Montaigne. No, no, no, I cannot afford to worry him outright: only a little for pastime—a morning’s merriment for the dogs and wenches. Scaliger. You really are then of so happy a temperament that, at your time of life, you can be amused by baiting a badger! Montaigne. Why not? Your father, a wiser and graver and older man than I am, was amused by baiting a professor or critic. I have not a dog in the kennel that would treat the badger worse than brave Julius treated Cardan and Erasmus, and some dozens more. We are all childish, old as well as young; and our very last tooth would fain stick, M. de l’Escale, in some tender place of a neighbour. Boys laugh at a person who falls in the dirt; men laugh rather when they make him fall, and most when the dirt is of their own laying. Is not the gallery rather cold, after the kitchen? We must go through it to get into the court where I keep my tame rabbits; the stable is hard by: come along, come along. Scaliger. Permit me to look a little at those banners. Some of them are old indeed. Montaigne. Upon my word, I blush to think I never took notice how they are tattered. I have no fewer than three women in the house, and in a summer’s evening, only two hours long, the worst of these rags might have been darned across. Scaliger. You would not have done it surely! Montaigne. I am not over-thrifty; the women might have been better employed. It is as well as it is then; ay? Scaliger. I think so. Montaigne. So be it. Scaliger. They remind me of my own family, we being descended from the great Cane della Scala, Prince of Verona, and from the House of Hapsburg, as you must have heard from my father. Montaigne. What signifies it to the world whether the great Cane was tied to his grandmother or not? As for the House of Hapsburg, if you could put together as many such houses as would make up a city larger than Cairo, they would not be worth his study, or a sheet of paper on the table of it. BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA Boccaccio. Remaining among us, I doubt not that you
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