Project Gutenberg's The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 9, by Michel de Montaigne

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Title: The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 9

Author: Michel de Montaigne

Release Date: September 17, 2006 [EBook #3589]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE, VOLUME 9 ***

Produced by David Widger

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.

I. Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II. Of drunkenness.
III. A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV. To-morrow's a new day.
V. Of conscience.
VI. Use makes perfect.

ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE

BOOK THE SECOND

CHAPTER I

OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS

Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
them into the world's eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person. We find the younger
Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus. Pope Boniface
VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
"O that I had never been taught to write!" so much it went to his heart
to condemn a man to death. All story is full of such examples, and every
man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:

"Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest."

["'Tis evil counsel that will admit no change."
--Pub. Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]

There seems some reason in f