and ten in a very happy state, both of body and mind; being
+then laid upon her bed, better dressed than ordinary and leaning upon her
+elbow, "The gods," said she, "O Sextus Pompeius, and rather those I leave
+than those I go to seek, reward thee, for that thou hast not disdained to
+be both the counsellor of my life and the witness of my death.  For my
+part, having always experienced the smiles of fortune, for fear lest the
+desire of living too long may make me see a contrary face, I am going, by
+a happy end, to dismiss the remains of my soul, leaving behind two
+daughters of my body and a legion of nephews"; which having said, with
+some exhortations to her family to live in peace, she divided amongst
+them her goods, and recommending her domestic gods to her eldest
+daughter, she boldly took the bowl that contained the poison, and having
+made her vows and prayers to Mercury to conduct her to some happy abode
+in the other world, she roundly swallowed the mortal poison.  This being
+done, she entertained the company with the progress of its operation, and
+how the cold by degrees seized the several parts of her body one after
+another, till having in the end told them it began to seize upon her
+heart and bowels, she called her daughters to do the last office and
+close her eyes.
+
+Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the
+sweet temperature of the air, lives rarely ended but by the voluntary
+surrender of the inhabitants, who, being weary of and satiated with
+living, had the custom, at a very old age, after having made good cheer,
+to precipitate themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock,
+assigned for that service.  Pain and the fear of a worse death seem to me
+the most excusable incitements.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TO-MORROW'S A NEW DAY
+
+I give, as it seems to me, with good reason the palm to Jacques Amyot of
+all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his
+language, wherein he excels all others, nor for his constancy in going
+through so long a work,  nor for the depth of his knowledge, having been
+able so successfully to smooth and unravel so knotty and intricate an
+author (for let people tell me what they will, I understand nothing of
+Greek; but I meet with sense so well united and maintained throughout his
+whole translation, that certainly he either knew the true fancy of the
+author, or having, by being long conversant with him, imprinted a vivid
+and general idea of that of Plutarch in his soul, he has delivered us
+nothing that either derogates from or contradicts him), but above all, I
+am the most taken with him for having made so discreet a choice of a book
+so worthy and of so great utility wherewith to present his country.  We
+ignorant fellows had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the
+dirt; by this favour of his we dare now speak and write; the ladies are
+able to read to schoolmasters; 'tis our breviary.  If this good man be
+yet living, I would recommend to him Xenophon, to do as much by that;
+'tis a much more easy task than the other, and consequently more proper
+for his age.  And, besides, though I know not how, methinks he does
+briskly--and clearly enough trip over steps another would have stumbled
+at, yet nevertheless his style seems to be more his own where he does not
+encounter those difficulties, and rolls away at his own ease.
+
+I was just now reading this passage where Plutarch says of himself, that
+Rusticus being present at a declamation of his at Rome, there received a
+packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for
+which, says he, all the company highly applauded the gravity of this
+person.  'Tis true, that being upon the subject of curiosity and of that
+eager passion for news, which makes us with so much indiscretion and
+impatience leave all to entertain a newcomer, and without any manner of
+respect or outcry, tear open on a sudden, in what company soever, the
+letters that are delivered to us, he had reason to applaud the gravity of
+Rusticus upon this occasion; and might moreover have added to it the
+commendation of his civility and courtesy, that would not interrupt the
+current of his declamation.  But I doubt whether any one can commend his
+prudence; for receiving unexpected letters, and especially from an
+emperor, it might have fallen out that the deferring to read them might
+have been of great prejudice.  The vice opposite to curiosity is
+negligence, to which I naturally incline, and wherein I have seen some
+men so extreme that one might have found letters sent them three or four
+days before, still sealed up in their pockets.
+
+I never open any letters directed to another; not only those intrusted
+with me, but even such as fortune has guided to my hand; and am angry
+with myself if my eyes unawares steal any contents of letters of
+importance he is reading when I stand near a great man.  Never was man
+less inquisitive or less prying into other men's affairs than I.
