Note 255 — ACT IV.
Reading edition
The reader will recall a famous passage of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:—“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of union: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.” Montaigne has some reflections of a similar kind. See also the complaint in Euripides’ Hippolytus, ll. 616-24.