“It is in Rabelais, in the satire of Ménippée, and in Montaigne
that we shall find principles of social justice, ideas of
reformation, expressed with as much profundity as eloquence;
in these writers they are scattered, hidden under buffoonery
in Rabelais, tempered by philosophical _insouciance_ in
Montaigne; but they bear witness to the extent to which the
study of antiquity, the religious struggles, and the civil war
had set political ideas in motion. The great history of the
President de Thou marked in the highest degree the spirit of
legal freedom under the monarchy. Calvin had been the despotic
legislator of a democracy, yet the Reformation everywhere
raised the questions of civil liberty involved in the question
of religious liberty; and as the governments of the Middle Ages
owed their origin to the church the political innovators owed
theirs to dissenting theologians.”--VILLEMAIN.[b]
While we have followed the fortunes of Henry of Navarre another century
has been rounded out. Almost a hundred years have passed since Francis
I came to the throne; more than half a hundred since that monarch laid
down the sceptre. It has been a troublous epoch for France as we have
seen: a time of foreign and civil wars that would have disrupted a less
stable civil organisation. Yet the new forces of the Renaissance and
the Reformation were making themselves felt throughout this period,
and, as so often happens, the time of military strife has been also a
time of social development. Some phases of this development we have
studied, particularly in connection with the reign of Francis I; it
remains to mention in some detail the work of three great writers who
made this century memorable in French literary annals. We have already
cited a comment of Villemain on the retardation of the French literary
Renaissance. How marked this retardation was will be even more evident
when we reflect that the century which has just been rounded out saw
Italian culture in its decadence, and that the immediate period of Henry
IV is precisely contemporary with the age of Elizabeth in England,--the
time of Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare; whereas French literature is
only at its beginnings. Notable beginnings these are however, for the
names that we now have to chronicle are those of Rabelais, of Calvin,
and of Montaigne. It is true that Stephen, whom we quote now somewhat
in extenso, cites this trio as the second great literary triumvirate
of France; having named Joinville, Froissart, and Comines as the great
triumvirate of an earlier period. In the widest view this classification
no doubt is just; yet it can hardly be asserted that these earlier
chroniclers are classic in the same sense as are Rabelais and Montaigne.
The earlier writers are preserved more for their method than for their
manner; and it is only work in which literary form takes precedence over
mere fact that can be classified on the highest plane of art. According
to this standard, the work of Calvin scarcely belongs beside that of
Rabelais and Montaigne; yet a study of French literary development in the
sixteenth century from which that work was omitted would be obviously
incomplete. Let us glance then at the work of these three greatest French
writers of the sixteenth century, between whom, as Sir James Stephen
asserts “the parallelisms are as remarkable as the contradictions.”
Taking them in the order of time we have first to consider the great
humourist Rabelais, mention of whose work has already been made when we
were speaking of the French Renaissance of the middle of the century.[a]
Rabelais, the son of an innkeeper at Chinon, was born at that place in
the year 1483.[83] He became a Franciscan friar, a deacon, and a priest
in holy orders; and then, at the mature age of forty-two, commenced
the study of medicine in the college at Montpellier. Various medical
treatises were the fruit of those labours; and the reputation derived
from them was sufficient to obtain for him the office of physician
to the public hospital at Lyons. But his professional books proving
unsaleable, Rabelais, to indemnify his bookseller, wrote and published
his _Pantagruel_, or _Chronique Gargantuine_, of which (as he says)
more copies were sold in two months than of the Bible in ten years.
Having thus discovered the secret of his power, he next produced the
_Gargantua_; the work which has secured for him the admiration of all
subsequent ages, though the reverence of none. It is a romance in
which Rabelais may be considered as depicting the habits, opinions,
errors, crimes, and follies of that age of religious and intellectual
revolutions, in the centre of which he lived. Yet the critics have
doubted, and must ever continue to doubt--whether Gargantua and his son
Pantagruel are actual portraits of those who led the armaments (literary,
theological, or military) of those times, or are mere impersonations of
those abstract qualities by which the world was then governed--whether
Panurge and Friar John had any living prototypes amongst the men of the
sixteenth century--or whether the one is but a name for mediocrity,
ceasing to be honest as it becomes conspicuous; and the other a name for
sensuality, rescued from contempt by a shrewd and jovial spirit. But why
investigate these and such other riddles, proposed by their author in
avowed defiance of any such attempt? Why, indeed, read at all a book of
which not only the general scope, but almost every page is enigmatical?
