'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: “Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.” Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together.…