Essays of Michel de Montaigne Complete

Capítulo 1

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1.

Preface

The Life of Montaigne

The Letters of Montaigne

PREFACE.

The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in

our literature--a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great

French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land

of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays,

which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his

productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon

and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as

Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from

the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and

subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the

essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the

circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the

comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of

intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he

has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at

the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without

being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His

book was different from all others which were at that date in the world.

It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told

its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was

about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new

light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist

uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public

property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His

essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the

writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large

variety of operating influences.

Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most

fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most

truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect

his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what

relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental

structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the

mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations

abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a

book.

Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design.

He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he

desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered

by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was--what he felt,

thought, suffered--and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his

expectations.

It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a

certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,

throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his

renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique

position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be

read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of

intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and

who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the

sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius

belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature,

which is always everywhere the same.

The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton’s

version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700,

1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same size.

In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected merely

as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions follow one

another. That of 1685-6 was the only one which the translator lived to

see. He died in 1687, leaving behind him an interesting and little-known

collection of poems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.

It was considered imperative to correct Cotton’s translation by a careful

collation with the ‘variorum’ edition of the original, Paris, 1854,

4 vols. 8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin’s earlier

undertaking have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page. A

Life of the Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number, have

also been given; but, as regards the correspondence, it can scarcely be

doubted that it is in a purely fragmentary state. To do more than

furnish a sketch of the leading incidents in Montaigne’s life seemed, in

the presence of Bayle St. John’s charming and able biography, an attempt

as difficult as it was useless.

The besetting sin of both Montaigne’s translators seems to have been a

propensity for reducing his language and phraseology to the language and

phraseology of the age and country to which they belonged, and, moreover,

inserting paragraphs and words, not here and there only, but constantly

and habitually, from an evident desire and view to elucidate or

strengthen their author’s meaning. The result has generally been

unfortunate; and I have, in the case of all these interpolations on

Cotton’s part, felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them

down into the notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be

allowed any longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and

reluctant, on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely,

where it appeared to possess a value of its own.

Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form of transgression in Cotton,

for there are places in his author which he thought proper to omit, and

it is hardly necessary to say that the restoration of all such matter to

the text was considered essential to its integrity and completeness.

My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr Registrar Hazlitt, the author

of the well-known and excellent edition of Montaigne published in 1842,

for the important assistance which he has rendered to me in verifying and

retranslating the quotations, which were in a most corrupt state, and of

which Cotton’s English versions were singularly loose and inexact, and

for the zeal with which he has co-operated with me in collating the

English text, line for line and word for word, with the best French

edition.

By the favour of Mr F. W. Cosens, I have had by me, while at work on this

subject, the copy of Cotgrave’s Dictionary, folio, 1650, which belonged

to Cotton. It has his autograph and copious MSS. notes, nor is it too

much to presume that it is the very book employed by him in his

translation.

W. C. H.

KENSINGTON, November 1877.

BOOK THE FIRST.

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Title: Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete

Author: Michel de Montaigne

Editor: William Carew Hazlitt

Translator: Charles Cotton

Release date: October 26, 2004 [eBook #3600]

Most recently updated: March 16, 2023

Language: English

Credits: David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE — COMPLETE ***

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazlitt