ESSAYS
Michel de Montaigne
(Published and revised, 1570–1592)
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
THAT MEN BY VARIOUS WAYS ARRIVE AT THE SAME END.
The most usual way of appeasing the indignation of such as we have any way offended,
when we see them in possession of the power of revenge, and find that we absolutely lie
at their mercy, is by submission, to move them to commiseration and pity; and yet
bravery, constancy, and resolution, however quite contrary means, have sometimes served
to produce the same effect.
Edward, Prince of Wales (the same who so long governed our Guienne, a personage
whose condition and fortune have in them a great deal of the most notable and most
considerable parts of grandeur), having been highly incensed by the Limousins, and
taking their city by assault, was not, either by the cries of the people, or the prayers and
tears of the women and children, abandoned to slaughter and prostrate at his feet for
mercy, to be stayed from prosecuting his revenge; till, penetrating further into the town,
he at last took notice of three French gentlemen, who with incredible bravery alone
sustained the power of his victorious army. Then it was that consideration and respect
unto so remarkable a valour first stopped the torrent of his fury, and that his clemency,
beginning with these three cavaliers, was afterwards extended to all the remaining
inhabitants of the city.
Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, pursuing one of his soldiers with purpose to kill him, the
soldier, having in vain tried by all the ways of humility and supplication to appease him,
resolved, as his last refuge, to face about and await him sword in hand: which behaviour
of his gave a sudden stop to his captain's fury, who, for seeing him assume so notable a
resolution, received him into grace; an example, however, that might suffer another
interpretation with such as have not read of the prodigious force and valour of that prince.
The Emperor Conrad III. having besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria, would not be
1
prevailed upon, what mean and unmanly satisfactions soever were tendered to him, to
condescend to milder conditions than that the ladies and gentlewomen only who were in
the town with the duke might go out without violation of their honour, on foot, and with
so much only as they could carry about them. Whereupon they, out of magnanimity of
heart, presently contrived to carry out, upon their shoulders, their husbands and children,
and the duke himself; a sight at which the emperor was so pleased, that, ravished with the
generosity of the action, he wept for joy, and immediately extinguishing in his heart the
mortal and capital hatred he had conceived against this duke, he from that time forward
treated him and his with all humanity. The one and the other of these two ways would
with great facility work upon my nature; for I have a marvellous propensity to mercy and
mildness, and to such a degree that I fancy of the two I should sooner surrender my anger
to compassion than to esteem. And yet pity is reputed a vice amongst the Stoics, who will
that we succour the afflicted, but not that we should be so affected with their sufferings as
to suffer with them. I conceived these examples not ill suited to the question in hand, and
the rather because therein we observe these great souls assaulted and tried by these two
several ways, to resist the one without relenting, and to be shook and subjected by the
other. It may be true that to suffer a man's heart to be totally subdued by compassion may
be imputed to facility, effeminacy, and over-tenderness; whence it comes to pass that the
weaker natures, as of women, children, and the common sort of people, are the most
subject to it but after having resisted and disdained the power of groans and tears, to yield
to the sole reverence of the sacred image of Valour, this can be no other than the effect of
a strong and inflexible soul enamoured of and honouring masculine and obstinate
courage. Nevertheless, astonishment and admiration may, in less generous minds, beget a
like effect: witness the people of Thebes, who, having put two of their generals upon trial
for their lives for having continued in arms beyond the precise term of their commission,
very hardly pardoned Pelopidas, who, bowing under the weight of so dangerous an
accusation, made no manner of defence for himself, nor produced other arguments than
prayers and supplications; whereas, on the contrary, Epaminondas, falling to recount
magniloquently the exploits he had performed in their service, and, after a haughty and
arrogant manner reproaching them with ingratitude and injustice, they had not the heart to
proceed any further in his trial, but broke up the court and departed, the whole assembly
highly commending the high courage of this personage.
Dionysius the elder, after having, by a tedious siege and through exceeding great
difficulties, taken the city of Reggio, and in it the governor Phyton, a very gallant man,
who had made so obstinate a defence, was resolved to make him a tragical example of his
revenge: in order whereunto he first told him, "That he had the day before caused his son
and all his kindred to be drowned." To which Phyton returned no other answer but this:
"That they were then by one day happier than he." After which, causing him to be
stripped, and delivering him into the hands of the tormentors, he was by them not only
2
dragged through the streets of the town, and most ignominiously and cruelly whipped, but
moreover vilified with most bitter and contumelious language: yet still he maintained his
courage entire all the way, with a strong voice and undaunted countenance proclaiming
the honourable and glorious cause of his death; namely, for that he would not deliver up
his country into the hands of a tyrant; at the same time denouncing against him a speedy
chastisement from the offended gods. At which Dionysius, reading in his soldiers' looks,
that instead of being incensed at the haughty language of this conquered enemy, to the
contempt of their captain and his triumph, they were not only struck with admiration of so
rare a virtue, but moreover inclined to mutiny, and were even ready to rescue the prisoner
out of the hangman's hands, he caused the torturing to cease, and afterwards privately
caused him to be thrown into the sea.
Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it
is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment. For Pompey could pardon the
whole city of the Mamertines, though furiously incensed against it, upon the single
account of the virtue and magnanimity of one citizen, Zeno who took the fault of the
public wholly upon himself; neither entreated other favour, but alone to undergo the
punishment for all: and yet Sylla's host, having in the city of Perugia, manifested the same
virtue, obtained nothing by it, either for himself or his fellow-citizens.
And, directly contrary to my first examples, the bravest of all men, and who was reputed
so gracious to all those he overcame, Alexander, having, after many great difficulties,
forced the city of Gaza, and, entering, found Betis, who commanded there, and of whose
valour in the time of this siege he had most marvellous manifest proof, alone, forsaken by
all his soldiers, his armour hacked and hewed to pieces, covered all over with blood and
wounds, and yet still fighting in the crowd of a number of Macedonians, who were laying
on him on all sides, he said to him, nettled at so dear-bought a victory (for, in addition to
the other damage, he had two wounds newly received in his own person), "Thou shalt not
die, Betis, as thou dost intend; be sure thou shall suffer all the torments that can be
inflicted on a captive." To which menace the other returning no other answer, but only a
fierce and disdainful look; "What," says Alexander, observing his haughty and obstinate
silence, "is he too stiff to bend a knee! Is he too proud to utter one suppliant word! Truly,
I will conquer this silence; and if I cannot force a word from his mouth, I will, at least,
extract a groan from his heart." And thereupon converting his anger into fury, presently
commanded his heels to be bored through, causing him, alive, to be dragged, mangled,
and dismembered at a cart's tail. Was it that the height of courage was so natural and
familiar to this conqueror, that because he could not admire, he respected it the less? Or
was it that he conceived valour to be a virtue so peculiar to himself, that his pride could
not, without envy, endure it in another? Or was it that the natural impetuosity of his fury
was incapable of opposition? Certainly, had it been capable of moderation, it is to be
3
believed that in the sack and desolation of Thebes, to see so many valiant men, lost and
totally destitute of any further defence, cruelly massacred before his eyes, would have
appeased it: where there were above six thousand put to the sword, of whom not one was
seen to fly, or heard to cry out for quarter; but, on the contrary, every one running here
and there to seek out and to provoke the victorious enemy to help them to an honourable
end. Not one was seen who, however weakened with wounds, did not in his last gasp yet
endeavour to revenge himself, and with all the arms of a brave despair, to sweeten his
own death in the death of an enemy. Yet did their valour create no pity, and the length of
one day was not enough to satiate the thirst of the conqueror's revenge, but the slaughter
continued to the last drop of blood that was capable of being shed, and stopped not till it
met with none but unarmed persons, old men, women, and children, of them to carry
away to the number of thirty thousand slaves.
CHAPTER II
OF SORROW
No man living is more free from this passion than I, who yet neither like it in myself nor
admire it in others, and yet generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace it
with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience. Foolish and
sordid guise! The Italians have more fitly baptized by this name— malignity; for 'tis a
quality always hurtful, always idle and vain; and as being cowardly, mean, and base, it is
by the Stoics expressly and particularly forbidden to their sages.
But the story says that Psammenitus, King of Egypt, being defeated and taken prisoner by
Cambyses, King of Persia, seeing his own daughter pass by him as prisoner, and in a
wretched habit, with a bucket to draw water, though his friends about him were so
concerned as to break out into tears and lamentations, yet he himself remained unmoved,
without uttering a word, his eyes fixed upon the ground; and seeing, moreover, his son
immediately after led to execution, still maintained the same countenance; till spying at
last one of his domestic and familiar friends dragged away amongst the captives, he fell to
tearing his hair and beating his breast, with all the other extravagances of extreme sorrow.
A story that may very fitly be coupled with another of the same kind, of recent date, of a
prince of our own nation, who being at Trent, and having news there brought him of the
death of his elder brother, a brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of
his house, and soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family, and
having withstood these two assaults with an exemplary resolution; one of his servants
happening a few days after to die, he suffered his constancy to be overcome by this last
4
accident; and, parting with his courage, so abandoned himself to sorrow and mourning,
that some thence were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this
last stroke of fortune; but, in truth, it was, that being before brimful of grief, the least
addition overflowed the bounds of all patience. Which, I think, might also be said of the
former example, did not the story proceed to tell us that Cambyses asking Psammenitus,
"Why, not being moved at the calamity of his son and daughter, he should with so great
impatience bear the misfortune of his friend?" "It is," answered he, "because only this last
affliction was to be manifested by tears, the two first far exceeding all manner of
expression."
