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Updated: May 20, 2025
But in this case, on the representation of the judge who tried the issue, the verdict was formally set aside. By that time people were beginning to realise the wisdom of Montaigne's counsel, written at the commencement of the witch epidemic: "How much more natural and more likely do I find it that two men should lie than one in twelve hours should pass with the winds from east to west?
We can fully believe in Montaigne's sincerity when elsewhere he asserts that we must not travel away from the paths marked down by the Roman Catholic Church, lest we should be driven about helplessly and aimlessly on the unbounded sea of human opinions.
You, Eusebius, will be perfectly of Montaigne's opinion. We would rather trust that there are few in whom this moral principle has no vitality whatever.
In fact, GOOD SENSE was with him the principium et fons of all theories and all practice. And it was this quality that attached him to the English. His philosophy on this head was rather curious. "Good sense," said he one day to Maltravers, as they were walking to and fro at De Montaigne's villa, by the margin of the lake, "is not a merely intellectual attribute.
De Montaigne, who had been long, though not intimately, acquainted with the deceased, took upon himself all the necessary arrangements, and superintended the funeral; after which ceremony, Howard returned to London; and in Paris, as in the grave, all things are forgotten! But still in De Montaigne's breast there dwelt a horrible fear.
And the man fighting against wrong to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps he is himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the metaphor of that, the song of the other, although the writers themselves professed indifference, or were even counted as belonging to the enemy. Montaigne's hold on his readers arises from many causes.
Even such is the contradiction in Montaigne's fanciful Essay 'On Cannibals, where, towards the end, he speaks of a captain who holds authority over these savages, not only in war, but also in peace, 'that when he went to visit the village of his dependence, they cut him paths through the thick of their woods, through which he might pass at ease. The beginning of this Essay described the commonwealth of these cannibals as tolerating no politic superiority, no use of service, no occupation, &c.
It is a good remark of Montaigne's, that the wisest men often hare friends with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of my regard. Poetry is a much easier and more agreeable species of composition than prose; and could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
In reality we ask for sincerity only in what is pleasant to us; the sincere whose frankness and honesty offend we call boors. Sincere self-revelation, if well done, is one of the most esteemed forms of literary production. Montaigne's preface to his "Essays" is a promise that he lived up to in the sincerity and frankness of his self and other analysis.
There have, indeed, been some enthusiastic and irrational zealots for friendship, who have maintained; and perhaps believed that one friend has a right to all that is in possession of another; and that therefore it is a violation of kindness to exempt any secret from this boundless confidence; accordingly a late female minister of state has been shameless enough to inform the world, that she used, when she wanted to extract any thing from her sovereign, to remind her of Montaigne's reasoning, who has determined, that to tell a secret to a friend is no breach of fidelity, because the number of persons trusted is not multiplied, a man and his friend being virtually the same.
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