A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of August Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I
found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his
chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after two
hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library the
inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of Mr
Sterling's, published in the _Westminster Review_, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomena to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakespeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased with a view of protecting the Shakespeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and
immortal for me.
[Footnote 72: From "Montaigne; or The Skeptic," in "Representative
Men." Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight
years old, retired from the practise of law at Bordeaux, and settled
himself on his estate. Tho he had been a man of pleasure, and
sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he
loved the compass, staidness, and independence of the country
gentleman's life. He took up his economy in good earnest, and made his
farms yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be
deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense
and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every
house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house
without defense. All parties freely came and went, his courage and
honor being universally esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry
brought jewels and papers to him for safe-keeping. Gibbon reckons, in
these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France--Henry IV and
Montaigne.