And, peradventure, something like this might be working in the fancy of the ancient
painter, who having, in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, to represent the sorrow of the assistants
proportionably to the several degrees of interest every one had in the death of this fair
innocent virgin, and having, in the other figures, laid out the utmost power of his art,
when he came to that of her father, he drew him with a veil over his face, meaning
thereby that no kind of countenance was capable of expressing such a degree of sorrow.
Which is also the reason why the poets feign the miserable mother, Niobe, having first
lost seven sons, and then afterwards as many daughters (overwhelmed with her losses), to
have been at last transformed into a rock—
"Diriguisse malis,"
["Petrified with her misfortunes."—Ovid, Met., vi. 304.]
thereby to express that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which benumbs all our
faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we are able to bear. And, indeed,
the violence and impression of an excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and
wholly deprive her of her ordinary functions: as it happens to every one of us, who, upon
any sudden alarm of very ill news, find ourselves surprised, stupefied, and in a manner
deprived of all power of motion, so that the soul, beginning to vent itself in tears and
lamentations, seems to free and disengage itself from the sudden oppression, and to have
obtained some room to work itself out at greater liberty.
"Et via vix tandem voci laxata dolore est."
["And at length and with difficulty is a passage opened by grief for
utterance."—AEneid, xi. 151.]
In the war that Ferdinand made upon the widow of King John of Hungary, about Buda, a
man-at-arms was particularly taken notice of by every one for his singular gallant
5
behaviour in a certain encounter; and, unknown, highly commended, and lamented, being
left dead upon the place: but by none so much as by Raisciac, a German lord, who was
infinitely enamoured of so rare a valour. The body being brought off, and the count, with
the common curiosity coming to view it, the armour was no sooner taken off but he
immediately knew him to be his own son, a thing that added a second blow to the
compassion of all the beholders; only he, without uttering a word, or turning away his
eyes from the woeful object, stood fixedly contemplating the body of his son, till the
vehemency of sorrow having overcome his vital spirits, made him sink down stone-dead
to the ground.
"Chi puo dir com' egli arde, a in picciol fuoco,"
["He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire"
—Petrarca, Sonetto 137.]
say the Innamoratos, when they would represent an 'insupportable passion.
"Misero quod omneis
Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi,
Quod loquar amens.
Lingua sed torpet: tenuis sub artus
Flamma dimanat; sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures; gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte."
["Love deprives me of all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy
presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion:
my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my
ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness."
Catullus, Epig. li. 5]
Neither is it in the height and greatest fury of the fit that we are in a condition to pour out
our complaints or our amorous persuasions, the soul being at that time over-burdened, and
labouring with profound thoughts; and the body dejected and languishing with desire; and
thence it is that sometimes proceed those accidental impotencies that so unseasonably
surprise the lover, and that frigidity which by the force of an immoderate ardour seizes
him even in the very lap of fruition. For all passions that suffer themselves to be relished
and digested are but moderate:
6
"Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent."
["Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb."
—Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.]
A surprise of unexpected joy does likewise often produce the same effect:
"Ut me conspexit venientem, et Troja circum
Arma amens vidit, magnis exterrita monstris,
Diriguit visu in medio, calor ossa reliquit,
Labitur, et longo vix tandem tempore fatur."
["When she beheld me advancing, and saw, with stupefaction, the
Trojan arms around me, terrified with so great a prodigy, she
fainted away at the very sight: vital warmth forsook her limbs: she
sinks down, and, after a long interval, with difficulty speaks."—
AEneid, iii. 306.]
Besides the examples of the Roman lady, who died for joy to see her son safe returned
from the defeat of Cannae; and of Sophocles and of Dionysius the Tyrant, who died of
joy; and of Thalna, who died in Corsica, reading news of the honours the Roman Senate
had decreed in his favour, we have, moreover, one in our time, of Pope Leo X., who upon
news of the taking of Milan, a thing he had so ardently desired, was rapt with so sudden
an excess of joy that he immediately fell into a fever and died. And for a more notable
testimony of the imbecility of human nature, it is recorded by the ancients that Diodorus
the dialectician died upon the spot, out of an extreme passion of shame, for not having
been able in his own school, and in the presence of a great auditory, to disengage himself
from a nice argument that was propounded to him. I, for my part, am very little subject to
these violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also, by
reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.
CHAPTER IV
THAT THE SOUL EXPENDS ITS PASSIONS UPON FALSE OBJECTS, WHERE
THE TRUE ARE WANTING
A gentleman of my country, marvellously tormented with the gout, being importuned by
his physicians totally to abstain from all manner of salt meats, was wont pleasantly to
reply, that in the extremity of his fits he must needs have something to quarrel with, and
7
that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues
and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain. But, in good earnest, as the arm when it is
advanced to strike, if it miss the blow, and goes by the wind, it pains us; and as also, that,
to make a pleasant prospect, the sight should not be lost and dilated in vague air, but have
some bound and object to limit and circumscribe it at a reasonable distance.
"Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densa
Occurrant sylvae, spatio diffusus inani."
["As the wind loses its force diffused in void space, unless it in
its strength encounters the thick wood."—Lucan, iii. 362.]
So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon
itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object
at which to aim, and whereon to act. Plutarch says of those who are delighted with little
dogs and monkeys, that the amorous part that is in us, for want of a legitimate object,
rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge and create one false and frivolous. And
we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false
and fantastical a subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to
work upon. After this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone or
weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth a even execute revenge upon themselves
for the injury they have received from another:
"Pannonis haud aliter, post ictum saevior ursa,
Cui jaculum parva Lybis amentavit habena,
Se rotat in vulnus, telumque irata receptum
Impetit, et secum fugientem circuit hastam."
["So the she-bear, fiercer after the blow from the Lybian's thonghurled dart, turns round upon the wound, and attacking the received
spear, twists it, as she flies."—Lucan, vi. 220.]
What causes of the misadventures that befall us do we not invent? what is it that we do
not lay the fault to, right or wrong, that we may have something to quarrel with? It is not
those beautiful tresses you tear, nor is it the white bosom that in your anger you so
unmercifully beat, that with an unlucky bullet have slain your beloved brother; quarrel
with something else. Livy, speaking of the Roman army in Spain, says that for the loss of
the two brothers, their great captains:
"Flere omnes repente, et offensare capita."
8
["All at once wept and tore their hair."-Livy, xxv. 37.]
'Tis a common practice. And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the king, who by
handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, "Does this man think that baldness is a
remedy for grief?" Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the cards, and
swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money? Xerxes whipped the sea, and
wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus employed a whole army several days at work, to
revenge himself of the river Gyndas, for the fright it had put him into in passing over it;
and Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once
enjoyed there.
—[Pleasure—unless 'plaisir' were originally 'deplaisir'—must be
understood here ironically, for the house was one in which she had
been imprisoned.—Seneca, De Ira. iii. 22]—
I remember there was a story current, when I was a boy, that one of our neighbouring
kings having received a blow from the hand of God, swore he would be revenged, and in
order to it, made proclamation that for ten years to come no one should pray to Him, or so
much as mention Him throughout his dominions, or, so far as his authority went, believe
in Him; by which they meant to paint not so much the folly as the vainglory of the nation
of which this tale was told. They are vices that always go together, but in truth such
actions as these have in them still more of presumption than want of wit. Augustus
Caesar, having been tossed with a tempest at sea, fell to defying Neptune, and in the
pomp of the Circensian games, to be revenged, deposed his statue from the place it had
amongst the other deities. Wherein he was still less excusable than the former, and less
than he was afterwards when, having lost a battle under Quintilius Varus in Germany, in
rage and despair he went running his head against the wall, crying out, "O Varus! give me
back my legions!" for these exceed all folly, forasmuch as impiety is joined therewith,
invading God Himself, or at least Fortune, as if she had ears that were subject to our
batteries; like the Thracians, who when it thunders or lightens, fall to shooting against
heaven with Titanian vengeance, as if by flights of arrows they intended to bring God to
reason. Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us—
"Point ne se faut couroucer aux affaires,
Il ne leur chault de toutes nos choleres."
["We must not trouble the gods with our affairs; they take no heed
of our angers and disputes."—Plutarch.]
But we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.
9
CHAPTER VIII
OF IDLENESS
As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile
by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of
weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true
office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service;
and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring
forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect
generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds,
which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a
thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the
imagination—
"Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis,
Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae,
Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras
Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti."
["As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light,
reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon,
swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on
high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof."—
AEneid, viii. 22.]
—in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not light upon:—
"Velut aegri somnia, vanae
Finguntur species."
["As a sick man's dreams, creating vain phantasms."—
Hor., De Arte Poetica, 7.]
The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said—
"Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat."
["He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere."—Martial, vii. 73.]
10
When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to
avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little
remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer
it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as
being by time become more settled and mature; but I find—
"Variam semper dant otia mentem,"
["Leisure ever creates varied thought."—Lucan, iv. 704]
that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs
into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so
many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that,
the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to
commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.