+
+In our fathers' days, Monsieur de Boutieres had like to have lost Turin
+from having, while engaged in good company at supper, delayed to read
+information that was sent him of the treason plotted against that city
+where he commanded.  And this very Plutarch has given me to understand,
+that Julius Caesar had preserved himself, if, going to the Senate the day
+he was assassinated by the conspirators, he had read a note which was
+presented to him by, the way.  He tells also the story of Archias, the
+tyrant of Thebes, that the night before the execution of the design
+Pelopidas had plotted to kill him to restore his country to liberty, he
+had a full account sent him in writing by another Archias, an Athenian,
+of the whole conspiracy, and that, this packet having been delivered to
+him while he sat at supper, he deferred the opening of it, saying, which
+afterwards turned to a proverb in Greece, "Business to-morrow."
+
+A wise man may, I think, out of respect to another, as not to disturb the
+company, as Rusticus did, or not to break off another affair of
+importance in hand, defer to read or hear any new thing that is brought
+him; but for his own interest or particular pleasure, especially if he be
+a public minister, that he will not interrupt his dinner or break his
+sleep is inexcusable.  And there was anciently at Rome, the consular
+place, as they called it, which was the most honourable at the table, as
+being a place of most liberty, and of more convenient access to those who
+came in to speak to the person seated there; by which it appears, that
+being at meat, they did not totally abandon the concern of other affairs
+and incidents.  But when all is said, it is very hard in human actions to
+give so exact a rule upon moral reasons, that fortune will not therein
+maintain her own right.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OF CONSCIENCE
+
+The Sieur de la Brousse, my brother, and I, travelling one day together
+during the time of our civil wars, met a gentleman of good sort.  He was
+of the contrary party, though I did not know so much, for he pretended
+otherwise: and the mischief on't is, that in this sort of war the cards
+are so shuffled, your enemy not being distinguished from yourself by any
+apparent mark either of language or habit, and being nourished under the
+same law, air, and manners, it is very hard to avoid disorder and
+confusion.  This made me afraid myself of meeting any of our troops in a
+place where I was not known, that I might not be in fear to tell my name,
+and peradventure of something worse; as it had befallen me before, where,
+by such a mistake, I lost both men and horses, and amongst others an
+Italian gentleman my page, whom I bred with the greatest care and
+affection, was miserably slain, in whom a youth of great promise and
+expectation was extinguished.  But the gentleman my brother and I met
+had so desperate, half-dead a fear upon him at meeting with any horse,
+or passing by any of the towns that held for the King, that I at last
+discovered it to be alarms of conscience.  It seemed to the poor man as
+if through his visor and the crosses upon his cassock, one would have
+penetrated into his bosom and read the most secret intentions of his
+heart; so wonderful is the power of conscience.  It makes us betray,
+accuse, and fight against ourselves, and for want of other witnesses, to
+give evidence against ourselves:
+
+               "Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum."
+
+     ["The torturer of the soul brandishing a sharp scourge within."
+     --Juvenal, iii. 195.]
+
+This story is in every child's mouth: Bessus the Paeonian, being
+reproached for wantonly pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing
+them, replied, that he had reason to do so, seeing that those little
+birds never ceased falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father.
+This parricide had till then been concealed and unknown, but the
+revenging fury of conscience caused it to be discovered by him himself,
+who was to suffer for it.  Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that
+punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same
+time with it.  Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever
+has deserved it expects it.  Wickedness contrives torments against
+itself:
+
+               "Malum consilium consultori pessimum."
+
+               ["Ill designs are worst to the contriver."
+               --Apud Aul. Gellium, iv. 5.]
+
+as the wasp stings and hurts another, but most of all itself, for it
+there loses its sting and its use for ever,
+
+                    "Vitasque in vulnere ponunt."
+
+               ["And leave their own lives in the wound."
