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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXXI 275

virtues are alive and vigorous — we have vitiated them in the latter, adapting them to the gratification of our corrupt taste; (c) and yet nevertheless the special savour and delicacy of divers uncultivated fruits of those regions seems excellent even to our taste in comparison with our own. (a) It is not reasonable that art should gain the ps reéminence over our great and puissant mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our con- trivances that we have altogether smothered her. Still, truly, whenever she shines forth unveiled,' she wonderfully shames our vain and trivial undertakings.

(4) Et veniunt edere sponte sua melius, Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris, Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.?

(a) All our efforts can not so much as reproduce the nest of the tiniest birdling, its contexture, its beauty, and its use- fulness; * nay, nor the web of the little spider. (c) -All things, said Plato, are produced either by nature, or by chance, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by one or other of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last.‘

(a) These nations seem to me, then, wild in this sense,

that they have received in very slight degree the external

forms of human intelligence, and are still very near to their primitive simplicity. ‘The laws of nature still govern them, very little carrupted by ours; even in such pureness that it sometimes grieves me that the knowledge of this did not come earlier, in the days when there were men who would have known better than we how to judge it. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had not this knowledge; for it seems to

me that what we see in intercourse with those nations sur- passes not only all the paintings wherewith poetry has em-

_bellished the golden age, and all its conceptions in represent-

ing a happy condition of mankind, but also the idea and

1 Par tout ois sa pureté relutt.

  • The ivy grows best when wild, and the arbutus springs most

beautifully in some lovely cave; birds sing most sweetly without teach- ing. — Propertius, I, 2.10. Montaigne has changed the true text somewhat.

® D’utilité de son usage.

4 See Plato, Laws, book X.

Gor gle

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