Produced by David Widger
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 5.
XXV. Of the education of children.XXVI. That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity.
CHAPTER XXV
OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
TO MADAME DIANE DE FOIX, Comtesse de Gurson
I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so decrepit ordeformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if hewere not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection, thathe did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all defaults hewas still his. Just so, I see better than any other, that all I writehere are but the idle reveries of a man that has only nibbled upon theoutward crust of sciences in his nonage, and only retained a general andformless image of them; who has got a little snatch of everything andnothing of the whole, 'a la Francoise'. For I know, in general, thatthere is such a thing as physic, as jurisprudence: four parts inmathematics, and, roughly, what all these aim and point at; and,peradventure, I yet know farther, what sciences in general pretend unto,in order to the service of our life: but to dive farther than that, andto have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of allmodern learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science,I have never done it; neither is there any one art of which I am able todraw the first lineaments and dead colour; insomuch that there is not aboy of the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser thanI, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I am atany time forced upon, I am necessitated in my own defence, to ask him,unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve to try hisnatural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to him, as his isto me.
I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of solidlearning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the Danaides, Ieternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something of which dropsupon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me. History is myparticular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry, for which I haveparticular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes said, as the voice,forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcibleand shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of versedarts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear andapprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect. As to the naturalparts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under theburden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping andstumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in nodegree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of landbefore me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds,that I am not able to penetrate. And taking upon me to writeindifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use ofnothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, asoft-times it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same headsand commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I did but justnow in Plutarch's "Discourse of the Force of Imagination"), to see myselfso weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so flat, in comparison of thosebetter writers, I at once pity or despise myself. Yet do I please myselfwith this, that my opinions have often the honour and g