conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption To contemn what we do not comprehend To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word To know by rote, is no knowledge Tongue will grow too stiff to bend Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 6.

XXVII.  Of friendship. 
XXVIII.  Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie. 
XXIX.  Of moderation. 
XXX.  Of cannibals. 
XXXI.  That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances. 
XXXII.  That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of life. 
XXXIII.  That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of
          reason. 
XXXIV.  Of one defect in our government. 
XXXV.  Of the custom of wearing clothes. 
XXXVI.  Of Cato the Younger. 
XXXVII.  That we laugh and cry for the same thing. 
XXXVIII.  Of solitude.

CHAPTER XXVII

OF FRIENDSHIP

Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way.  He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes.  And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?

“Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.”

          ["A fair woman in her upper form terminates in a fish.” 
          —­Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 4.]