[Sen. Controv. 1. 3.] And Cicero: The subject itself bears the words along with it.'-[Cic. De. Fin. 3. 5.] A plain, uneducated man knows nothing of rhetoric; he does not know how to arrange his preamble so as to secure the good will of the courteous reader, nor in fact, does he care to know this. Seriously, all this fine painting, this flaunting array of trope and metaphor, grows dim before the splendor of untinseled truth. These elaborate flourishes serve only to tickle the palates of the multitude, who are not in a condition to digest stronger and more solid food. The ambassadors of Samos came to Cleomenes, king of Sparta, prepared with a long and grandiloquent speech, framed for the purpose of persuading him to engage in a war with the tyrant Polycrates. After Cleomenes had patiently heard them through, he gave them his reply, as follows: 'The commencement and preamble of your speech I do not remember, nor can I recall the middle of it; but as far as regards the conclusion of it, I can not grant your request.' That, it appears to me, was a good answer, and the orators must have gone away, utterly confounded with shame and mortification. And how was it, too, in this other instance? The Athenians, wishing to build a large edifice, were obliged first to choose one of two architects to superintend the work. The first stood up, and in a haughty manner, but with a well-studied speech, discoursed upon the whole subject, and that so eloquently, that he carried the multitude completely away with him. But the other then arose, and made use only of these few words: 'Ye men of Athens, what my rival has thus said, that will I do.'"

Against multiplying words, without the energy to direct them. Whoever has a treasure of clear, well-marked thoughts in his mind, will never be at a loss for clear and appropriate language, in which to express them.

"I am none of those who hold that good metre makes good poetry. Should our pupil use a long syllable for a short one, what matters it? If his invention displays genius, if wit and understanding have done their part, then I will say, 'he is a good poet, although a bad versifier.'"

Here we have the same principles applied to poetry,-sense and substance placed higher than mere elegance of language. So we may justly admire the physical build of a strong, healthy man, even though he is ill-favored in the extreme. In any case, an inartistic decision, that takes no account of beauty, is always to be preferred to an admiration of smooth but unmeaning rhyme.

"But what is our pupil to do when he is assailed with the subtleties of sophistical syllogisms? As, for example, eating bacon provokes

6

to drinking; drinking quenches thirst: ergo, eating bacon quenches thirst.' Let him laugh, for laughing at such platitude is much better than answering them. Chrysippus said to a certain fellow, who was endeavoring to banter Cleanthes with his logical fallacies: Mock children with your foolish tricks, but do not expect that a man will condescend to take any notice of them.""

Montaigne here praises the self-confidence of the man of a strong, healthy understanding, who encounters, with his native, unperverted good sense, the professed pugilists of philosophy, and parries their attacks, or, on the other hand, considers it beneath his dignity to close weapons with them.

"There are some silly persons, who will go a half-mile out of their direct course to pick up an ingenious fancy. Or, those who do not suit their words to their subjects, but call in the aid of irrelevant subjects, in order to use words already chosen.'-[Quintilian, Lib. 8.] Seneca too, says: 'Who, for the sake of using some pleasing and graceful word, will introduce a subject, upon which he did not at first intend to speak?"—[Sen. Ep. 59.]

"I would have the hearer so carried away by the subject, and his imagination so filled with it, that he shall forget the words. I love a plain, natural style, written or spoken; a strong, expressive style, curt and compact, not so much nice and faultless, as animated and direct. 'Those words are after all the wisest, which reach the heart.""

"That eloquence which attracts attention to itself, does this at the expense of the subject; and, as it is childish in our dress to seek notoriety by what is singular and uncommon, so is it also, in our speech. A desire to employ new phrases and unfamiliar words denotes a scholastic and puerile ambition. I would not use even a word or an expression, which could not be understood in the fish-markets of Paris. Aristophanes, the grammarian, knew nothing of the matter, when he censured Epicurus for his inartistic style, and overlooked the chief element in his oratory, which was simple, intelligible language. Forms of speech are so easy of imitation, that they soon spread over a whole nation; but it is not so with judgment and invention. Bone and sinew we do not borrow, as we do the stuff and the fashion of our coat and our cloak. Most of the persons, with whom I converse, speak like my book; whether they think after the same sort, I know not. 'The Athenians,' says Plato, 'look at the fullness and the beauty of your language; the Lacedæmonians, at its conciseness; but the Cretans, more at the sentiment, than the expression. And these latter please me the best.""

Precepts, again, of that genuine eloquence, which aims not at

appearance, but at essence and substance; which does not seek, by means of a fine array of borrowed phrases, to startle and captivate, but which leaps from heart to heart, bearing the hearers along with it, even against their will. How different this from the rhetoric that idly and aimlessly expends itself in cold and glittering words.