CHAPTER IX
OF LIARS
There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as
myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so
marvellously treacherous as mine. My other faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and
mean; but in this I think myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought
famous. Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the necessary use of
memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a great and powerful goddess), in
my country, when they would say a man has no sense, they say, such an one has no
memory; and when I complain of the defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove
me, as though I accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory
and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me. But they do me wrong;
for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary, that a strong memory is commonly
coupled with infirm judgment. They do, me, moreover (who am so perfect in nothing as
in friendship), a great wrong in this, that they make the same words which accuse my
infirmity, represent me for an ungrateful person; they bring my affections into question
upon the account of my memory, and from a natural imperfection, make out a defect of
conscience. "He has forgot," says one, "this request, or that promise; he no more
remembers his friends; he has forgot to say or do, or conceal such and such a thing, for
my sake." And, truly, I am apt enough to forget many things, but to neglect anything my
friend has given me in charge, I never do it. And it should be enough, methinks, that I feel
11
the misery and inconvenience of it, without branding me with malice, a vice so contrary
to my humour.
However, I derive these comforts from my infirmity: first, that it is an evil from which
principally I have found reason to correct a worse, that would easily enough have grown
upon me, namely, ambition; the defect being intolerable in those who take upon them
public affairs. That, like examples in the progress of nature demonstrate to us, she has
fortified me in my other faculties proportionably as she has left me unfurnished in this; I
should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind and judgment upon
the bare report of other men, without ever setting them to work upon their own force, had
the inventions and opinions of others been ever been present with me by the benefit of
memory. That by this means I am not so talkative, for the magazine of the memory is ever
better furnished with matter than that of the invention. Had mine been faithful to me, I
had ere this deafened all my friends with my babble, the subjects themselves arousing and
stirring up the little faculty I have of handling and employing them, heating and
distending my discourse, which were a pity: as I have observed in several of my intimate
friends, who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of things, begin
their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many impertinent circumstances, that
though the story be good in itself, they make a shift to spoil it; and if otherwise, you are
either to curse the strength of their memory or the weakness of their judgment: and it is a
hard thing to close up a discourse, and to cut it short, when you have once started; there is
nothing wherein the force of a horse is so much seen as in a round and sudden stop. I see
even those who are pertinent enough, who would, but cannot stop short in their career; for
whilst they are seeking out a handsome period to conclude with, they go on at random,
straggling about upon impertinent trivialities, as men staggering upon weak legs. But,
above all, old men who retain the memory of things past, and forget how often they have
told them, are dangerous company; and I have known stories from the mouth of a man of
very great quality, otherwise very pleasant in themselves, become very wearisome by
being repeated a hundred times over and over again to the same people.
Secondly, that, by this means, I the less remember the injuries I have received; insomuch
that, as the ancient said, I should have a register of injuries, or a prompter, as Darius,
who, that he might not forget the offence he had received from those of Athens, so oft as
he sat down to dinner, ordered one of his pages three times to repeat in his ear, "Sir,
remember the Athenians"; and then, again, the places which I revisit, and the books I read
over again, still smile upon me with a fresh novelty.
It is not without good reason said "that he who has not a good memory should never take
upon him the trade of lying." I know very well that the grammarians distinguish betwixt
an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth is to tell a thing that is false, but that we
12
ourselves believe to be true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which
our French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be untrue; and it
is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now, these do either wholly contrive and
invent the untruths they utter, or so alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie.
When they disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy, 'tis very
hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped, by reason that the real truth
of the thing, having first taken possession of the memory, and being there lodged
impressed by the medium of knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not
represent itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there have
so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of the first true knowledge
evermore running in their minds, will be apt to make them forget those that are
illegitimate, and only, forged by their own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch
as there is no contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less danger of
tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and without any hold, is very apt to
escape the memory, if it be not well assured. Of which I had very pleasant experience, at
the expense of such as profess only to form and accommodate their speech to the affair
they have in hand, or to humour of the great folks to whom they are speaking; for the
circumstances to which these men stick not to enslave their faith and conscience being
subject to several changes, their language must vary accordingly: whence it happens that
of the same thing they tell one man that it is this, and another that it is that, giving it
several colours; which men, if they once come to confer notes, and find out the cheat,
what becomes of this fine art? To which may be added, that they must of necessity very
often ridiculously trap themselves; for what memory can be sufficient to retain so many
different shapes as they have forged upon one and the same subject? I have known many
in my time very ambitious of the repute of this fine wit; but they do not see that if they
have the reputation of it, the effect can no longer be.
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one
another, but by our word. If we did but discover the horror and gravity of it, we should
pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes. I see that parents
commonly, and with indiscretion enough, correct their children for little innocent faults,
and torment them for wanton tricks, that have neither impression nor consequence;
whereas, in my opinion, lying only, and, which is of something a lower form, obstinacy,
are the faults which are to be severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in
their progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a tongue has
once got the knack of lying, 'tis not to be imagined how impossible it is to reclaim it
whence it comes to pass that we see some, who are otherwise very honest men, so subject
and enslaved to this vice. I have an honest lad to my tailor, whom I never knew guilty of
one truth, no, not when it had been to his advantage. If falsehood had, like truth, but one
face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary
13
to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field
indefinite, without bound or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite,
and evil, infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white, there is only
one to hit it. For my own part, I have this vice in so great horror, that I am not sure I could
prevail with my conscience to secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger
by an impudent and solemn lie. An ancient father says "that a dog we know is better
company than a man whose language we do not understand."
"Ut externus alieno pene non sit hominis vice."
["As a foreigner cannot be said to supply us the place of a man."
—Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. I]
And how much less sociable is false speaking than silence?
King Francis I. vaunted that he had by this means nonplussed Francesco Taverna,
ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, a man very famous for his science in
talking in those days. This gentleman had been sent to excuse his master to his Majesty
about a thing of very great consequence, which was this: the King, still to maintain some
intelligence with Italy, out of which he had lately been driven, and particularly with the
duchy of Milan, had thought it convenient to have a gentleman on his behalf to be with
that Duke: an ambassador in effect, but in outward appearance a private person who
pretended to reside there upon his own particular affairs; for the Duke, much more
depending upon the Emperor, especially at a time when he was in a treaty of marriage
with his niece, daughter to the King of Denmark, who is now dowager of Lorraine, could
not manifest any practice and conference with us without his great interest. For this
commission one Merveille, a Milanese gentleman, and an equerry to the King, being
thought very fit, was accordingly despatched thither with private credentials, and
instructions as ambassador, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke about
his own private concerns, the better to mask and colour the business; and was so long in
that court, that the Emperor at last had some inkling of his real employment there; which
was the occasion of what followed after, as we suppose; which was, that under pretence
of some murder, his trial was in two days despatched, and his head in the night struck off
in prison. Messire Francesco being come, and prepared with a long counterfeit history of
the affair (for the King had applied himself to all the princes of Christendom, as well as to
the Duke himself, to demand satisfaction), had his audience at the morning council;
where, after he had for the support of his cause laid open several plausible justifications
of the fact, that his master had never looked upon this Merveille for other than a private
gentleman and his own subject, who was there only in order to his own business, neither
had he ever lived under any other aspect; absolutely disowning that he had ever heard he
14
was one of the King's household or that his Majesty so much as knew him, so far was he
from taking him for an ambassador: the King, in his turn, pressing him with several
objections and demands, and challenging him on all sides, tripped him up at last by
asking, why, then, the execution was performed by night, and as it were by stealth? At
which the poor confounded ambassador, the more handsomely to disengage himself,
made answer, that the Duke would have been very loth, out of respect to his Majesty, that
such an execution should have been performed by day. Any one may guess if he was not
well rated when he came home, for having so grossly tripped in the presence of a prince
of so delicate a nostril as King Francis.
Pope Julius II. having sent an ambassador to the King of England to animate him against
King Francis, the ambassador having had his audience, and the King, before he would
give an answer, insisting upon the difficulties he should find in setting on foot so great a
preparation as would be necessary to attack so potent a King, and urging some reasons to
that effect, the ambassador very unseasonably replied that he had also himself considered
the same difficulties, and had represented them to the Pope. From which saying of his, so
directly opposite to the thing propounded and the business he came about, which was
immediately to incite him to war, the King of England first derived the argument (which
he afterward found to be true), that this ambassador, in his own mind, was on the side of
the French; of which having advertised his master, his estate at his return home was
confiscated, and he himself very narrowly escaped the losing of his head.
CHAPTER X
OF QUICK OR SLOW SPEECH
"Onc ne furent a touts toutes graces donnees."
["All graces were never yet given to any one man."—A verse
in one of La Brebis' Sonnets.]
So we see in the gift of eloquence, wherein some have such a facility and promptness, and
that which we call a present wit so easy, that they are ever ready upon all occasions, and
never to be surprised; and others more heavy and slow, never venture to utter anything but
what they have long premeditated, and taken great care and pains to fit and prepare.
