do; and private men, says Aristotle,’ serve virtue more painfully and highly than those in authority do:  we prepare ourselves for eminent occasions, more out of glory than conscience.  The shortest way to arrive at glory, would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory:  and the virtue of Alexander appears to me of much less vigour in his great theatre, than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure employment.  I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates, I cannot.  Who shall ask the one what he can do, he will answer, “Subdue the world”:  and who shall put the same question to the other, he will say, “Carry on human life conformably with its natural condition”; a much more general, weighty, and legitimate science than the other.—­[Montaigne added here, “To do for the world that for which he came into the world,” but he afterwards erased these words from the manuscript.—­Naigeon.]

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.  As they who judge and try us within, make no great account of the lustre of our public actions, and see they are only streaks and rays of clear water springing from a slimy and muddy bottom so, likewise, they who judge of us by this gallant outward appearance, in like manner conclude of our internal constitution; and cannot couple common faculties, and like their own, with the other faculties that astonish them, and are so far out of their sight.  Therefore it is that we give such savage forms to demons:  and who does not give Tamerlane great eyebrows, wide nostrils, a dreadful visage, and a prodigious stature, according to the imagination he has conceived by the report of his name?  Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus, I should hardly have believed but that all was adage and apothegm he spoke to his man or his hostess.  We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool, or upon his wife, than a great president venerable by his port and sufficiency:  we fancy that they, from their high tribunals, will not abase themselves so much as to live.  As vicious souls are often incited by some foreign impulse to do well, so are virtuous souls to do ill; they are therefore to be judged by their settled state, when they are at home, whenever that may be; and, at all events, when they are nearer repose, and in their native station.

Natural inclinations are much assisted and fortified by education; but they seldom alter and overcome their institution:  a thousand natures of my time have escaped towards virtue or vice, through a quite contrary discipline: 

              “Sic ubi, desuetae silvis, in carcere clausae
               Mansuevere ferx, et vultus posuere minaces,
               Atque hominem didicere pati, si torrida parvus
               Venit in ora cruor, redeunt rabiesque fororque,
               Admonitaeque tument gustato sanguine fauces
               Fervet, et a trepido vix abstinet ira magistro;”