The Essays, vol 5 | 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 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 or
deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if
he were not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection,
that he did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all
defaults he was still his. Just so, I see better than any other, that all I
write here are but the idle reveries of a man that has only nibbled upon
the outward crust of sciences in his nonage, and only retained a general
and formless image of them; who has got a little snatch of everything
and nothing of the whole, 'a la Francoise'. For I know, in general, that
there is such a thing as physic, as jurisprudence: four parts in
mathematics, 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, and to
have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all
modern 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 to
draw the first lineaments and dead colour; insomuch that there is not a
boy of the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser
than I, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I
am at any time forced upon, I am necessitated in my own defence, to

ask him, unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve
to try his natural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to
him, as his is to me.
I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of solid
learning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the Danaides, I
eternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something of which drops
upon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me. History is my
particular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry, for which I have
particular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes said, as the voice,
forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more
forcible and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony
of verse darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my
ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect. As to the
natural parts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under
the burden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping
and stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in
no degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land
before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in
clouds, that I am not able to penetrate. And taking upon me to write
indifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use
of nothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, as oft-
times it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same heads
and commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I did but
just now in Plutarch's "Discourse of the Force of Imagination"), to see
myself so weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so flat, in comparison of
those better writers, I at once pity or despise myself. Yet do I please
myself with this, that my opinions have often the honour and good
fortune to jump with theirs, and that I go in the same path, though at a
very great distance, and can say, "Ah, that is so." I am farther satisfied
to find that I have a quality, which every one is not blessed withal,
which is, to discern the vast difference between them and me; and
notwithstanding all that, suffer my own inventions, low and feeble as
they are, to run on in their career, without mending or plastering up the
defects that this comparison has laid open to my own view. And, in
plain truth, a man had need of a good strong back to keep pace with
these people. The indiscreet scribblers of our times, who, amongst their

laborious nothings, insert whole sections and pages out