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certain points in the ceremonial of our Church, which seem to have an aspect more or less idle or strange, when I have come to confer about them with learned men, I have found that these things have a substantial and very solid foundation, and that it is only stupidity and ignorance which cause us to receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not remember how much we are conscious of contradiction in our very judgement? how many things we regarded yesterday as articles of faith which are fables to us to-day? Vain-glory and curiosity are the scourges of our soul. The last leads us to put our noses into every thing, and the other forbids us to leave any thing unsettled and undecided.
CHAPTER XXVIII
OF FRIENDSHIP
This Essay is based on the friendship between Montaigne and La Boëtie, and there could not be a more fitting motto for it than a stanza of Ben Jonson’s fine ode to the two friends, Sir Lucius Cary (afterward Lord Falkland) and Sir Henry Morison.
Jonson speaks of the
simple love of greatness and of good,
That knits brave minds and manners more than blood, —
adding: —
This made you first to know the why
You liked; then, after, to apply
That liking: and approach so, one the t’ other,
That either grew a portion of the other.
Before reading this Essay there should be read the letter Montaigne wrote to his father at the time of La Boëtie’s death in 1563 — fourteen years before this Essay was written. The causes of Montaigne’s ardent and admiring affection for him are there, not set forth, but revealed; and after reading the letter, and thus passing day after day with Montaigne by the bed of his dying friend, we find ourselves reading between the lines of the Essay a full record of the personal emotion which years could not dull. A touching indication of the permanent strength of this emotion is given in the Journal kept by Montaigne when travelling in 1580. He was ill, and he says: “This morning, writing to M. Ossat [the cardinal and famous statesman], I fell into such sad thoughts of M. de la Boëtie, and was so long a time engrossed by them that it did me much