Page:Essays, Vol 4 (Ives, 1925).pdf/16
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4 ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
and especially his quotations, for which his times, more than he, may be blamed.
He handles with neither strength nor delicacy the whole question of the place of women in the world; and nevertheless from his own day to ours, women have been his warmest friends; because, [ think, they value, more than any high appreciation of themselves, the qualities which he depicts himself as showing — and I believe truly — in his per- sonal relations with them: honesty, fidelity, sincerity, and even gen- erosity and respectfulness. And there is real delicacy of perception in such phrases as this in this Essay: “It costs her more to give this little than it costs another to give every thing.” There is also truthfulness and discernment in the thought here expressed: “We are almost always incompetent judges of their actions, as they are of ours.”
I think this Essay may have come about in this way. Reading Virgil, in what seemed to him his old age, and these verses recalling to him the rapturous heats of youth, he dwelt on them with pleasure, — “even any small occasions of pleasure that I meet with, I seize upon them,” — dwelt on them with a delightful literary, as well as physical, pleasure; and then he began to question: “Why should n’t I write of this pleas- ure, as well as feel it?” and from that there was but one step — sure to be taken — to “I will write of it.” And he wrote with
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“the glowing of such fire As on the ashes of his youth did lie.”
A few special passages are perhaps worth remarking on, some of them for the sake of noting such connection with passages in others of the Essays as indicates the permanence in Montaigne’s mind of the opinion expressed. ;
Very near the beginning he says: “‘ Wisdom has her excesses, and has no less need than folly of moderation”; and we are reminded that one of the inscriptions in his library was: Ne pilus sapias quam necesse est, ne obstupiscas.
In an earlier Essay, Montaigne criticises as regards its sound — its “numbers” — a sentence of Cicero in the De Seneciute: Ego vero me minus din senem esse mailem, quam esse senem antequam essem. That he sympathised with the thought is proved by his here translating the sen- tence and accepting it as his own — since he gives no hint that it is quoted: F'aime mieux estre moins long temps viet! que d'estre vieil avant de I'estre.
When Montaigne exclaims, on this same page, “ Would I could take pleasure in playing with nuts or with a top! Nom poneéat enim rumores ante salutem,” he drolly diminishes the sense, the weight, that this line has in the original. Cicero (De Offictis, I, 24) quotes it (from Ennius) when contrasting the conduct of Quintus Maximus (Fabius) with that of Cleombrotus, who, fearing odium, rashly gave battle to Epaminon- das, whereby the power of the Lacedemonians perished: 2uanto 9. Fabius Maximus melius! de quo Ennius:
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