The Essays, vol 1 | Page 4

to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1. Preface The Life of Montaigne The
Letters of Montaigne

PREFACE.
The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in
our literature--a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great
French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land
of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which
are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his
productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of
Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed,
as Hallam observes, the Frenchman's literary importance largely results
from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval
and subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of
the essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and
the circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the
comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of
intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he
has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder
at the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was,
without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and
morals. His book was different from all others which were at that date
in the world. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new
channels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its
writer's opinion was about men and things, and threw what must have
been a strange kind of new light on many matters but darkly understood.
Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made his intellectual and
physical organism public property. He took the world into his
confidence on all subjects. His essays were a sort of literary anatomy,
where we get a diagnosis of the writer's mind, made by himself at
different levels and under a large variety of operating influences.

Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating,
because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. What he
did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show
us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to
external objects. He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy
pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and
the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and
force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a book.
Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design.
He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he
desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be
remembered by, something which should tell what kind of a man he
was--what he felt, thought, suffered--and he succeeded immeasurably, I
apprehend, beyond his expectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a
certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,
throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his
renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost
unique position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays
would be read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of
intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League,
and who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived
in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of
genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of
nature, which is always everywhere the same.
The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton's
version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700,
1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same
size. In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected
merely as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions
follow one another. That of 1685-6 was the only one which the
translator lived to see. He died in 1687, leaving behind him an
interesting and little-known collection of poems, which appeared
posthumously, 8vo, 1689.
It was considered imperative to correct Cotton's translation by a careful
collation with the 'variorum' edition of the original, Paris, 1854, 4 vols.
8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin's earlier undertaking

have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page. A Life of the
Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number, have also