Produced by David Widger
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
XXVII. Of friendship.
XXVIII. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie.
XXIX. Of moderation.
XXX. Of cannibals.
XXXI. That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances.
XXXII. That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of life.
XXXIII. That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of
reason.
XXXIV. Of one defect in our government.
XXXV. Of the custom of wearing clothes.
XXXVI. Of Cato the Younger.
XXXVII. That we laugh and cry for the same thing.
XXXVIII. Of solitude.
Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had amind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of anywall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with hisutmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques,which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derivefrom their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth,what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrousbodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any otherthan accidental order, coherence, or proportion?
"Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne."
["A fair woman in her upper form terminates in a fish."
—Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 4.]
In this second part I go hand in hand with my painter; but fall veryshort of him in the first and the better, my power of handling not beingsuch, that I dare to offer at a rich piece, finely polished, and set offaccording to art. I have therefore thought fit to borrow one of Estiennede la Boetie, and such a one as shall honour and adorn all the rest of mywork—namely, a discourse that he called 'Voluntary Servitude'; but,since, those who did not know him have properly enough called it "Lecontr Un." He wrote in his youth,—["Not being as yet eighteen yearsold."—Edition of 1588.] by way of essay, in honour of liberty againsttyrants; and it has since run through the hands of men of great learningand judgment, not without singular and merited commendation; for it isfinely written, and as full as anything can possibly be. And yet one mayconfidently say it is far short of what he was able to do; and if in thatmore mature age, wherein I had the happiness to know him, he had taken adesign like this of mine, to commit his thoughts to writing, we shouldhave seen a great many rare things, and such as would have gone very nearto have rivalled the best writings of antiquity: for in natural partsespecially, I know no man comparable to him. But he has left nothingbehind him, save this treatise only (and that too by chance, for Ibelieve he never saw it after it first went out of his hands), and someobservations upon that edict of January—[1562, which granted to theHuguenots the public exercise of their religion.]—made famous by ourcivil-wars, which also shall elsewhere, peradventure, find a place.These were all I could recover of his remains, I to whom with soaffectionate a remembrance, upon his death-bed, he by his last willbequeathed his library and papers, the little book of his works onlyexcepted, which I committed to the press. And this particular obligationI have to this treatise of his, that it was the occasion of my first