flight, as dearly as they might have done a glorious victory.

passion.

The thing I am most afraid of is, fear, because it It suspends is a passion which supersedes and suspends all others. every other What affliction could be greater and more just than that of Pompey's friends, who in his ship were spectators of that horrid massacre? yet so it was, that the fear of the Egyptian vessels, which they saw approaching, stifled that passion to such a degree, that they did nothing but press the rowers to make haste away, for fear of being surrounded by the enemy, till they arrived at Tyre, when, being delivered from their apprehension, they had leisure to turn their thoughts to the loss they had so lately sustained, and gave vent to those lamentations and tears which the more prevalent passion had suspended : Tum pavor sapientiam omnem mihi ex animo expectorat.† i. e. My mind, which fear had then oppress'd, Was of all judgment dispossess'd.

Such as have been soundly thrashed in some skirmish, may, yet all bruised and bloody as they are, be brought on again next day to the charge; but those who have once conceived a dread of the enemy, will never be brought so much as to look him in the face. They who are in fear every day of losing their estates, of banishment, or of being made slaves, live in perpetual anguish, without appetite or rest; whereas such as are naturally poor slaves and exiles, often live as happy as those in better condition. And so many people who, not able to bear the terrors of fear, have hanged, drowned, and thrown themselves from precipices, afford a convincing proof that fear is even more vexatious and insupportable than death. The Greeks mention another kind of fear, pro- Panic ceeding from no visible cause, but the effect of an impulse from heaven; so that whole armies and nations have been struck with it. Such was that which

* Cicero Tusc. Quest. lib. iii. cap. 27.

VOL. I.

F

+ Id. lib. iv. cap. $.

fears.

brought so wonderful a desolation upon Carthage, where nothing was to be heard but outcries and shrieks; the inhabitants ran out of their houses as if they were ready to fall on their heads, and they attacked, wounded, and killed one another, as if they had been so many enemies come to take their city. They were all, in short, in the strangest disorder and distraction, till by prayer and sacrifices they had appeased the anger of the gods. This is what they call panic terrors.t

happiness

CHAPTER XVIII.

That we are not to judge of Man's Happiness before his Death.

No man's THERE is scarce a boy at school but knows the to be judg-story of king Croesus to this purpose, who, being ed of till taken prisoner by Cyrus, and condemned to suffer

death

comes.

death, cried out on the scaffold, O Solon! Solon !§ which being reported to Cyrus, and he inquiring what it meant, Croesus gave him to understand, that he now was convinced, to his cost, of the truth of that warning which was formerly given him by Solon, viz. To call no man happy, how much soever fortune smiled upon him, till he had passed over the last day of his life, by reason of the uncertainty and vicissi

*Diodorus of Sicily, lib. xv. cap. 7.

Id. ibid. and Plutarch in his Treatise of Isis and Osiris, cap. 8.
Ovid. Metam. lib. iii. fab. 2, ver. 5.

ý Herodot. lib. i. p. 40.

tude of human affairs, which are apt to change, in an
instant, from one condition to the opposite. There
fore it was, that Agesilaus said, in answer to one who
pronounced the king of Persia a happy man for
coming very young to such a height of power,
"It
"is true, but neither was Priam at such an age un-
happy."* We know that some of the kings of
Macedon, successors of Alexander the Great, were
reduced to be joiners and carpenters at Rome; a
tyrant of Sicily, to be school-master at Corinth; a
conqueror of one half of the world, and general of
many armies, a miserable supplicant to the beggarly
officers of a king of Egypt. So dear did the great
Pompey pay for a reprieve, of five or six months,
from death. In the time of our fathers, Lewis Sforza,
the tenth duke of Milan, who had so long made all
Italy tremble, died in prison at Loches,t and what
was worse for him, he had suffered imprisonment ten
years. That most beautiful queen,t the widow of
the greatest king in Christendom, did not she die by.
the hand of an executioner? Base and barbarous
cruelty! and to this might be added a thousand more
instances of the same kind; for, as storms and tem-
pests are provoked at the pride and loftiness of our
structures, it would seem that there are spirits above
which envy the grandeur of this lower world:

Usque adeo res humanas vis aldita quædum
Obterit, et pulchros fasces, sævasque secures
Proculcare, hac ludibro sibi habere videtur.§

And hence we fancy UNSEEN POWERS in things,
Whose force and will such strange confusion brings,
And spurn and overthrow our greatest kings.