+               --Virgil, Geo., iv. 238.]
+
+Cantharides have somewhere about them, by a contrariety of nature, a
+counterpoison against their poison.  In like manner, at the same time
+that men take delight in vice, there springs in the conscience a
+displeasure that afflicts us sleeping and waking with various tormenting
+imaginations:
+
+              "Quippe ubi se multi, per somnia saepe loquentes,
+               Aut morbo delirantes, protraxe ferantur,
+               Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse."
+
+     ["Surely where many, often talking in their sleep, or raving in
+     disease, are said to have betrayed themselves, and to have given
+     publicity to offences long concealed."--Lucretius, v. 1157.]
+
+Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself flayed by the Scythians and
+afterwards boiled in a cauldron, and that his heart muttered these words
+"I am the cause of all these mischiefs that have befallen thee."
+Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they
+could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience
+discovered them to themselves.
+
+                    "Prima est haec ultio, quod se
+               Judice nemo nocens absohitur."
+
+     ["Tis the first punishment of sin that no man absolves himself." or:
+     "This is the highest revenge, that by its judgment no offender is
+     absolved."--Juvenal, xiii. 2.]
+
+As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater
+confidence and assurance; and I can truly say that I have gone through
+several hazards with a more steady pace in consideration of the secret
+knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my intentions:
+
+         "Conscia mens ut cuique sua est, ita concipit intra
+          Pectora pro facto spemque metumque suo."
+
+     ["As a man's conscience is, so within hope or fear prevails, suiting
+     to his design."--Ovid, Fast., i. 485.]
+
+Of this are a thousand examples; but it will be enough to instance three
+of one and the same person.  Scipio, being one day accused before the
+people of Rome of some crimes of a very high nature, instead of excusing
+himself or flattering his judges: "It will become you well," said he,
+"to sit in judgment upon a head, by whose means you have the power to
+judge all the world."  Another time, all the answer he gave to several
+impeachments brought against him by a tribune of the people, instead of
+making his defence: "Let us go, citizens," said he, "let us go render
+thanks to the gods for the victory they gave me over the Carthaginians as
+this day," and advancing himself before towards the Temple, he had
+presently all the assembly and his very accuser himself following at his
+heels.  And Petilius, having been set on by Cato to demand an account of
+the money that had passed through his hands in the province of Antioch,
+Scipio being come into the senate to that purpose, produced a book from
+under his robe, wherein he told them was an exact account of his receipts
+and disbursements; but being required to deliver it to the prothonotary
+to be examined, he refused, saying, he would not do himself so great a
+disgrace; and in the presence of the whole senate tore the book with his
+own hands to pieces.  I do not believe that the most seared conscience
+could have counterfeited so great an assurance.  He had naturally too
+high a spirit and was accustomed to too high a fortune, says Titius
+Livius, to know how to be criminal, and to lower himself to the meanness
+of defending his innocence.  The putting men to the rack is a dangerous
+invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.
+Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who
+has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than
+force me to say what is not?  And, on the contrary, if he who is not
+guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those
+torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward
+as life being in his prospect?  I believe the ground of this invention
+proceeds from the consideration of the force of conscience: for, to the
+guilty, it seems to assist the rack to make him confess his fault and to
+shake his resolution; and, on the other side, that it fortifies the
+innocent against the torture.  But when all is done, 'tis, in plain
+truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger what would not a man say,
+what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments?
+
+               "Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor."
+
+     ["Pain will make even the innocent lie."--Publius Syrus, De Dolore.]
+
+Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may
+not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked.  A thousand
+and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions, amongst
+whom I place Philotas, considering the circumstances of the trial
+Alexander put upon him and the progress of his torture.  But so it is
+that some say it is the least evil human weakness could invent; very
+inhumanly, notwithstanding, and to very little purpose, in my opinion.
