neighbour, if he will let him
     Venture the making ourselves better without any danger
     We confess our ignorance in many things
     We do not easily accept the medicine we understand
     What are become of all our brave philosophical precepts? 
     What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands
     Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug
     Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead
     Who does not boast of some rare recipe
     Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription
     Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead
     With being too well I am about to die
     Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it
     You may indeed make me die an ill death

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 14.

I. Of Profit and Honesty. 
II.  Of Repentance. 
III.  Of Three Commerces. 
IV.  Of Diversion.

ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

BOOK THE THIRD

CHAPTER I

OF PROFIT AND HONESTY

No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on’t is, when a man labours to play the fool: 

“Nae iste magno conatu magnas nugas dixerit.”

     ["Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle.”
     —–­Terence, Heaut., act iii., s. 4.]

This does not concern me; mine slip from me with as little care as they are of little value, and ’tis the better for them.  I would presently part with them for what they are worth, and neither buy nor sell them, but as they weigh.  I speak on paper, as I do to the first person I meet; and that this is true, observe what follows.

To whom ought not treachery to be hateful, when Tiberius refused it in a thing of so great importance to him?  He had word sent him from Germany that if he thought fit, they would rid him of Arminius by poison:  this was the most potent enemy the Romans had, who had defeated them so ignominiously under Varus, and who alone prevented their aggrandisement in those parts.

He returned answer, “that the people of Rome were wont to revenge themselves of their enemies by open ways, and with their swords in their hands, and not clandestinely and by fraud”:  wherein he quitted the profitable for the honest.  You will tell me that he was a braggadocio; I believe so too:  and ’tis no great miracle in men of his profession.  But the acknowledgment of virtue is not less valid in the mouth of him who hates it, forasmuch as truth forces it from him, and if he will not inwardly receive it, he at least puts it on for a decoration.