Now, as we teach young ladies those sports and exercises which are most proper to set out
the grace and beauty of those parts wherein their chiefest ornament and perfection lie, so
it should be in these two advantages of eloquence, to which the lawyers and preachers of
15
our age seem principally to pretend. If I were worthy to advise, the slow speaker,
methinks, should be more proper for the pulpit, and the other for the bar: and that because
the employment of the first does naturally allow him all the leisure he can desire to
prepare himself, and besides, his career is performed in an even and unintermitted line,
without stop or interruption; whereas the pleader's business and interest compels him to
enter the lists upon all occasions, and the unexpected objections and replies of his adverse
party jostle him out of his course, and put him, upon the instant, to pump for new and
extempore answers and defences. Yet, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King
Francis at Marseilles, it happened, quite contrary, that Monsieur Poyet, a man bred up all
his life at the bar, and in the highest repute for eloquence, having the charge of making
the harangue to the Pope committed to him, and having so long meditated on it
beforehand, as, so they said, to have brought it ready made along with him from Paris; the
very day it was to have been pronounced, the Pope, fearing something might be said that
might give offence to the other princes' ambassadors who were there attending on him,
sent to acquaint the King with the argument which he conceived most suiting to the time
and place, but, by chance, quite another thing to that Monsieur de Poyet had taken so
much pains about: so that the fine speech he had prepared was of no use, and he was upon
the instant to contrive another; which finding himself unable to do, Cardinal du Bellay
was constrained to perform that office. The pleader's part is, doubtless, much harder than
that of the preacher; and yet, in my opinion, we see more passable lawyers than preachers,
at all events in France. It should seem that the nature of wit is to have its operation
prompt and sudden, and that of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow. But
he who remains totally silent, for want of leisure to prepare himself to speak well, and he
also whom leisure does noways benefit to better speaking, are equally unhappy.
'Tis said of Severus Cassius that he spoke best extempore, that he stood more obliged to
fortune than to his own diligence; that it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in
speaking, and that his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble
his eloquence. I know, experimentally, the disposition of nature so impatient of tedious
and elaborate premeditation, that if it do not go frankly and gaily to work, it can perform
nothing to purpose. We say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp,
by reason of a certain rough harshness that laborious handling imprints upon those where
it has been employed. But besides this, the solicitude of doing well, and a certain striving
and contending of a mind too far strained and overbent upon its undertaking, breaks and
hinders itself like water, that by force of its own pressing violence and abundance, cannot
find a ready issue through the neck of a bottle or a narrow sluice. In this condition of
nature, of which I am now speaking, there is this also, that it would not be disordered and
stimulated with such passions as the fury of Cassius (for such a motion would be too
violent and rude); it would not be jostled, but solicited; it would be roused and heated by
unexpected, sudden, and accidental occasions. If it be left to itself, it flags and languishes;
16
agitation only gives it grace and vigour. I am always worst in my own possession, and
when wholly at my own disposition: accident has more title to anything that comes from
me than I; occasion, company, and even the very rising and falling of my own voice,
extract more from my fancy than I can find, when I sound and employ it by myself. By
which means, the things I say are better than those I write, if either were to be preferred,
where neither is worth anything. This, also, befalls me, that I do not find myself where I
seek myself, and I light upon things more by chance than by any inquisition of my own
judgment. I perhaps sometimes hit upon something when I write, that seems quaint and
sprightly to me, though it will appear dull and heavy to another.—But let us leave these
fine compliments; every one talks thus of himself according to his talent. But when I
come to speak, I am already so lost that I know not what I was about to say, and in such
cases a stranger often finds it out before me. If I should make erasure so often as this
inconvenience befalls me, I should make clean work; occasion will, at some other time,
lay it as visible to me as the light, and make me wonder what I should stick at.
CHAPTER XV
OF THE PUNISHMENT OF COWARDICE
I once heard of a prince, and a great captain, having a narration given him as he sat at
table of the proceeding against Monsieur de Vervins, who was sentenced to death for
having surrendered Boulogne to the English, openly maintaining that a soldier could not
justly be put to death for want of courage. And, in truth, 'tis reason that a man should
make a great difference betwixt faults that merely proceed from infirmity, and those that
are visibly the effects of treachery and malice: for, in the last, we act against the rules of
reason that nature has imprinted in us; whereas, in the former, it seems as if we might
produce the same nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection and weakness of
courage, for our justification. Insomuch that many have thought we are not fairly
questionable for anything but what we commit against our conscience; and it is partly
upon this rule that those ground their opinion who disapprove of capital or sanguinary
punishments inflicted upon heretics and misbelievers; and theirs also who advocate or a
judge is not accountable for having from mere ignorance failed in his administration.
But as to cowardice, it is certain that the most usual way of chastising it is by ignominy
and and it is supposed that this practice brought into use by the legislator Charondas; and
that, before his time, the laws of Greece punished those with death who fled from a battle;
whereas he ordained only that they be for three days exposed in the public dressed in
woman's attire, hoping yet for some service from them, having awakened their courage by
this open shame:
17
"Suffundere malis homims sanguinem, quam effundere."
["Rather bring the blood into a man's cheek than let it out of his
body." Tertullian in his Apologetics.]
It appears also that the Roman laws did anciently punish those with death who had run
away; for Ammianus Marcellinus says that the Emperor Julian commanded ten of his
soldiers, who had turned their backs in an encounter against the Parthians, to be first
degraded, and afterward put to death, according, says he, to the ancient laws, and yet
elsewhere for the like offence he only condemned others to remain amongst the prisoners
under the baggage ensign. The severe punishment the people of Rome inflicted upon
those who fled from the battle of Cannae, and those who ran away with Aeneius Fulvius
at his defeat, did not extend to death. And yet, methinks, 'tis to be feared, lest disgrace
should make such delinquents desperate, and not only faint friends, but enemies.
Of late memory, the Seigneur de Frauget, lieutenant to the Mareschal de Chatillon's
company, having by the Mareschal de Chabannes been put in government of Fuentarabia
in the place of Monsieur de Lude, and having surrendered it to the Spaniard, he was for
that condemned to be degraded from all nobility, and both himself and his posterity
declared ignoble, taxable, and for ever incapable of bearing arms, which severe sentence
was afterwards accordingly executed at Lyons. And, since that, all the gentlemen who
were in Guise when the Count of Nassau entered into it, underwent the same punishment,
as several others have done since for the like offence. Notwithstanding, in case of such a
manifest ignorance or cowardice as exceeds all ordinary example, 'tis but reason to take it
for a sufficient proof of treachery and malice, and for such to be punished.
CHAPTER XVII
OF FEAR
"Obstupui, steteruntque comae et vox faucibus haesit."
["I was amazed, my hair stood on end, and my voice stuck in my
throat." Virgil, AEneid, ii. 774.]
I am not so good a naturalist (as they call it) as to discern by what secret springs fear has
its motion in us; but, be this as it may, 'tis a strange passion, and such a one that the
physicians say there is no other whatever that sooner dethrones our judgment from its
proper seat; which is so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through
18
fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain that it begets a terrible
astonishment and confusion during the fit. I omit the vulgar sort, to whom it one while
represents their great-grandsires risen out of their graves in their shrouds, another while
werewolves, nightmares, and chimaeras; but even amongst soldiers, a sort of men over
whom, of all others, it ought to have the least power, how often has it converted flocks of
sheep into armed squadrons, reeds and bullrushes into pikes and lances, friends into
enemies, and the French white cross into the red cross of Spain! When Monsieur de
Bourbon took Rome, an ensign who was upon guard at Borgo San Pietro was seized with
such a fright upon the first alarm, that he threw himself out at a breach with his colours
upon his shoulder, and ran directly upon the enemy, thinking he had retreated toward the
inward defences of the city, and with much ado, seeing Monsieur de Bourbon's people,
who thought it had been a sally upon them, draw up to receive him, at last came to
himself, and saw his error; and then facing about, he retreated full speed through the same
breach by which he had gone out, but not till he had first blindly advanced above three
hundred paces into the open field. It did not, however, fall out so well with Captain
Giulio's ensign, at the time when St. Paul was taken from us by the Comte de Bures and
Monsieur de Reu, for he, being so astonished with fear as to throw himself, colours and
all, out of a porthole, was immediately, cut to pieces by the enemy; and in the same siege,
it was a very memorable fear that so seized, contracted, and froze up the heart of a
gentleman, that he sank down, stone-dead, in the breach, without any manner of wound or
hurt at all. The like madness does sometimes push on a whole multitude; for in one of the
encounters that Germanicus had with the Germans, two great parties were so amazed with
fear that they ran two opposite ways, the one to the same place from which the other had
fled. Sometimes it adds wings to the heels, as in the two first: sometimes it nails them to
the ground, and fetters them from moving; as we read of the Emperor Theophilus, who, in
a battle he lost against the Agarenes, was so astonished and stupefied that he had no
power to fly—
"Adeo pavor etiam auxilia formidat"
["So much does fear dread even the means of safety."—Quint.
Curt., ii. II.]
—till such time as Manuel, one of the principal commanders of his army, having jogged
and shaked him so as to rouse him out of his trance, said to him, "Sir, if you will not
follow me, I will kill you; for it is better you should lose your life than, by being taken,
lose your empire." But fear does then manifest its utmost power when it throws us upon a
valiant despair, having before deprived us of all sense both of duty and honour. In the
first pitched battle the Romans lost against Hannibal, under the Consul Sempronius, a
body of ten thousand foot, that had taken fright, seeing no other escape for their
19
cowardice, went and threw themselves headlong upon the great battalion of the enemies,
which with marvellous force and fury they charged through and through, and routed with
a very great slaughter of the Carthaginians, thus purchasing an ignominious flight at the
same price they might have gained a glorious victory.
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone, in the trouble of it,
exceeding all other accidents. What affliction could be greater or more just than that of
Pompey's friends, who, in his ship, were spectators of that horrible murder? Yet so it was,
that the fear of the Egyptian vessels they saw coming to board them, possessed them with
so great alarm that it is observed they thought of nothing but calling upon the mariners to
make haste, and by force of oars to escape away, till being arrived at Tyre, and delivered
from fear, they had leisure to turn their thoughts to the loss of their captain, and to give
vent to those tears and lamentations that the other more potent passion had till then
suspended.
"Tum pavor sapientiam omnem mihiex animo expectorat."
["Then fear drove out all intelligence from my mind."—Ennius, ap.
Cicero, Tusc., iv. 8.]
Such as have been well rubbed in some skirmish, may yet, all wounded and bloody as
they are, be brought on again the next day to charge; but such as have once conceived a
good sound fear of the enemy, will never be made so much as to look him in the face.
Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in
perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor,
slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk. And the many people who,
impatient of the perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged or drowned themselves, or dashed
themselves to pieces, give us sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and
insupportable than death itself.
The Greeks acknowledged another kind of fear, differing from any we have spoken of
yet, that surprises us without any visible cause, by an impulse from heaven, so that whole
nations and whole armies have been struck with it. Such a one was that which brought so
wonderful a desolation upon Carthage, where nothing was to be heard but affrighted
voices and outcries; where the inhabitants were seen to sally out of their houses as to an
alarm, and there to charge, wound, and kill one another, as if they had been enemies come
to surprise their city. All things were in disorder and fury till, with prayers and sacrifices,
they had appeased their gods; and this is that they call panic terrors.
20
CHAPTER XXI
THAT THE PROFIT OF ONE MAN IS THE DAMAGE OF ANOTHER
Demades the Athenian condemned one of his city, whose trade it was to sell the
necessaries for funeral ceremonies, upon pretence that he demanded unreasonable profit,
and that that profit could not accrue to him, but by the death of a great number of people.
A judgment that appears to be ill grounded, forasmuch as no profit whatever can possibly
be made but at the expense of another, and that by the same rule he should condemn all
gain of what kind soever. The merchant only thrives by the debauchery of youth, the
husband man by the dearness of grain, the architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and
officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honour and office of
divines are derived from our death and vices. A physician takes no pleasure in the health
even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his
country, and so of the rest. And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own
bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at
another's expense. Upon which consideration it comes into my head, that nature does not
in this swerve from her general polity; for physicians hold, that the birth, nourishment,
and increase of every thing is the dissolution and corruption of another:
"Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante."
["For, whatever from its own confines passes changed, this is at
once the death of that which before it was."—Lucretius, ii. 752.]
CHAPTER XXVI
THAT IT IS FOLLY TO MEASURE TRUTH AND ERROR BY OUR OWN
CAPACITY
'Tis not, perhaps, without reason, that we attribute facility of belief and easiness of
persuasion to simplicity and ignorance: for I fancy I have heard belief compared to the
impression of a seal upon the soul, which by how much softer and of less resistance it is,
is the more easy to be impressed upon.
"Ut necesse est, lancem in Libra, ponderibus impositis,
deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere."
21
["As the scale of the balance must give way to the weight that
presses it down, so the mind yields to demonstration."
—Cicero, Acad., ii. 12.]
By how much the soul is more empty and without counterpoise, with so much greater
facility it yields under the weight of the first persuasion. And this is the reason that
children, the common people, women, and sick folks, are most apt to be led by the ears.
But then, on the other hand, 'tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for
false that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy
themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of those; and if I heard
talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story I
had no mind to believe:
"Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala,"
["Dreams, magic terrors, marvels, sorceries, Thessalian prodigies."
—Horace. Ep. ii. 3, 208.]
I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies. Whereas I now find,
that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least, as they; not that experience has taught me
anything to alter my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but
reason has instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and
impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God, and the
power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly
can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason
cannot comprehend, how many are continually presented before our eyes? Let us but
consider through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers lead us to
the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we shall find that it is rather
custom than knowledge that takes away their strangeness—
"Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;"
["Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven's lucid
temples."—Lucretius, ii. 1037. The text has 'statiate videnai']
and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as
incredible, if not more, than any others.
22
"Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes."
[Lucretius, ii. 1032. The sense of the passage is in the preceding
sentence.]
He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the
greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we conclude the extremes that
nature makes of the kind.
"Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei'st
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit."
["A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a
mighty stream; and so with other things—a tree, a man—anything
appears greatest to him that never knew a greater."—Idem, vi. 674.]
"Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur,
neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident."
["Things grow familiar to men's minds by being often seen; so that
they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily
see."—Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]
The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire into their causes. We
are to judge with more reverence, and with greater acknowledgment of our own ignorance
and infirmity, of the infinite power of nature. How many unlikely things are there testified
by people worthy of faith, which, if we cannot persuade ourselves absolutely to believe,
we ought at least to leave them in suspense; for, to condemn them as impossible, is by a
temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost bounds of possibility. Did we
rightly understand the difference betwixt the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that
which is contrary to the order and course of nature and contrary to the common opinion of
men, in not believing rashly, and on the other hand, in not being too incredulous, we
should observe the rule of 'Ne quid nimis' enjoined by Chilo.
When we find in Froissart, that the Comte de Foix knew in Bearn the defeat of John, king
23
of Castile, at Jubera the next day after it happened, and the means by which he tells us he
came to do so, we may be allowed to be a little merry at it, as also at what our annals
report, that Pope Honorius, the same day that King Philip Augustus died at Mantes,
performed his public obsequies at Rome, and commanded the like throughout Italy, the
testimony of these authors not being, perhaps, of authority enough to restrain us. But what
if Plutarch, besides several examples that he produces out of antiquity, tells us, he knows
of certain knowledge, that in the time of Domitian, the news of the battle lost by Antony
in Germany was published at Rome, many days' journey from thence, and dispersed
throughout the whole world, the same day it was fought; and if Caesar was of opinion,
that it has often happened, that the report has preceded the incident, shall we not say, that
these simple people have suffered themselves to be deceived with the vulgar, for not
having been so clear-sighted as we? Is there anything more delicate, more clear, more
sprightly; than Pliny's judgment, when he is pleased to set it to work? Anything more
remote from vanity? Setting aside his learning, of which I make less account, in which of
these excellences do any of us excel him? And yet there is scarce a young schoolboy that
does not convict him of untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the progress of
the works of nature. When we read in Bouchet the miracles of St. Hilary's relics, away
with them: his authority is not sufficient to deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him;
but generally and offhand to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular
impudence. That great St. Augustin' testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight upon
the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at Carthage cured of a
cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a woman newly baptized; Hesperius, a
familiar friend of his, to have driven away the spirits that haunted his house, with a little
earth of the sepulchre of our Lord; which earth, being also transported thence into the
church, a paralytic to have there been suddenly cured by it; a woman in a procession,
having touched St. Stephen's shrine with a nosegay, and rubbing her eyes with it, to have
recovered her sight, lost many years before; with several other miracles of which he
professes himself to have been an eyewitness: of what shall we excuse him and the two
holy bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, both of whom he attests to the truth of these
things? Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice and imposture? Is
any man now living so impudent as to think himself comparable to them in virtue, piety,
learning, judgment, or any kind of perfection?
"Qui, ut rationem nullam afferrent,
ipsa auctoritate me frangerent."
["Who, though they should adduce no reason, would convince me with
their authority alone."—Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, i. 21.]
'Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd temerity it draws
24
after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend. For after, according to your fine
understanding, you have established the limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards,
there appears a necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have
contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits. Now, that which seems to me so
much to disorder our consciences in the commotions we are now in concerning religion,
is the Catholics dispensing so much with their belief. They fancy they appear moderate,
and wise, when they grant to their opponents some of the articles in question; but, besides
that they do not discern what advantage it is to those with whom we contend, to begin to
give ground and to retire, and how much this animates our enemy to follow his blow:
these articles which they select as things indifferent, are sometimes of very great
importance. We are either wholly and absolutely to submit ourselves to the authority of
our ecclesiastical polity, or totally throw off all obedience to it: 'tis not for us to determine
what and how much obedience we owe to it. And this I can say, as having myself made
trial of it, that having formerly taken the liberty of my own swing and fancy, and omitted
or neglected certain rules of the discipline of our Church, which seemed to me vain and
strange coming afterwards to discourse of it with learned men, I have found those same
things to be built upon very good and solid ground and strong foundation; and that
nothing but stupidity and ignorance makes us receive them with less reverence than the
rest. Why do we not consider what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how
many things were yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables?
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses
into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.
CHAPTER XXX
OF CANNIBALS
When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order of the army
the Romans sent out to meet him; "I know not," said he, "what kind of barbarians" (for so
the Greeks called all other nations) "these may be; but the disposition of this army that I
see has nothing of barbarism in it." As much said the Greeks of that which Flaminius
brought into their country; and Philip, beholding from an eminence the order and
distribution of the Roman camp formed in his kingdom by Publius Sulpicius Galba, spake
to the same effect. By which it appears how cautious men ought to be of taking things
upon trust from vulgar opinion, and that we are to judge by the eye of reason, and not
from common report.
I long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New World, discovered
in these latter days, and in that part of it where Villegaignon landed, he called Antarctic
25
France. This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great consideration. I
cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be another, so many wiser men than we
having been deceived in this. I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we
have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.