+
+Many nations less barbarous in this than the Greeks and Romans who call
+them so, repute it horrible and cruel to torment and pull a man to pieces
+for a fault of which they are yet in doubt.  How can he help your
+ignorance?  Are not you unjust, that, not to kill him without cause, do
+worse than kill him?  And that this is so, do but observe how often men
+prefer to die without reason than undergo this examination, more painful
+than execution itself; and that oft-times by its extremity anticipates
+execution, and perform it.  I know not where I had this story, but it
+exactly matches the conscience of our justice in this particular.  A
+country-woman, to a general of a very severe discipline, accused one of
+his soldiers that he had taken from her children the little soup meat she
+had left to nourish them withal, the army having consumed all the rest;
+but of this proof there was none.  The general, after having cautioned
+the woman to take good heed to what she said, for that she would make
+herself guilty of a false accusation if she told a lie, and she
+persisting, he presently caused the soldier's belly to be ripped up to
+clear the truth of the fact, and the woman was found to be right.  An
+instructive sentence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+USE MAKES PERFECT
+
+'Tis not to be expected that argument and instruction, though we never so
+voluntarily surrender our belief to what is read to us, should be of
+force to lead us on so far as to action, if we do not, over and above,
+exercise and form the soul by experience to the course for which we
+design it; it will, otherwise, doubtless find itself at a loss when it
+comes to the pinch of the business.  This is the reason why those amongst
+the philosophers who were ambitious to attain to a greater excellence,
+were not contented to await the severities of fortune in the retirement
+and repose of their own habitations, lest he should have surprised them
+raw and inexpert in the combat, but sallied out to meet her, and
+purposely threw themselves into the proof of difficulties.  Some of them
+abandoned riches to exercise themselves in a voluntary poverty; others
+sought out labour and an austerity of life, to inure them to hardships
+and inconveniences; others have deprived themselves of their dearest
+members, as of sight, and of the instruments of generation, lest their
+too delightful and effeminate service should soften and debauch the
+stability of their souls.
+
+But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give
+us no assistance at all.  A man may by custom fortify himself against
+pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can
+experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.
+There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that
+they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have
+bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but
+they are none of them come back to tell us the news:
+
+               "Nemo expergitus exstat,
+               Frigida quern semel est vitai pausa sequuta."
+
+     ["No one wakes who has once fallen into the cold sleep of death."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 942]
+
+Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having
+been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many
+marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just
+going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a
+philosopher, a friend of his: "Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now?
+what is she doing?  What are you thinking of?"--"I was thinking," replied
+the other, "to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full
+settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I
+could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and
+whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come
+again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it."  This man philosophises
+not unto death only, but in death itself.  What a strange assurance was
+this, and what bravery of courage, to desire his death should be a lesson
+to him, and to have leisure to think of other things in so great an
+affair:
+
+               "Jus hoc animi morientis habebat."
+
+     ["This mighty power of mind he had dying."-Lucan, viii. 636.]
+
+And yet I fancy, there is a certain way of making it familiar to us, and
+in some sort of making trial what it is.  We may gain experience, if not
+entire and perfect, yet such, at least, as shall not be totally useless
+to us, and that may render us more confident and more assured.  If we
+cannot overtake it, we may approach it and view it, and if we do not
+advance so far as the fort, we may at least discover and make ourselves
+acquainted with the avenues.  It is not without reason that we are taught
+to consider sleep as a resemblance of death: with how great facility do
+we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose
+the knowledge of light and of ourselves.  Peradventure, the faculty of
+sleeping would seem useless and contrary to nature, since it deprives us
+of all action and sentiment, were it not that by it nature instructs us
+that she has equally made us to die as to live; and in life presents to
+us the eternal state she reserves for us after it, to accustom us to it
+and to take from us the fear of it.  But such as have by violent accident
+fallen into a swoon, and in it have lost all sense, these, methinks, have
+been very near seeing the true and natural face of death; for as to the
+moment of the passage, it is not to be feared that it brings with it any
+pain or displeasure, forasmuch as we can have no feeling without leisure;
+our sufferings require time, which in death is so short, and so
+precipitous, that it must necessarily be insensible.  They are the
+approaches that we are to fear, and these may fall within the limits of
+experience.
