How to Read and Learn from Books — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens that he speaks from natural parts, not mastery, and gladly borrows better minds: readers may give Plutarch a fillip and rail at Seneca when they think they rail at him, yet he shelters weakness under great names and fills gaps with memory, not invention. He lays open himself, not things; if he is a man of some reading, he is a man of no retention, and he weighs borrowings rather than numbering them. Others speak after him what he cannot express; he only desires to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent.

Books supply matter he reshapes; he loves poets and historians but distrusts erudition that piles quotation without judgment. Learning adorns and assists, yet cannot replace a soul's own cast; Cicero and Horace please him, but ornament must serve invention, which stays his own. He returns to a few trusted books rather than chase every new title, letting authors argue in his head while memory remains a cabinet, not a public warehouse.

He reads without needing rhetorical warming: he comes prepared from his chamber and eats the meat raw, tiring at fifty cries of Oyez and Plato's long preliminary dialogues that stifle the matter. Orators may nod in court or pulpit, but Montaigne wants substance, not allurement; licence of the time will not excuse him if he calls even Plato dull where the form wastes time better spent on the argument itself. He marks what strikes, digests it in solitude, and prefers a few authors revisited to a shelf of titles admired but never absorbed.

Historians trouble him next: they twist judgments to advantage, omit ticklish facts, and polish masters while hiding what the world already knows. Caesar's Commentaries please him for plain truth, yet even great writers conceal secret actions and pass over public scandals. He closes on the Memoirs of Francis I, warning that Montmorency, Biron, and Madame d'Estampes are missing, so perfect knowledge of that reign must be sought elsewhere; the only profit left is in battles fought and negotiations carried by Langey, where discourse rises above the vulgar strain.