Plato brings in Solon, telling a story that he had heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt,
that of old, and before the Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly
at the mouth of the straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than both Africa
and Asia put together; and that the kings of that country, who not only possessed that Isle,
but extended their dominion so far into the continent that they had a country of Africa as
far as Egypt, and extending in Europe to Tuscany, attempted to encroach even upon Asia,
and to subjugate all the nations that border upon the Mediterranean Sea, as far as the
Black Sea; and to that effect overran all Spain, the Gauls, and Italy, so far as to penetrate
into Greece, where the Athenians stopped them: but that some time after, both the
Athenians, and they and their island, were swallowed by the Flood.
It is very likely that this extreme irruption and inundation of water made wonderful
changes and alterations in the habitations of the earth, as 'tis said that the sea then divided
Sicily from Italy—
"Haec loca, vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina,
Dissiluisse ferunt, quum protenus utraque tellus
Una foret"
["These lands, they say, formerly with violence and vast desolation
convulsed, burst asunder, where erewhile were."—AEneid, iii. 414.]
Cyprus from Syria, the isle of Negropont from the continent of Beeotia, and elsewhere
united lands that were separate before, by filling up the channel betwixt them with sand
and mud:
"Sterilisque diu palus, aptaque remis,
Vicinas urbes alit, et grave sentit aratrum."
["That which was once a sterile marsh, and bore vessels on its
bosom, now feeds neighbouring cities, and admits the plough."
—Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 65.]
But there is no great appearance that this isle was this New World so lately discovered:
for that almost touched upon Spain, and it were an incredible effect of an inundation, to
26
have tumbled back so prodigious a mass, above twelve hundred leagues: besides that our
modern navigators have already almost discovered it to be no island, but terra firma, and
continent with the East Indies on the one side, and with the lands under the two poles on
the other side; or, if it be separate from them, it is by so narrow a strait and channel, that it
none the more deserves the name of an island for that.
It should seem, that in this great body, there are two sorts of motions, the one natural and
the other febrific, as there are in ours. When I consider the impression that our river of
Dordogne has made in my time on the right bank of its descent, and that in twenty years it
has gained so much, and undermined the foundations of so many houses, I perceive it to
be an extraordinary agitation: for had it always followed this course, or were hereafter to
do it, the aspect of the world would be totally changed. But rivers alter their course,
sometimes beating against the one side, and sometimes the other, and some times quietly
keeping the channel. I do not speak of sudden inundations, the causes of which everybody
understands. In Medoc, by the seashore, the Sieur d'Arsac, my brother, sees an estate he
had there, buried under the sands which the sea vomits before it: where the tops of some
houses are yet to be seen, and where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful
barren pasturage. The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the sea has driven
so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four leagues of land. These sands are
her harbingers: and we now see great heaps of moving sand, that march half a league
before her, and occupy the land.
The other testimony from antiquity, to which some would apply this discovery of the New
World, is in Aristotle; at least, if that little book of Unheard of Miracles be his. He there
tells us, that certain Carthaginians, having crossed the Atlantic Sea without the Straits of
Gibraltar, and sailed a very long time, discovered at last a great and fruitful island, all
covered over with wood, and watered with several broad and deep rivers, far remote from
all terra firma; and that they, and others after them, allured by the goodness and fertility of
the soil, went thither with their wives and children, and began to plant a colony. But the
senate of Carthage perceiving their people by little and little to diminish, issued out an
express prohibition, that none, upon pain of death, should transport themselves thither;
and also drove out these new inhabitants; fearing, 'tis said, lest' in process of time they
should so multiply as to supplant themselves and ruin their state. But this relation of
Aristotle no more agrees with our new-found lands than the other.
This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more likely to tell truth:
for your better-bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, 'tis true, and
discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to
what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they
never represent things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as
27
they would have them appear to you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgment, and
the better to induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something more
than is really true, of their own invention. Now in this case, we should either have a man
of irreproachable veracity, or so simple that he has not wherewithal to contrive, and to
give a colour of truth to false relations, and who can have no ends in forging an untruth.
Such a one was mine; and besides, he has at divers times brought to me several seamen
and merchants who at the same time went the same voyage. I shall therefore content
myself with his information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say to the
business. We should have topographers to trace out to us the particular places where they
have been; but for having had this advantage over us, to have seen the Holy Land, they
would have the privilege, forsooth, to tell us stories of all the other parts of the world
beside. I would have every one write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no
more; and that not in this only but in all other subjects; for such a person may have some
particular knowledge and experience of the nature of such a river, or such a fountain,
who, as to other things, knows no more than what everybody does, and yet to give a
currency to his little pittance of learning, will undertake to write the whole body of
physics: a vice from which great inconveniences derive their original.
Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this
nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism
to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of
truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place
wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there
the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate
that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary
progress; whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have
changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most
useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have
helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own
corrupted palate. And yet for all this, our taste confesses a flavour and delicacy excellent
even to emulation of the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound
without art or culture. Neither is it reasonable that art should gain the pre-eminence of our
great and powerful mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional
ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our
inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in
her own purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and
frivolous attempts:
"Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius;
Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris;
28
Et volucres nulls dulcius arte canunt."
["The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves;
and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach.
—"Propertius, i. 2, 10.]
Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds,
its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.
All things, says Plato, are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and
most beautiful by the one or the other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by
the last.
These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received but very little
form and fashion from art and human invention, and consequently to be not much remote
from their original simplicity. The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet
much vitiated with any mixture of ours: but 'tis in such purity, that I am sometimes
troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they were not
discovered in those better times, when there were men much more able to judge of them
than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them; for to my
apprehension, what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures
with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a
happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy
itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could
never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could
have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that
it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of
numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or
poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but
those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal,
no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation,
avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of.
How much would he find his imaginary Republic short of his perfection?
"Viri a diis recentes."
["Men fresh from the gods."—Seneca, Ep., 90.]
"Hos natura modos primum dedit."
29
["These were the manners first taught by nature."
—Virgil, Georgics, ii. 20.]
As to the rest, they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so that, as my witnesses
inform me, 'tis rare to hear of a sick person, and they moreover assure me, that they never
saw any of the natives, either paralytic, bleareyed, toothless, or crooked with age. The
situation of their country is along the sea-shore, enclosed on the other side towards the
land, with great and high mountains, having about a hundred leagues in breadth between.
They have great store of fish and flesh, that have no resemblance to those of ours: which
they eat without any other cookery, than plain boiling, roasting, and broiling. The first
that rode a horse thither, though in several other voyages he had contracted an
acquaintance and familiarity with them, put them into so terrible a fright, with his centaur
appearance, that they killed him with their arrows before they could come to discover
who he was. Their buildings are very long, and of capacity to hold two or three hundred
people, made of the barks of tall trees, reared with one end upon the ground, and leaning
to and supporting one another at the top, like some of our barns, of which the covering
hangs down to the very ground, and serves for the side walls. They have wood so hard,
that they cut with it, and make their swords of it, and their grills of it to broil their meat.
Their beds are of cotton, hung swinging from the roof, like our seamen's hammocks,
every man his own, for the wives lie apart from their husbands. They rise with the sun,
and so soon as they are up, eat for all day, for they have no more meals but that; they do
not then drink, as Suidas reports of some other people of the East that never drank at their
meals; but drink very often all day after, and sometimes to a rousing pitch. Their drink is
made of a certain root, and is of the colour of our claret, and they never drink it but
lukewarm. It will not keep above two or three days; it has a somewhat sharp, brisk taste,
is nothing heady, but very comfortable to the stomach; laxative to strangers, but a very
pleasant beverage to such as are accustomed to it. They make use, instead of bread, of a
certain white compound, like coriander seeds; I have tasted of it; the taste is sweet and a
little flat. The whole day is spent in dancing. Their young men go a-hunting after wild
beasts with bows and arrows; one part of their women are employed in preparing their
drink the while, which is their chief employment. One of their old men, in the morning
before they fall to eating, preaches to the whole family, walking from the one end of the
house to the other, and several times repeating the same sentence, till he has finished the
round, for their houses are at least a hundred yards long. Valour towards their enemies
and love towards their wives, are the two heads of his discourse, never failing in the
close, to put them in mind, that 'tis their wives who provide them their drink warm and
well seasoned. The fashion of their beds, ropes, swords, and of the wooden bracelets they
tie about their wrists, when they go to fight, and of the great canes, bored hollow at one
end, by the sound of which they keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in several
places, and amongst others, at my house. They shave all over, and much more neatly than
30
we, without other razor than one of wood or stone. They believe in the immortality of the
soul, and that those who have merited well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven
where the sun rises, and the accursed in the west.
They have I know not what kind of priests and prophets, who very rarely present
themselves to the people, having their abode in the mountains. At their arrival, there is a
great feast, and solemn assembly of many villages: each house, as I have described,
makes a village, and they are about a French league distant from one another. This
prophet declaims to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty: but all their
ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war, and affection to their wives.
He also prophesies to them events to come, and the issues they are to expect from their
enterprises, and prompts them to or diverts them from war: but let him look to't; for if he
fail in his divination, and anything happen otherwise than he has foretold, he is cut into a
thousand pieces, if he be caught, and condemned for a false prophet: for that reason, if
any of them has been mistaken, he is no more heard of.
Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture.
Amongst the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid,
bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with firs and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on
which they were burned to death. Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct
of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that
come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding,
ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise,
and for the temerity of their imposture?
