The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1877) is a collection of essays and
letters by Michel de Montaigne. Originally published in French as
Essais (1580), this edition was translated by English poet Charles
Cotton in the late-17th century and republished by William Carew
Hazlitt, the grandson of renowned English essayist and critic William
Hazlitt. "No man living is more free from this passion [of sorrow]
than I, who yet neither like it in myself nor admire it in others, and
yet generally the world, as a settled thing, is pleased to grace it with
a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.
Foolish and sordid guise!" In his masterful essays, Michel de Montaigne
eschews the typical distancing required of the authorial voice in order
to investigate public matters through a personal lens. As the subject of
his own musings, he provides both a stirring self-portrait and an
invaluable new voice that will resonate throughout Western literature.
Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers who would follow in his footsteps,
Montaigne is skeptical of the possibility of human certainty and takes
an ethical stand against the European colonial project in the Americas
and elsewhere. At times serious, at others tongue-in-cheek, his
wide-ranging topics include conscience, politics, sorrow, solitude,
fear, friendship, war, and poetry. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne
were written at a crossroads in human history--between Renaissance and
Enlightenment, Catholicism and Protestantism, Montaigne argues that to
look outward requires we first look within, and that the quest for
happiness requires us to accept what we cannot know. With a beautifully
designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne is a classic of French philosophy
reimagined for modern readers.
