can be greater than what
they see, if they are not wiser than we, are really more happy; I do not
envy their wisdom, but their good fortune.

This greedy humour of new and unknown things helps to nourish in me the
desire of travel; but a great many more circumstances contribute to it;
I am very willing to quit the government of my house. There is, I
confess, a kind of convenience in commanding, though it were but in a
barn, and in being obeyed by one's people; but 'tis too uniform and
languid a pleasure, and is, moreover, of necessity mixed with a thousand
vexatious thoughts: one while the poverty and the oppression of your
tenants: another, quarrels amongst neighbours: another, the trespasses
they make upon you afflict you;

"Aut verberatae grandine vineae,
Fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas
Culpante, nunc torrentia agros
Sidera, nunc hyemes iniquas."

["Or hail-smitten vines and the deceptive farm; now trees damaged
by the rains, or years of dearth, now summer's heat burning up the
petals, now destructive winters."--Horatius, Od., iii. I, 29.]

and that God scarce in six months sends a season wherein your bailiff can
do his business as he should; but that if it serves the vines, it spoils
the meadows:

"Aut nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol,
Aut subiti perimunt imbres, gelidoeque pruinae,
Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant;"

["Either the scorching sun burns up your fields, or sudden rains or
frosts destroy your harvests, or a violent wind carries away all
before it."--Lucretius, V. 216.]

to which may be added the new and neat-made shoe of the man of old, that
hurts your foot,

[Leclerc maliciously suggests that this is a sly hit at Montaigne's
wife, the man of old being the person mentioned in Plutarch's Life
of Paulus Emilius, c. 3, who, when his friends reproached him for
repudiating his wife, whose various merits they extolled, pointed to
his shoe, and said, "That looks a nice well-made shoe to you; but I
alone know where it pinches."]

and that a stranger does not understand how much it costs you, and what
you contribute to maintain that show of order that is seen in your
family, and that peradventure you buy too dear.

I came late to the government of a house: they whom nature sent into the
world before