+
+Many things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect; I have
+passed a good part of my life in a perfect and entire health; I say, not
+only entire, but, moreover, sprightly and wanton.  This state, so full of
+verdure, jollity, and vigour, made the consideration of sickness so
+formidable to me, that when I came to experience it, I found the attacks
+faint and easy in comparison with what I had apprehended.  Of this I have
+daily experience; if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy
+and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am
+afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do
+not wish to be anywhere else.  This one thing of being always shut up in
+a chamber I fancied insupportable: but I was presently inured to be so
+imprisoned a week, nay a month together, in a very weak, disordered, and
+sad condition; and I have found that, in the time of my health, I much
+more pitied the sick, than I think myself to be pitied when I am so, and
+that the force of my imagination enhances near one-half of the essence
+and reality of the thing.  I hope that when I come to die I shall find it
+the same, and that, after all, it is not worth the pains I take, so much
+preparation and so much assistance as I call in, to undergo the stroke.
+But, at all events, we cannot give ourselves too much advantage.
+
+In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember
+which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own
+house, which is seated in the very centre of all the bustle and mischief
+of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so
+near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had
+taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong.
+Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of
+this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my
+train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had
+a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead
+of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I
+was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse,
+with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over
+and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air: so that there lay the
+horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, and I ten or twelve paces
+from him stretched out at length, with my face all battered and broken,
+my sword which I had had in my hand, above ten paces beyond that, and my
+belt broken all to pieces, without motion or sense any more than a stock.
+'Twas the only swoon I was ever in till that hour in my life.  Those who
+were with me, after having used all the means they could to bring me to
+myself, concluding me dead, took me up in their arms, and carried me with
+very much difficulty home to my house, which was about half a French
+league from thence.  On the way, having been for more than two hours
+given over for a dead man, I began to move and to fetch my breath; for so
+great abundance of blood was fallen into my stomach, that nature had need
+to rouse her forces to discharge it.  They then raised me upon my feet,
+where I threw off a whole bucket of clots of blood, as this I did also
+several times by the way.  This gave me so much ease, that I began to
+recover a little life, but so leisurely and by so small advances, that my
+first sentiments were much nearer the approaches of death than life:
+
+               "Perche, dubbiosa ancor del suo ritorno,
+               Non s'assicura attonita la mente."
+
+    ["For the soul, doubtful as to its return, could not compose itself"
+     --Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., xii. 74.]
+
+The remembrance of this accident, which is very well imprinted in my
+memory, so naturally representing to me the image and idea of death, has
+in some sort reconciled me to that untoward adventure.  When I first
+began to open my eyes, it was with so perplexed, so weak and dead a
+sight, that I could yet distinguish nothing but only discern the light:
+
+               "Come quel ch'or apre, or'chiude
+               Gli occhi, mezzo tra'l sonno e l'esser desto."
+
+     ["As a man that now opens, now shuts his eyes, between sleep
+     and waking."--Tasso, Gierus.  Lib., viii., 26.]
+
+As to the functions of the soul, they advanced with the same pace and
+measure with those of the body.  I saw myself all bloody, my doublet
+being stained all over with the blood I had vomited.  The first thought
+that came into my mind was that I had a harquebuss shot in my head, and
+indeed, at the time there were a great many fired round about us.
+Methought my life but just hung upon my, lips: and I shut my eyes, to
+help, methought, to thrust it out, and took a pleasure in languishing and
+letting myself go.  It was an imagination that only superficially floated
+upon my soul, as tender and weak as all the rest, but really, not only
+exempt from anything displeasing, but mixed with that sweetness that
+people feel when they glide into a slumber.
