Montaigne is not guilty of the common error of judging another by himself. He easily believes a humour contrary to his own. He is engaged to one certain form, but he does not oblige others to it. He believes and apprehends a thousand ways of living, and contrary to most men more easily admits difference than uniformity. He discharges a man from his own humours and principles, and considers him according to his own particular model. Though he is not continent himself, he sincerely approves the continence of the Feuillans and Capuchins, and loves and honours them the more for being other than he is. He very much desires that every man be judged by himself. His own weakness nothing alters the esteem he ought to have for the force and vigour of those who deserve it. Crawling upon the slime of the earth, he does not cease to observe, up in the clouds, the inimitable height of some heroic souls. It is a great deal for him to have his judgment regular and just if the effects cannot be so, and to keep this sovereign part free from corruption: something to have the will right and good where the legs fail.
This age, in his part of the world at least, has grown so stupid that not only the exercise but the very imagination of virtue is defective, and seems no other than college jargon. Virtue is a gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue, for ornament only. Those actions that carry a show of virtue have yet nothing of its essence, because profit, glory, fear, custom, and other such foreign causes put us on the way to produce them. Justice, valour, and courtesy may be called so in respect to others and according to the face they wear in public, but in the doer they cannot be virtue when another end is proposed. Virtue owns nothing but what is done by herself and for herself alone. In the great battle of Plataea, after the Greeks under Pausanias beat Mardonius, the Spartans found that Aristodemus had of all others hazarded his person with the greatest bravery, yet they allowed him no prize, because his virtue had been incited by a desire to clear the reproach of his miscarriage at Thermopylae, and to die bravely to wipe off that former blemish.
Our judgments are yet sick, and obey the humour of our depraved manners. Most wits of these times pretend to ingenuity by blemishing the bravest actions of former ages, forging vain causes for noble things. Give Montaigne the greatest and most unblemished action the day beheld, and he will contrive a hundred plausible drifts to obscure it. The same pains others take to bespatter illustrious names, he would undergo to lend them a shoulder to raise them higher. It is the duty of good men to portray virtue as beautiful as they can. These people do the contrary out of malice, or by confining their belief to their own capacity, or, what he is more inclined to think, for not having their sight strong enough to conceive virtue in her native purity. Plutarch is angry, with good reason, that some attributed the younger Cato's death to fear of Caesar, and would have been more offended with those who attributed it to ambition. Senseless people. That man would rather have performed a noble, just, and generous action, and had ignominy for his reward, than glory. He was in truth a pattern nature chose out to show to what height human virtue and constancy could arrive. Montaigne is not capable of handling so rich an argument, so he only sets five Latin poets together, contending in Cato's praise. A well-educated child will find the first two a little flat, the third vigorous but overthrown by his own force, then lift his hands at the fourth, and at the last not know where he is. True, supreme, divine poesy is above all rules and reason. It does not exercise our judgment. It ravishes and overwhelms it, like the quick reflection of a flash of lightning. The master of the choir, after the great names of the greatest Romans, ends on Cato giving laws to all the rest.
