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panionship and society of this personage.” Tennyson says (In Memoriam):
The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleas’d as well,
Through four sweet years arose and fell
From flower to flower, from snow to snow.
Montaigne writes, untranslatably: “Depuis le jour que je le perdis, je ne foys que trainer languissant.” Dryden (Threnodia Augustalis):
No wife, no brother, such a grief could know,
Nor any name but friend.
If, in connection with this Essay, one reads the fine essay by Bacon on the same subject, one may perceive that that was written by a moralist, this by a poet.
OBSERVING the method of work of a painter in my employ, I have been tempted to imitate him. He chooses the best spot in the middle of each wall, to place there a picture worked out with all his skill; and the empty space all about it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings having no other charm than diversity and strangeness. And, in truth, what are these writings of mine but grotesques and monstrous bodies, botched up with divers members, without definite shape, having neither order, sequence, nor proportion, except by chance?
I go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the other and better part; for my ability does not go so far as to venture to undertake a fine picture, of high finish and fashioned according to art. I have thought of borrowing such a one from Etienne de la Boëtie, which will do honour to all the rest of this work. It is a treatise to which he gave the name of La Servitude Volontaire; but those who did not know this have since very aptly rebaptised it Le Contre-Un. He wrote it by way of essay in his early youth,[2] in praise of liberty and against tyrants. It has