+
+I believe it is the very same condition those people are in, whom we see
+swoon with weakness in the agony of death we pity them without cause,
+supposing them agitated with grievous dolours, or that their souls suffer
+under painful thoughts.  It has ever been my belief, contrary to the
+opinion of many, and particularly of La Boetie, that those whom we see so
+subdued and stupefied at the approaches of their end, or oppressed with
+the length of the disease, or by accident of an apoplexy or falling
+sickness,
+
+         "Vi morbi saepe coactus
+          Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu,
+          Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et tremit artus;
+          Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat,
+          Inconstanter, et in jactando membra fatigat;"
+
+     ["Often, compelled by the force of disease, some one as
+     thunderstruck falls under our eyes, and foams, groans, and trembles,
+     stretches, twists, breathes irregularly, and in paroxysms wears out
+     his strength."--Lucretius, iii. 485.]
+
+or hurt in the head, whom we hear to mutter, and by fits to utter
+grievous groans; though we gather from these signs by which it seems as
+if they had some remains of consciousness, and that there are movements
+of the body; I have always believed, I say, both the body and the soul
+benumbed and asleep,
+
+               "Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae,"
+
+               ["He lives, and does not know that he is alive."
+               --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 12.]
+
+and could not believe that in so great a stupefaction of the members and
+so great a defection of the senses, the soul could maintain any force
+within to take cognisance of herself, and that, therefore, they had no
+tormenting reflections to make them consider and be sensible of the
+misery of their condition, and consequently were not much to be pitied.
+
+I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as
+to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself; as
+one should say of such as are sent to execution with their tongues first
+cut out (were it not that in this kind of dying, the most silent seems to
+me the most graceful, if accompanied with a grave and constant
+countenance); or if those miserable prisoners, who fall into the hands of
+the base hangman soldiers of this age, by whom they are tormented with
+all sorts of inhuman usage to compel them to some excessive and
+impossible ransom; kept, in the meantime, in such condition and place,
+where they have no means of expressing or signifying their thoughts and
+their misery.  The poets have feigned some gods who favour the
+deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death:
+
+                              "Hunc ego Diti
+               Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo."
+
+     ["I bidden offer this sacred thing to Pluto, and from that body
+     dismiss thee."--AEneid, iv. 782.]
+
+both the interrupted words, and the short and irregular answers one gets
+from them sometimes, by bawling and keeping a clutter about them; or the
+motions which seem to yield some consent to what we would have them do,
+are no testimony, nevertheless, that they live, an entire life at least.
+So it happens to us in the yawning of sleep, before it has fully
+possessed us, to perceive, as in a dream, what is done about us, and to
+follow the last things that are said with a perplexed and uncertain
+hearing which seems but to touch upon the borders of the soul; and to
+make answers to the last words that have been spoken to us, which have
+more in them of chance than sense.
+
+Now seeing I have in effect tried it, I have no doubt but I have hitherto
+made a right judgment; for first, being in a swoon, I laboured to rip
+open the buttons of my doublet with my nails, for my sword was gone; and
+yet I felt nothing in my imagination that hurt me; for we have many
+motions in us that do not proceed from our direction;
+
+          "Semianimesque micant digiti, ferrumque retractant;"
+
+     ["Half-dead fingers grope about, and grasp again the sword."
+     --AEneid, x. 396.]
+
+so falling people extend their arms before them by a natural impulse,
+which prompts our limbs to offices and motions without any commission
+from our reason.
+
+         "Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra .  .  .
+          Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
+          Decidit abscissum; cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
+          Mobilitate mali, non quit sentire dolorem."
+
+     ["They relate that scythe-bearing chariots mow off limbs, so that
+     they quiver on the ground; and yet the mind of him from whom the
+     limb is taken by the swiftness of the blow feels no pain."
+     --Lucretius, iii. 642.]
