[The Essays of Montaigne by Michel de Montaigne]@TWC D-Link book
The Essays of Montaigne

CHAPTER VIII
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These cost us a great deal more and bring us more honour, if they have anything of good in them.

For the value of our other children is much more theirs than ours; the share we have in them is very little; but of these all the beauty, all the grace and value, are ours; and also they more vividly represent us than the others.

Plato adds, that these are immortal children that immortalise and deify their fathers, as Lycurgus, Solon, Minos.

Now, histories being full of examples of the common affection of fathers to their children, it seems not altogether improper to introduce some few of this other kind.

Heliodorus, that good bishop of Trikka, rather chose to lose the dignity, profit, and devotion of so venerable a prelacy, than to lose his daughter; a daughter that continues to this day very graceful and comely; but, peradventure, a little too curiously and wantonly tricked, and too amorous for an ecclesiastical and sacerdotal daughter.
There was one Labienus at Rome, a man of great worth and authority, and amongst other qualities excellent in all sorts of literature, who was, as I take it, the son of that great Labienus, the chief of Caesar's captains in the wars of Gaul; and who, afterwards, siding with Pompey the great, so valiantly maintained his cause, till he was by Caesar defeated in Spain.


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