They have continual war with the nations that live further within the mainland, beyond
their mountains, to which they go naked, and without other arms than their bows and
wooden swords, fashioned at one end like the head of our javelins. The obstinacy of their
battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running
away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy
he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house. After having a long time treated
their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the
prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope
to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the
one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same
manner; which being. done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him
with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops
to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the
Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge; as will appear by
this: that having observed the Portuguese, who were in league with their enemies, to
31
inflict another sort of death upon any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them
up to the girdle in the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was stuck full of arrows,
and then to hang them, they thought those people of the other world (as being men who
had sown the knowledge of a great many vices amongst their neighbours, and who were
much greater masters in all sorts of mischief than they) did not exercise this sort of
revenge without a meaning, and that it must needs be more painful than theirs, they began
to leave their old way, and to follow this. I am not sorry that we should here take notice of
the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we
should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive,
than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet
in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs
and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal
enemies, but among neighbours and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under colour of
piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead.
Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic sect, were of opinion that there was no
hurt in making use of our dead carcasses, in what way soever for our necessity, and in
feeding upon them too; as our own ancestors, who being besieged by Caesar in the city
Alexia, resolved to sustain the famine of the siege with the bodies of their old men,
women, and other persons who were incapable of bearing arms.
"Vascones, ut fama est, alimentis talibus usi
Produxere animas."
["'Tis said the Gascons with such meats appeased their hunger."
—Juvenal, Sat., xv. 93.]
And the physicians make no bones of employing it to all sorts of use, either to apply it
outwardly; or to give it inwardly for the health of the patient. But there never was any
opinion so irregular, as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our
familiar vices. We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason:
but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. Their wars are
throughout noble and generous, and carry as much excuse and fair pretence, as that
human malady is capable of; having with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy
of valour. Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already
possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or concern, with all
things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And
they are, moreover, happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural necessities
require: all beyond that is superfluous to them: men of the same age call one another
generally brothers, those who are younger, children; and the old men are fathers to all.
32
These leave to their heirs in common the full possession of goods, without any manner of
division, or other title than what nature bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into
the world. If their neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a
victory, all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having proved
themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle with the goods of the
conquered, but presently return into their own country, where they have no want of
anything necessary, nor of this greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their
condition and to be content. And those in turn do the same; they demand of their prisoners
no other ransom, than acknowledgment that they are overcome: but there is not one found
in an age, who will not rather choose to die than make such a confession, or either by
word or look recede from the entire grandeur of an invincible courage. There is not a man
amongst them who had not rather be killed and eaten, than so much as to open his mouth
to entreat he may not. They use them with all liberality and freedom, to the end their lives
may be so much the dearer to them; but frequently entertain them with menaces of their
approaching death, of the torments they are to suffer, of the preparations making in order
to it, of the mangling their limbs, and of the feast that is to be made, where their carcass is
to be the only dish. All which they do, to no other end, but only to extort some gentle or
submissive word from them, or to frighten them so as to make them run away, to obtain
this advantage that they were terrified, and that their constancy was shaken; and indeed, if
rightly taken, it is in this point only that a true victory consists:
"Victoria nulla est,
Quam quae confessor animo quoque subjugat hostes."
["No victory is complete, which the conquered do not admit to be
so.—"Claudius, De Sexto Consulatu Honorii, v. 248.]
The Hungarians, a very warlike people, never pretend further than to reduce the enemy to
their discretion; for having forced this confession from them, they let them go without
injury or ransom, excepting, at the most, to make them engage their word never to bear
arms against them again. We have sufficient advantages over our enemies that are
borrowed and not truly our own; it is the quality of a porter, and no effect of virtue, to
have stronger arms and legs; it is a dead and corporeal quality to set in array; 'tis a turn of
fortune to make our enemy stumble, or to dazzle him with the light of the sun; 'tis a trick
of science and art, and that may happen in a mean base fellow, to be a good fencer. The
estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the will: there his true honour lies.
Valour is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in
the goodness of our horse or our arms but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his
courage—
33
"Si succiderit, de genu pugnat"
["If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees."
—Seneca, De Providentia, c. 2.]
—he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his assurance; who, dying,
yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune;
he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. There
are defeats more triumphant than victories. Never could those four sister victories, the
fairest the sun ever be held, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily, venture to oppose all
their united glories, to the single glory of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men,
at the pass of Thermopylae. Who ever ran with a more glorious desire and greater
ambition, to the winning, than Captain Iscolas to the certain loss of a battle? Who could
have found out a more subtle invention to secure his safety, than he did to assure his
destruction? He was set to defend a certain pass of Peloponnesus against the Arcadians,
which, considering the nature of the place and the inequality of forces, finding it utterly
impossible for him to do, and seeing that all who were presented to the enemy, must
certainly be left upon the place; and on the other side, reputing it unworthy of his own
virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name to fail in any part of his duty, he
chose a mean betwixt these two extremes after this manner; the youngest and most active
of his men, he preserved for the service and defence of their country, and sent them back;
and with the rest, whose loss would be of less consideration, he resolved to make good
the pass, and with the death of them, to make the enemy buy their entry as dear as
possibly he could; as it fell out, for being presently environed on all sides by the
Arcadians, after having made a great slaughter of the enemy, he and his were all cut in
pieces. Is there any trophy dedicated to the conquerors which was not much more due to
these who were overcome? The part that true conquering is to play, lies in the encounter,
not in the coming off; and the honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing.
But to return to my story: these prisoners are so far from discovering the least weakness,
for all the terrors that can be represented to them, that, on the contrary, during the two or
three months they are kept, they always appear with a cheerful countenance; importune
their masters to make haste to bring them to the test, defy, rail at them, and reproach them
with cowardice, and the number of battles they have lost against those of their country. I
have a song made by one of these prisoners, wherein he bids them "come all, and dine
upon him, and welcome, for they shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers,
whose flesh has served to feed and nourish him. These muscles," says he, "this flesh and
these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think that the substance of
your ancestors' limbs is here yet; notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of
your own flesh:" in which song there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes
34
of the barbarian. Those that paint these people dying after this manner, represent the
prisoner spitting in the faces of his executioners and making wry mouths at them. And 'tis
most certain, that to the very last gasp, they never cease to brave and defy them both in
word and gesture. In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of
necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for there is a vast
difference betwixt their manners and ours.
The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how much they
have the greater reputation for valour. And it is one very remarkable feature in their
marriages, that the same jealousy our wives have to hinder and divert us from the
friendship and familiarity of other women, those employ to promote their husbands'
desires, and to procure them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their
husbands' honour, 'tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in the most companions
they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the husband's virtue. Most of our ladies will
cry out, that 'tis monstrous; whereas in truth it is not so, but a truly matrimonial virtue,
and of the highest form. In the Bible, Sarah, with Leah and Rachel, the two wives of
Jacob, gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their husbands; Livia preferred the
passions of Augustus to her own interest; and the wife of King Deiotarus, Stratonice, did
not only give up a fair young maid that served her to her husband's embraces, but
moreover carefully brought up the children he had by her, and assisted them in the
succession to their father's crown.
And that it may not be supposed, that all this is done by a simple and servile obligation to
their common practice, or by any authoritative impression of their ancient custom,
without judgment or reasoning, and from having a soul so stupid that it cannot contrive
what else to do, I must here give you some touches of their sufficiency in point of
understanding. Besides what I repeated to you before, which was one of their songs of
war, I have another, a love-song, that begins thus:
"Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the
fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved,
by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales
shall for ever be preferred before all other serpents."
Wherein the first couplet, "Stay, adder," &c., makes the burden of the song. Now I have
conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that not only there is nothing barbarous
in this invention, but, moreover, that it is perfectly Anacreontic. To which it may be
added, that their language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the
Greek termination.
35
Three of these people, not foreseeing how dear their knowledge of the corruptions of this
part of the world will one day cost their happiness and repose, and that the effect of this
commerce will be their ruin, as I presuppose it is in a very fair way (miserable men to
suffer themselves to be deluded with desire of novelty and to have left the serenity of
their own heaven to come so far to gaze at ours!), were at Rouen at the time that the late
King Charles IX. was there. The king himself talked to them a good while, and they were
made to see our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a great city. After which, some one
asked their opinion, and would know of them, what of all the things they had seen, they
found most to be admired? To which they made answer, three things, of which I have
forgotten the third, and am troubled at it, but two I yet remember. They said, that in the
first place they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and
well armed, who were about the king ('tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should
submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves to
command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of
one another), that they had observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed
with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at
their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange
that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and
that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.
I talked to one of them a great while together, but I had so ill an interpreter, and one who
was so perplexed by his own ignorance to apprehend my meaning, that I could get
nothing out of him of any moment: Asking him what advantage he reaped from the
superiority he had amongst his own people (for he was a captain, and our mariners called
him king), he told me, to march at the head of them to war. Demanding of him further
how many men he had to follow him, he showed me a space of ground, to signify as many
as could march in such a compass, which might be four or five thousand men; and putting
the question to him whether or no his authority expired with the war, he told me this
remained: that when he went to visit the villages of his dependence, they planed him
paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his ease. All this does
not sound very ill, and the last was not at all amiss, for they wear no breeches.