+
+My stomach was so oppressed with the coagulated blood, that my hands
+moved to that part, of their own voluntary motion, as they frequently do
+to the part that itches, without being directed by our will.  There are
+several animals, and even men, in whom one may perceive the muscles to
+stir and tremble after they are dead.  Every one experimentally knows
+that there are some members which grow stiff and flag without his leave.
+Now, those passions which only touch the outward bark of us, cannot be
+said to be ours: to make them so, there must be a concurrence of the
+whole man; and the pains which are felt by the hand or the foot while
+we are sleeping, are none of ours.
+
+As I drew near my own house, where the alarm of my fall was already got
+before me, and my family were come out to meet me, with the hubbub usual
+in such cases, not only did I make some little answer to some questions
+which were asked me; but they moreover tell me, that I was sufficiently
+collected to order them to bring a horse to my wife whom on the road,
+I saw struggling and tiring herself which is hilly and rugged.  This
+should seem to proceed from a soul its functions; but it was nothing so
+with me. I knew not what I said or did, and they were nothing but idle
+thoughts in the clouds, that were stirred up by the senses of the eyes
+and ears, and proceeded not from me.  I knew not for all that, whence I
+came or whither I went, neither was I capable to weigh and consider what
+was said to me: these were light effects, that the senses produced of
+themselves as of custom; what the soul contributed was in a dream,
+lightly touched, licked and bedewed by the soft impression of the senses.
+Notwithstanding, my condition was, in truth, very easy and quiet; I had
+no affliction upon me, either for others or myself; it was an extreme
+languor and weakness, without any manner of pain.  I saw my own house,
+but knew it not.  When they had put me to bed I found an inexpressible
+sweetness in that repose; for I had been desperately tugged and lugged by
+those poor people who had taken the pains to carry me upon their arms a
+very great and a very rough way, and had in so doing all quite tired out
+themselves, twice or thrice one after another.  They offered me several
+remedies, but I would take none, certainly believing that I was mortally
+wounded in the head.  And, in earnest, it had been a very happy death,
+for the weakness of my understanding deprived me of the faculty of
+discerning, and that of my body of the sense of feeling; I was suffering
+myself to glide away so sweetly and after so soft and easy a manner, that
+I scarce find any other action less troublesome than that was.  But when
+I came again to myself and to resume my faculties:
+
+               "Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei,"
+
+          ["When at length my lost senses again returned."
+          --Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 14.]
+
+which was two or three hours after, I felt myself on a sudden involved in
+terrible pain, having my limbs battered and ground with my fall, and was.
+so ill for two or three nights after, that I thought I was once more
+dying again, but a more painful death, having concluded myself as good as
+dead before, and to this hour am sensible of the bruises of that terrible
+shock.  I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat
+into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over
+again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at
+what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend
+it.  As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favour to
+him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented.  But a
+long time after, and the very next day that my memory began to return and
+to represent to me the state wherein I was, at the instant that I
+perceived this horse coming full drive upon me (for I had seen him at my
+heels, and gave myself for gone, but this thought had been so sudden,
+that fear had had no leisure to introduce itself) it seemed to me like a
+flash of lightning that had pierced my soul, and that I came from the
+other world.
+
+This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it
+not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really
+find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to
+approach it.  Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself,
+provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand.  Here, this
+is not my doctrine, 'tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but
+my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that
+which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.  As
+to the rest, I spoil nothing, I make use of nothing but my own; and if I
+play the fool, 'tis at my own expense, and nobody else is concerned in't;
+for 'tis a folly that will die with me, and that no one is to inherit.
+We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path,
+and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them
+but their names.  No one since has followed the track: 'tis a rugged
+road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
+as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
+internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
+motions; 'tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
+from the common and most recommended employments of the world.  'Tis now
+many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than
+myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I
+study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself.  And yet
+I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable
+sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very
+well pleased with my own progress.  There is no description so difficult,
+nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man's self: and withal, a
+man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in
+public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon
+my own description.  Custom has made all speaking of a man's self
+vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that
+seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:
+
+                    "In vitium ducit culpae fuga."
