odel you set before you--supposing your name moulder
with your dust, still you will have passed life more nobly than the
unlaborious herd. Grant that you win not that glorious accident, 'a name
below,' how can you tell but what you may have fitted yourself for high
destiny and employ in the world not of men, but of spirits? The powers
of the mind are things that cannot be less immortal than the mere
sense of identity; their acquisitions accompany us through the Eternal
Progress; and we may obtain a lower or a higher grade hereafter,
in proportion as we are more or less fitted by the exercise of our
intellect to comprehend and execute the solemn agencies of God. The wise
man is nearer to the angels than the fool is. This may be an apocryphal
dogma, but it is not an impossible theory."

"But we may waste the sound enjoyments of actual life in chasing the
hope you justly allow to be 'apocryphal;' and our knowledge may go for
nothing in the eyes of the Omniscient."

"Very well," said De Montaigne, smiling; "but answer me honestly. By the
pursuits of intellectual ambition do you waste the sound enjoyments of
life? If so, you do not pursue the system rightly. Those pursuits
ought only to quicken your sense for such pleasures as are the true
relaxations of life. And this, with you peculiarly, since you are
fortunate enough not to depend for subsistence upon literature;--did you
do so, I might rather advise you to be a trunkmaker than an author. A
man ought not to attempt any of the highest walks of Mind and Art, as
the mere provision of daily bread; not literature alone, but everything
else of the same degree. He ought not to be a statesman, or an orator,
or a philosopher, as a thing of pence and shillings: and usually all
men, save the poor poet, feel this truth insensibly."

"This may be fine preaching," said Maltravers; "but you may be quite
sure that the pursuit of literature is a pursuit apart from the ordinary
objects of life, and you cannot command the enjoyments of both."

"I think otherwise," said De Montaigne; "but it is not in a country
house eighty miles from the capital, without wife, guests, or friends,
that the experiment can be fairly made. Come, Maltravers, I see before
you a brave career, and I cannot permit you to halt at the onset."

"You do not see all the calumnies that are already put forth against me,
to say nothing of all the assurances (and many by clever men) that there
is nothing in me!"

"Den