CHAPTER XXXI
THAT A MAN IS SOBERLY TO JUDGE OF THE DIVINE ORDINANCES
The true field and subject of imposture are things unknown, forasmuch as, in the first
place, their very strangeness lends them credit, and moreover, by not being subjected to
our ordinary reasons, they deprive us of the means to question and dispute them: For
36
which reason, says Plato, it is much more easy to satisfy the hearers, when speaking of the
nature of the gods than of the nature of men, because the ignorance of the auditory affords
a fair and large career and all manner of liberty in the handling of abstruse things. Thence
it comes to pass, that nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people
so confident, as those who entertain us with fables, such as your alchemists, judicial
astrologers, fortune-tellers, and physicians,
"Id genus omne."
["All that sort of people."—Horace, Sat., i. 2, 2.]
To which I would willingly, if I durst, join a pack of people that take upon them to
interpret and control the designs of God Himself, pretending to find out the cause of every
accident, and to pry into the secrets of the divine will, there to discover the
incomprehensible motive, of His works; and although the variety, and the continual
discordance of events, throw them from corner to corner, and toss them from east to west,
yet do they still persist in their vain inquisition, and with the same pencil to paint black
and white.
In a nation of the Indies, there is this commendable custom, that when anything befalls
them amiss in any encounter or battle, they publicly ask pardon of the sun, who is their
god, as having committed an unjust action, always imputing their good or evil fortune to
the divine justice, and to that submitting their own judgment and reason. 'Tis enough for a
Christian to believe that all things come from God, to receive them with acknowledgment
of His divine and inscrutable wisdom, and also thankfully to accept and receive them,
with what face soever they may present themselves. But I do not approve of what I see in
use, that is, to seek to affirm and support our religion by the prosperity of our enterprises.
Our belief has other foundation enough, without going about to authorise it by events: for
the people being accustomed to such plausible arguments as these and so proper to their
taste, it is to be feared, lest when they fail of success they should also stagger in their
faith: as in the war wherein we are now engaged upon the account of religion, those who
had the better in the business of Rochelabeille, making great brags of that success as an
infallible approbation of their cause, when they came afterwards to excuse their
misfortunes of Moncontour and Jarnac, by saying they were fatherly scourges and
corrections that they had not a people wholly at their mercy, they make it manifestly
enough appear, what it is to take two sorts of grist out of the same sack, and with the
same mouth to blow hot and cold. It were better to possess the vulgar with the solid and
real foundations of truth. 'Twas a fine naval battle that was gained under the command of
Don John of Austria a few months since against the Turks; but it has also pleased God at
other times to let us see as great victories at our own expense. In fine, 'tis a hard matter to
37
reduce divine things to our balance, without waste and losing a great deal of the weight.
And who would take upon him to give a reason that Arius and his Pope Leo, the principal
heads of the Arian heresy, should die, at several times, of so like and strange deaths (for
being withdrawn from the disputation by a griping in the bowels, they both of them
suddenly gave up the ghost upon the stool), and would aggravate this divine vengeance by
the circumstances of the place, might as well add the death of Heliogabalus, who was also
slain in a house of office. And, indeed, Irenaeus was involved in the same fortune. God,
being pleased to show us, that the good have something else to hope for and the wicked
something else to fear, than the fortunes or misfortunes of this world, manages and
applies these according to His own occult will and pleasure, and deprives us of the means
foolishly to make thereof our own profit. And those people abuse themselves who will
pretend to dive into these mysteries by the strength of human reason. They never give one
hit that they do not receive two for it; of which St. Augustine makes out a great proof
upon his adversaries. 'Tis a conflict that is more decided by strength of memory than by
the force of reason. We are to content ourselves with the light it pleases the sun to
communicate to us, by virtue of his rays; and who will lift up his eyes to take in a greater,
let him not think it strange, if for the reward of his presumption, he there lose his sight.
"Quis hominum potest scire consilium Dei?
Aut quis poterit cogitare quid velit Dominus?"
["Who of men can know the counsel of God? or who can think what the
will of the Lord is."—Book of Wisdom, ix. 13.]
CHAPTER LI
OF THE VANITY OF WORDS
A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession.
This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot. They would in Sparta
have sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and deceitful act;
and I fancy that Archidamus, who was king of that country, was a little surprised at the
answer of Thucydides, when inquiring of him, which was the better wrestler, Pericles, or
he, he replied, that it was hard to affirm; for when I have thrown him, said he, he always
persuades the spectators that he had no fall and carries away the prize. The women who
paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins, filling up their wrinkles and deformities, are less
to blame, because it is no great matter whether we see them in their natural complexions;
whereas these make it their business to deceive not our sight only but our judgments, and
to adulterate and corrupt the very essence of things. The republics that have maintained
38
themselves in a regular and well-modelled government, such as those of Lacedaemon and
Crete, had orators in no very great esteem. Aristo wisely defined rhetoric to be "a science
to persuade the people;" Socrates and Plato "an art to flatter and deceive." And those who
deny it in the general description, verify it throughout in their precepts. The
Mohammedans will not suffer their children to be instructed in it, as being useless, and
the Athenians, perceiving of how pernicious consequence the practice of it was, it being
in their city of universal esteem, ordered the principal part, which is to move the
affections, with their exordiums and perorations, to be taken away. 'Tis an engine
invented to manage and govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble, and that never is
made use of, but like physic to the sick, in a discomposed state. In those where the vulgar
or the ignorant, or both together, have been all-powerful and able to give the law, as in
those of Athens, Rhodes, and Rome, and where the public affairs have been in a continual
tempest of commotion, to such places have the orators always repaired. And in truth, we
shall find few persons in those republics who have pushed their fortunes to any great
degree of eminence without the assistance of eloquence.
Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Lucullus, Lentulus, Metellus, thence took their chiefest spring,
to mount to that degree of authority at which they at last arrived, making it of greater use
to them than arms, contrary to the opinion of better times; for, L. Volumnius speaking
publicly in favour of the election of Q. Fabius and Pub. Decius, to the consular dignity:
"These are men," said he, "born for war and great in execution; in the combat of the
tongue altogether wanting; spirits truly consular. The subtle, eloquent, and learned are
only good for the city, to make praetors of, to administer justice."
Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the worst condition
and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free and untilled soil bears the worst
weeds. By which it should seem that a monarchical government has less need of it than
any other: for the stupidity and facility natural to the common people, and that render
them subject to be turned and twined and, led by the ears by this charming harmony of
words, without weighing or considering the truth and reality of things by the force of
reason: this facility, I say, is not easily found in a single person, and it is also more easy
by good education and advice to secure him from the impression of this poison. There
was never any famous orator known to come out of Persia or Macedon.
I have entered into this discourse upon the occasion of an Italian I lately received into my
service, and who was clerk of the kitchen to the late Cardinal Caraffa till his death. I put
this fellow upon an account of his office: when he fell to discourse of this palate-science,
with such a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, as if he had been handling some
profound point of divinity. He made a learned distinction of the several sorts of appetites;
of that a man has before he begins to eat, and of those after the second and third service;
39
the means simply to satisfy the first, and then to raise and actuate the other two; the
ordering of the sauces, first in general, and then proceeded to the qualities of the
ingredients and their effects; the differences of salads according to their seasons, those
which ought to be served up hot, and which cold; the manner of their garnishment and
decoration to render them acceptable to the eye. After which he entered upon the order of
the whole service, full of weighty and important considerations:
"Nec minimo sane discrimine refert,
Quo gestu lepores, et quo gallina secetur;"
["Nor with less discrimination observes how we should carve a hare,
and how a hen." or, ("Nor with the least discrimination relates how
we should carve hares, and how cut up a hen.)"
—Juvenal, Sat., v. 123.]
and all this set out with lofty and magnificent words, the very same we make use of when
we discourse of the government of an empire. Which learned lecture of my man brought
this of Terence into my memory:
"Hoc salsum est, hoc adustum est, hoc lautum est, parum:
Illud recte: iterum sic memento: sedulo
Moneo, qux possum, pro mea sapientia.
Postremo, tanquam in speculum, in patinas,
Demea, Inspicere jubeo, et moneo, quid facto usus sit."
["This is too salt, that's burnt, that's not washed enough; that's
well; remember to do so another time. Thus do I ever advise them to
have things done properly, according to my capacity; and lastly,
Demea, I command my cooks to look into every dish as if it were a
mirror, and tell them what they should do."
—Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 71.]
And yet even the Greeks themselves very much admired and highly applauded the order
and disposition that Paulus AEmilius observed in the feast he gave them at his return
from Macedon. But I do not here speak of effects, I speak of words only.
I do not know whether it may have the same operation upon other men that it has upon
me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast words of pilasters,
architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my
imagination is presently possessed with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find
40
them but the paltry pieces of my own kitchen door.
To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words,
would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they
are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid.
And this other is a gullery of the same stamp, to call the offices of our kingdom by the
lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude of function, and still less of
authority and power. And this also, which I doubt will one day turn to the reproach of this
age of ours, unworthily and indifferently to confer upon any we think fit the most glorious
surnames with which antiquity honoured but one or two persons in several ages. Plato
carried away the surname of Divine, by so universal a consent that never any one repined
at it, or attempted to take it from him; and yet the Italians, who pretend, and with good
reason, to more sprightly wits and sounder sense than the other nations of their time, have
lately bestowed the same title upon Aretin, in whose writings, save tumid phrases set out
with smart periods, ingenious indeed but far-fetched and fantastic, and the eloquence, be
it what it may, I see nothing in him above the ordinary writers of his time, so far is he
from approaching the ancient divinity. And we make nothing of giving the surname of
great to princes who have nothing more than ordinary in them.
41