nscribed to women. Mr. Emerson's excuse of Montaigne for his
coarseness,--that he wrote for a generation in which women were not
expected to be readers,--is thus seen to be curiously impertinent to the
actual case that existed. Of a far worse fault in Montaigne than his
coarseness,--we mean his outright immorality,--Mr. Emerson makes no
mention, and for it, therefore, provides no excuse. We shall ourselves,
in due time, deal more openly with our readers on this point.

It was for a "boy of quality" that Montaigne aimed to adapt his
suggestions on the subject of education. In this happy country of ours,
all boys are boys of quality; and we shall go nowhere amiss in selecting
from the present essay:--

For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than
a well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other,
but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere
learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new
method.

'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the
business of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said:
now, I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the
very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal
with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste
things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes
opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for
himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and speak,
but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.... Let him
make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and
accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet
rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own.... 'Tis a sign of
crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed its
office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
committed to it to concoct....

Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads,
and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon
trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to
him than those of Epicurus