Plutarch, in his notable Sayings of the Lacedæmonians, + In the reign of Lewis XII. who confined him there, Anno 1500. Mary, queen of Scotland, and mother of James I. king of Eng land, was beheaded in this kingdom, by order of queen Elizabeth, in 1587. Montaigne surely wrote this long after the passage in the following chapter, where he tells us, that the year he then wrote in, was but 1572; but we do not find this particular in the quarto edition of

1588.

Lucr. lib. v. ver. 1231, &c.

It would seem also as if fortune sometimes lies in wait to surprise the last day of our lives, to show the power she has in one moment to overthrow what she was so many years erecting, and makes us cry out with Laberius, Nimirum hac die unâ plus vixi mihi quàm vivendum fuit ;* i. e. I have therefore lived one day too long. And in this sense, it were reasonable to attend to the good advice of Solon; but he being a philosopher, with which sort of men the favours and frowns of fortune stand for nothing, either to the making a man happy or unhappy, and with whom grandeur and power, accidents of quality, are in a manner quite indifferent, I am apt to think, that he had some farther aim, and meant, that the very felicity of our lives, which depends on the tranquillity and satisfaction of a generous mind, and on the resolution and stability of a well-composed soul, ought never to be pronounced as the enjoyment of any man, till he has been seen to play the last, and doubtless the hardest act of his part. In all the rest there may have been some disguise. Either these fine lessons of philosophy are only calculated to keep us in countenance, or accidents, not touching us to the quick, allow us to preserve the same gravity; but in this last scene, betwixt death and us, there is no more playing the counterfeit, we must speak plain, and if there be any purity and simplicity at the bottom, it must be discovered:

Nam veræ voces tum demum pectore ab imo

Ejiciuntur, et eripitur persona, manet res.†

For then their words will with their thoughts agree,
And all the mask pull'd off, show what they be..

This last act, therefore, ought to be the criterion or touch-stone by which all the other actions of our life are to be tried and sifted. It is the grand day, it is the day that is judge of all the rest; "It is the day," says one of the ancients, " by which all my

* Macrobius, lib. ii. cap. 7.

+ Lucret. lib. iii. v. 57, 58.

years past are to be judged." To death do I submit the trial of the fruit of my studies. It will then appear whether my discourses came only from my mouth, or from my heart. I have known many who, by their death, have given a good or a bad reputation to their whole lives. Scipio, the father-in-law of Pompey, by dying well, expunged the ill opinion which had till then been conceived of him. Epaminondas being interrogated which of the three men he had in greatest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself;t "We must all die," said he, " before that "question can be resolved." It would really be doing vast injustice to that personage to scan him, without considering how great and honourable was his end. The Almighty has ordered every thing as it best pleased him; but, in my time, three of the most execrable persons that ever I knew, most abominably vicious, and likewise the most infamous, died natural deaths, and, in all circumstances, perfectly composed. There are some deaths that are grave and happy. I have seen the thread of a person's life

* This remark is taken, if I mistake not, from Seneca. It is a pretty long passage, but so curious a one, that I cannot help transcribing it here. Seneca, desirous to fortify his friend against the terrors of death, said to him, in the first place, I should prevail on you with more ease, were I to show, that not only heroes have despised the moment of the soul's departure out of the body, but that even dastards have in this matter equalled those of the greatest ⚫ fortitude of mind.' And immediately after he adds, Even like that, Scipio, the father-in-law of Cn. Pompey, who, being drove by contrary winds to the coast of Africa, when he saw his ship detained by the enemy, stabbed himself with his own sword; and to those who asked him where the general was, said, "The general " is well." This word equalled him to his superiors, and did not suffer the glory fatal to the Scipios in Africa to be interrupted. It was a great task to conquer Carthage, but a harder to conquer death. Seneca, Epist. 24.

+ Plutarch, in his notable Sayings of the ancient kings, princes, and generals.

It is very probable, that Montaigne speaks here of his friend Boetius, at whose death he was present, as appears by a speech which Montaigne caused to be printed at Paris, in 1571, wherein he mentions the most remarkable particulars of Boetius's sickness and death. As this speech does honour to both these eminent friends, and is become very scarce, I shall insert it hereafter.