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pubOne.info present you this wonderfully illustrated edition. 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

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9782819949282
Langue	English

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ESSAYS OF
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
PREFACE
The present publication is intended to supply arecognised deficiency in our literature— a library edition of theEssays of Montaigne. This great French writer deserves to beregarded as a classic, not only in the land of his birth, but inall countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which are at oncethe most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, forma magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon andShakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, asHallam observes, the Frenchman's literary importance largelyresults from the share which his mind had in influencing otherminds, coeval and subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating thevalue and rank of the essayist, we are not to leave out of theaccount the drawbacks and the circumstances of the period: theimperfect 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 willingto borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at the reputationwhich he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without beingaware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. Hisbook was different from all others which were at that date in theworld. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into newchannels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what itswriter's opinion was about men and things, and threw what must havebeen a strange kind of new light on many matters but darklyunderstood. Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made hisintellectual and physical organism public property. He took theworld into his confidence on all subjects. His essays were a sortof literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the writer's mind,made by himself at different levels and under a large variety ofoperating influences.
Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, wasthe most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affectedand 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 wasmade, and what relation it bore to external objects. Heinvestigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch topieces, 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 alikeremote from his design. He did not write from necessity, scarcelyperhaps for fame. But he desired to leave France, nay, and theworld, something to be remembered by, something which should tellwhat kind of a man he was— what he felt, thought, suffered— and hesucceeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his expectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne shouldexpect for his work a certain share of celebrity in Gascony, andeven, as time went on, throughout France; but it is scarcelyprobable that he foresaw how his renown was to become world-wide;how he was to occupy an almost unique position as a man of lettersand a moralist; how the Essays would be read, in all the principallanguages of Europe, by millions of intelligent human beings, whonever heard of Perigord or the League, and who are in doubt, ifthey are questioned, whether the author lived in the sixteenth orthe eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius belongsto 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 firstedition of Cotton's version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, andrepublished in 1693, 1700, 1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same numberof volumes and the same size. In the earliest impression the errorsof the press are corrected merely as far as page 240 of the firstvolume, and all the editions follow one another. That of 1685-6 wasthe only one which the translator lived to see. He died in 1687,leaving behind him an interesting and little-known collection ofpoems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.
It was considered imperative to correct Cotton'stranslation by a careful collation with the 'variorum' edition ofthe original, Paris, 1854, 4 vols. 8vo or 12mo, and parallelpassages from Florin's earlier undertaking have occasionally beeninserted at the foot of the page. A Life of the Author and all hisrecovered Letters, sixteen in number, have also been given; but, asregards the correspondence, it can scarcely be doubted that it isin a purely fragmentary state. To do more than furnish a sketch ofthe leading incidents in Montaigne's life seemed, in the presenceof Bayle St. John's charming and able biography, an attempt asdifficult as it was useless.
The besetting sin of both Montaigne's translatorsseems to have been a propensity for reducing his language andphraseology to the language and phraseology of the age and countryto which they belonged, and, moreover, inserting paragraphs andwords, not here and there only, but constantly and habitually, froman evident desire and view to elucidate or strengthen theirauthor's meaning. The result has generally been unfortunate; and Ihave, in the case of all these interpolations on Cotton's part,felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them down intothe notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be allowedany longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and reluctant,on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely, whereit appeared to possess a value of its own.
Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form oftransgression in Cotton, for there are places in his author whichhe thought proper to omit, and it is hardly necessary to say thatthe restoration of all such matter to the text was consideredessential to its integrity and completeness.
My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr RegistrarHazlitt, the author of the well-known and excellent edition ofMontaigne published in 1842, for the important assistance which hehas rendered to me in verifying and retranslating the quotations,which were in a most corrupt state, and of which Cotton's Englishversions were singularly loose and inexact, and for the zeal withwhich 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 andcopious MSS. notes, nor is it too much to presume that it is thevery book employed by him in his translation.
W. C. H. KENSINGTON, November 1877.
THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE
[This is translated freely from that prefixedto the 'variorum' Paris edition, 1854, 4 vols. 8vo. This biographyis the more desirable that it contains all really interesting andimportant matter in the journal of the Tour in Germany and Italy,which, as it was merely written under Montaigne's dictation, is inthe third person, is scarcely worth publication, as a whole, in anEnglish dress. ]
The author of the Essays was born, as he informs ushimself, between eleven and twelve o'clock in the day, the last ofFebruary 1533, at the chateau of St. Michel de Montaigne. Hisfather, Pierre Eyquem, esquire, was successively first Jurat of thetown of Bordeaux (1530), Under-Mayor 1536, Jurat for the secondtime in 1540, Procureur in 1546, and at length Mayor from 1553 to1556. He was a man of austere probity, who had “a particular regardfor honour and for propriety in his person and attire . . . amighty good faith in his speech, and a conscience and a religiousfeeling inclining to superstition, rather than to the otherextreme. ” [Essays, ii. 2. ] Pierre Eyquem bestowedgreat care on the education of his children, especially on thepractical side of it. To associate closely his son Michel with thepeople, and attach him to those who stand in need of assistance, hecaused him to be held at the font by persons of meanest position;subsequently he put him out to nurse with a poor villager, andthen, at a later period, made him accustom himself to the mostcommon sort of living, taking care, nevertheless, to cultivate hismind, and superintend its development without the exercise of unduerigour or constraint. Michel, who gives us the minutest account ofhis earliest years, charmingly narrates how they used to awake himby the sound of some agreeable music, and how he learned Latin,without suffering the rod or shedding a tear, before beginningFrench, thanks to the German teacher whom his father had placednear him, and who never addressed him except in the language ofVirgil and Cicero. The study of Greek took precedence. At six yearsof age young Montaigne went to the College of Guienne at Bordeaux,where he had as preceptors the most eminent scholars of thesixteenth century, Nicolas Grouchy, Guerente, Muret, and Buchanan.At thirteen he had passed through all the classes, and as he wasdestined for the law he left school to study that science. He wasthen about fourteen, but these early years of his life are involvedin obscurity. The next information that we have is that in 1554 hereceived the appointment of councillor in the Parliament ofBordeaux; in 1559 he was at Bar-le-Duc with the court of FrancisII, and in the year following he was present at Rouen to witnessthe declaration of the majority of Charles IX. We do not know inwhat manner he was engaged on these occasions.
Between 1556 and 1563 an important incident occurredin the life of Montaigne, in the commencement of his romanticfriendship with Etienne de la Boetie, whom he had met, as he tellsus, by pure chance at some festive celebration in the town. Fromtheir very first interview the two found themselves drawnirresistibly close to one another, and during six years thisalliance was foremost in the heart of Montaigne, as it wasafterwards in his memory, when death had se