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ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

its soundness render sound the body likewise; it should make its tranquillity and gladness shine forth; should shape the outward bearing in its mould, and therefore arm it with a gracious pride, with an active and sprightly behaviour, and with a satisfied and courteous demeanour. (c) The most express mark of wisdom is a constant gladness;[1] its state is like that of things beyond the moon — always serene. (a) It is "Baroco" and "Baralipton" that make their adherents so dirty and smoke-begrimed, it is not she; they know her only by hearsay. What! it is her part to still the tempests of the soul and to teach hunger and fever to laugh, not by a few imaginary epicycles, but by natural and palpable arguments. (c) Her purpose is virtue, which is not, as school-men say, established at the top of a steep, rugged, and inaccessible mountain.[2] They who have approached her have, on the contrary, found her dwelling in a lovely plain, fertile and flower-strewn, whence she can see clearly beneath her all things; but yet one who knows the way can reach the place by shady, grassy, and sweetly blooming paths, pleasantly, and by an easy and smooth slope, like that of the heavenly vault. Those who have not frequented this sovereign Virtue, beautiful, triumphant, full of love, equally delicate and courageous, the professed and irreconcilable foe of bitterness and trouble and fear and constraint, who has Nature for her guide, and Good Fortune and Pleasure for her companions, have imagined according to their weakness this absurd, gloomy, contentious, grim, menacing, scornful image, and have placed it on a lonely rock amid brambles: a phantom to frighten folk.

My tutor, who knows that he ought to fill his pupil’s heart with affection, as much as or more than with reverence for virtue, will not fail to tell him that the poets follow the common opinions, and to make him clearly to know [3] that the gods have placed toil in the approaches to the closets of Venus rather than to those of Pallas. And when he shall begin to be conscious of himself, putting before him, as a mistress to enjoy, Bradamante or Angelica,[4] and a natural, vigorous, noble beauty, not mannish but virile, in contrast

  1. ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 59.16.
  2. ↑ See Idem, De Ira, III, 13.
  3. ↑ Lui faire toucher au doigt.
  4. ↑ Heroines of the Orlando Furioso.
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