"I would first become familiar with my mother tongue, and the language of my neighbors, with whom I am in constant contact. There is, truly, something fine and grand about the Greek and the Latin, but we buy their acquisition at too dear a price. I will here communicate a method, whereby we may compass this knowledge with far less pains-taking, than in the ordinary way. It is the same method that was pursued with me, and whoever will may avail himself of it. After my deceased father had made every possible inquiry of learned and experienced men as to the best mode of education, he became convinced of the disadvantages of the common method. They told him that the long time, which we spend in learning the language of the Greeks and that of the Romans, and which cost them hardly any time at all, was to be considered the sole reason that we did not attain to their mental elevation and their knowledge. I do not, however, think that this is the only cause of the difference. But the plan that my father adopted was the following. While I was yet in my nurse's arms, and even before I could talk, he committed me to the charge of a German, who has since died in France, having been a famous physician there. He understood not a word of French, but was so much the better a Latin scholar. My father had written for him, expressly to instruct me, and gave him a liberal salary therefor, and I was thus almost constantly in his arms. To lighten his labors, there were two others of less learning associated with him, as my attendants. These all spoke to me only in Latin; and, as for the rest of the family, it was an inflexible rule, that neither my father nor my mother, neither a man-servant nor a maid-servant, should ever address me but with a few crumbs of Latin, that each one had learned to prattle with me. It was astonishing what progress they all made by this means. My father and mother learned enough Latin to understand it, and even enough to express themselves in it in case of necessity. In short, we all Latinized to that degree, that our speech flowed out over the neighboring villages, where it became customary to give Latin names to various artificers and their tools, which remain even to the present day. To return to myself, then, I knew in my seventh year as little of the French or Perigord tongue, as of Arabic; and without art or book, without grammar or rule, without a rod or a tear, I had learned to speak as pure Latin as did my teacher;

and, in truth, how could it have been otherwise? If a theme was given me for practice, as is the custom in schools, it was not in French, but in bad Latin, to be turned into good. As for Greek, which I knew scarce anything of, my father contrived a new method of instruction to initiate me therein, namely, by games and exercises. For, among other things, he had been advised to leave my will so entirely without constraint, that I should, from my own natural impulse, acquire a fondness both for duty and for learning, and moreover, to mould my faculties with gentleness and freedom, forbearing all compulsion and severity. He even carried this policy out with superstitious fidelity; for, as some are of opinion that it injures the delicate brains of children to wake them suddenly and with violence out of sleep in the morning, because they sleep more soundly than adults, he invariably caused me to be awaked by music."

"When I was not far from six years old, my father sent me to the public school in Guyenne, then in a very flourishing state, and the best in France. But it was none the less a public school. From that hour, my Latin grew corrupt; and since then, I have lost all command over it, from discontinuing its practice. And my previous extraordinary education served only to place me at the outset in the highest classes. For when I left the school at thirteen, I had run through my curriculum, as they call it, and had yet derived nothing from it at all, which I can now turn to any account. I early conceived a taste for books, which began with the pleasure I derived from reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. For in my seventh or eighth year, I stole from every other pursuit, to read Ovid; and, so much the more, since his language was my mother-tongue, as it were, and his book was both the easiest that I was acquainted with in that tongue, and also it treated of matters suited to my tender years. As for Launcelot of the Lake, Amadis, Huon of Bordeaux, and the like pleasant old romances, which youth in general devour so eagerly, I knew not even their titles, (and to this hour I know no more of their contents,) so strict was my training. But I was thus led to neglect the studies that were allotted to me. In this position of things, however, it happened very favorably for me, that my preceptor was a man of sense, and he accordingly closed his eyes to my occasional deviations of one sort and another from my prescribed course. And thus I was enabled to read through, without interruption, Virgil's Eneid, Lucretius, Plautus, and the Italian Comedies, all of which allured me by the interesting nature of their subjects. Had he been so foolish as to have disturbed me in this course, I verily believe that I should have brought nothing away from the school with me, but an

aversion to books altogether, as is almost invariably the case with all our nobility. But he was quite discreet in his apparent self-deception, acting as though he was not aware of my habits; and he thus sharpened my appetite, by permitting me to peruse these books only in secret, while keeping me to my required tasks in the most indulgent manner possible."

Here we have the course which was pursued in the education of Montaigne himself, and which he sanctions throughout. He anticipates the new educational era in his wish; "to learn before every thing else his mother-tongue, and the language of those who immediately surround him ;" in which it is apparent that he has regard more to the utilitarian aspect of philology, than to its influence upon mental culture. The spirit of the same era is expressed in the attempt to teach Latin in a new and an easier way, "without grammar or rule, without a blow or a tear." In the same spirit it was that Montaigne learned Greek, "in play," and that he was awakened from sleep, in play, as it were,-by strains of music. "We must ex- 1 cite," he says, "a strong desire and a hunger for study; otherwise, we shall educate with our books droves of luggage-laden asses; under the crack of the whip we shall fill their panniers with knowledge, and admonish them not to lose it. But we ought not merely to entertain knowledge in our dwellings, we should wed ourselves to her." With justice does Montaigne thus battle against the heartless, formal drill system, and against learning without enthusiasm. But he, like so many thousand others in the transition-period, while seeking to avoid this Charybdis, falls into a Scylla, into an enervating, over-weening neglect of all discipline, and into an unmethodical method of teaching and learning. Their ideal is an ideal amateurship from their youth up, untrammeled by that wholesome severity of the school, which moulds those strong, manly characters, who in their studies sedulously subordinate themselves to whatever subject is before them, and become obedient to it, in order to subdue it.

That Montaigne emerged from such a delicate training, wherein he was diligently guarded from all care and trouble, a thoroughly indoctrinated, pleasure-seeking Epicurean, we have already seen, and he is therefore himself to be regarded as the first fruits of the modern system of education.

In his 24th chapter "On Pedantry," Montaigne attacks not pedants merely, but the sciences in general, in so far as they unfit men for action; thus repeating here the strictures, which we have observed in passages already cited. Here too he is throughout the forerunner of Rousseau.

"Plutarch tells us," says Montaigne, "that among the Romans,