+
+     ["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater."
+     Or: "The escape from a fault leads into a vice"
+     --Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]
+
+Instead of blowing the child's nose, this is to take his nose off
+altogether.  I think the remedy worse than the disease.  But, allowing it
+to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people
+with discourses of one's self, I ought not, pursuing my general design,
+to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal
+the fault which I not only practise but profess.  Notwithstanding, to
+speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine,
+because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man
+cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this
+rule has only regard to the popular vice.  They are bits for calves, with
+which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor
+the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am
+as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at
+all events, when the occasions arise, they don't hesitate to put
+themselves on the public highway.  Of what does Socrates treat more
+largely than of himself?  To what does he more direct and address the
+discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of the
+lesson in their book, but of the essence and motion of their souls?  We
+confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our
+neighbours, do to all the people.  But some will answer that we there
+speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for
+our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable.  My trade and art is to
+live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience,
+and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building
+according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour;
+according to the knowledge of another, and not according to his own.  If
+it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero
+prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?
+Peradventure they mean that I should give testimony of myself by works
+and effects, not barely by words.  I chiefly paint my thoughts, a subject
+void of form and incapable of operative production; 'tis all that I can
+do to couch it in this airy body of the voice; the wisest and devoutest
+men have lived in the greatest care to avoid all apparent effects.
+Effects would more speak of fortune than of me; they manifest their own
+office and not mine, but uncertainly and by conjecture; patterns of some
+one particular virtue.  I expose myself entire; 'tis a body where, at one
+view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its
+proper place; here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating,
+very dubiously.  I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.
+
+I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself,
+and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse,
+impartially.  If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle
+it out to some purpose.  To speak less of one's self than what one really
+is is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under
+a man's value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle.
+No virtue assists itself with falsehood; truth is never matter of error.
+To speak more of one's self than is really true is not always mere
+presumption; 'tis, moreover, very often folly; to, be immeasurably
+pleased with what one is, and to fall into an indiscreet self-love, is in
+my opinion the substance of this vice.  The most sovereign remedy to cure
+it, is to do quite contrary to what these people direct who, in
+forbidding men to speak of themselves, consequently, at the same time,
+interdict thinking of themselves too.  Pride dwells in the thought; the
+tongue can have but a very little share in it.
+
+They fancy that to think of one's self is to be delighted with one's
+self; to frequent and converse with one's self, to be overindulgent; but
+this excess springs only in those who take but a superficial view of
+themselves, and dedicate their main inspection to their affairs; who call
+it mere reverie and idleness to occupy one's self with one's self, and
+the building one's self up a mere building of castles in the air; who
+look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger.  If any one be
+in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let
+him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be
+abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him
+under foot.  If he enter into a flattering presumption of his personal
+valour, let him but recollect the lives of Scipio, Epaminondas; so many
+armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them.  No
+particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put
+the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the
+nothingness of human condition to make up the weight.  Because Socrates
+had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, "to know himself,"
+and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought,
+he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage.  Whosoever shall so know
+himself, let him boldly speak it out.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
+All apprentices when we come to it (death)
+Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
+Business to-morrow
+Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
+Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
+Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
+Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
+Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one's nature
+I can more hardly believe a man's constancy than any virtue
+"I wish you good health."  "No health to thee," replied the other
+If to philosophise be, as 'tis defined, to doubt
+Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
+It's madness to nourish infirmity
+Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
+Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.
+Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
+Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
+Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
+No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
+No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
+Not conclude too much upon your mistress's inviolable chastity
+One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
+Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
+Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
+Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
+Speak less of one's self than what one really is is folly
+Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
+The action is commendable, not the man
+The most voluntary death is the finest
+The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
+Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
+Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
+Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
+Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
+We do not go, we are driven
+What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
+Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
+Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Essays of Montaigne, V9
+By Michel de Montaigne
+
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