ntion been to seek the world's favor, I should
surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties. I desire therein
to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary
manner, without study and artifice; for it is myself I paint. My
defects are therein to be read to the life, and my imperfections
and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.
If I had lived among those nations which (they say) yet dwell under
the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would
most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite naked.
Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no reason
thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
subject. Therefore, farewell.

From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, our author, as the foregoing date will have
suggested, derived his most familiar name from the place at which he was
born and at which he lived. Readers are not to take too literally
Montaigne's notice of his dispensing with "borrowed beauties." He was,
in fact, a famous borrower. He himself warns his readers to be careful
how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch,
or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. Montaigne
is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature, of the man of
genius exercising his prescriptive right to help himself to his own
wherever he may happen to find it. But Montaigne has in turn been freely
borrowed from. Bacon borrowed from him, Shakspeare borrowed from him,
Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron,--these, with many more, in England;
and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau,--directly
or indirectly, almost every writer since his day. No modern writer,
perhaps, has gone in solution into subsequent literature more widely
than Montaigne. But no writer remains more solidly and insolubly entire.

We go at once to chapter twenty-five of the first book of the "Essays,"
entitled, in the English translation, "Of the education of children."
The translation we use henceforth throughout is the classic one of
Charles Cotton, in a text of it edited by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt. The
"preface," already given, Cotton omitted to translate. We have allowed
Mr. Hazlitt to supply the deficiency. Montaigne addresses his
educational views to a countess. Several others of his essays are
similarly i