Why squander time and patience on a writer who, of set purpose, makes his
readers dependent on the guidance of some dull and doubtful commentator?
For those passages which do reward the toil of the student are separated
from each other, not only by this profound obscurity, but by foul abysses
of impurity, which no skill or caution can always succeed in overleaping.
I know not how to describe them in terms at once accurate and decorous,
except by borrowing Mr. Carlyle’s denunciation of a work of Diderot’s,
and saying with him, or in words resembling his, that he who, even
undesignedly, shall come into contact with these parts of Rabelais’ great
work, should forthwith plunge into running waters, and regard himself,
for the rest of the day, as something more than ceremonially unclean.
[Illustration: RABELAIS]
Yet he whose business, or whose determination, it is to appreciate aright
the civil, and therefore the literary, history of France, must needs
pay this heavy price of knowledge. For, in that history, the romance
of _Gargantua_ is an indispensable link. From the revival of heathen
antiquity, Rabelais had gathered a mass of learning resembling the diet
of his own Pantagruel, who had 4,600 cows milked every morning for his
breakfast. From the revival of Christian antiquity, he had learned to
despise the authority and the superstitions of the church of Rome;
without, at the same time, learning to reverence the authority and the
doctrines of the Gospel. He thus traversed the boundless expanse of
human knowledge. He traversed it under the guidance of his own wit,
sagacity, and humour, a wit, vaulting at a bound, from the arctic to the
antarctic poles of thought; a sagacity embracing all the higher questions
of man’s social existence, and many of the deeper problems of his moral
constitution; and a humour which fairly baffles all attempts to analyse
or to describe it. For it was the result, not of natural temperament
alone, but also of the most assiduous and severe studies. The language
of Greece had become as familiar to him as his mother-tongue; and, while
he learned from Galen and Hippocrates to investigate the properties
of living or of inert matter, he was trained, by Plato, to spiritual
meditation, and by Lucian to a scepticism and a buffoonery, alike
audacious and unintermitted. From the union of such a disposition and
of such discipline, emerged the strange phenomenon of a philosopher in
his revels. In contemplating it one knows not, as it has been well said,
“whether to wonder most that such wisdom should ever assume the mask
of folly, or that such folly should permit the growth and development
of any true wisdom.” It is, however, an apparent, rather than a real,
difficulty. The wisdom is never sublime, and the folly but seldom abject.
Each is but a different aspect of a nature, of which the parts are,
indeed, inharmonious, but not incompatible--of a genuine Epicurean gifted
with gigantic powers, but of cold affections, and of debased appetites;
ever worshipping and obeying his one idol, pleasure, though at one time
she bids him soar to the empyrean, and at another commands him to wallow
in the sty.
Rabelais was wise in the sense in which any man may be so who delights in
the strenuous exercise of a powerful understanding, and loves thinking
for thinking’s sake. He was wise to detect popular fallacies, and to
discern unpopular truths. He was wise to see how the young might be
better educated, laws better made, nations better governed, wars more
vigorously conducted, and peace more securely maintained. He was wise to
call down both theology and philosophy from the skies above to the earth
beneath us. And he was not more wise than eloquent; sometimes arraying
truth in the noblest forms of speech, though more frequently enhancing
her beauty by enveloping and contrasting her with the homeliest. At his
prolific touch his native tongue germinated into countless new varieties
of expression; and the mines of wealth, both intellectual and verbal,
which he bequeathed to future ages, after being wrought by multitudes in
each, still appear inexhaustible.
The wisdom of Rabelais, was, however, of the world, worldly. It never
ascended to the eternal fountains of light, nor descended to illuminate
the dark places of the earth. It neither sought to interpret the awful
mysteries of our nature, nor bowed down to adore in the contemplation
of them. It aimed at no exalted ends, nor did it ever lead the way
through any rugged and self-denying paths. It expressed neither sympathy
for the wretchedness, nor pity for the sorrows, of mankind; but was
satisfied to be shrewd, and witty, and comical upon them all. To the
keen gaze of Rabelais, the frauds, and follies, and ignorance, and
licentiousness of the papal court and priesthood afforded endless matter
of scorn and merriment; but to his last hour he lived in their outward
garb and communion. To that penetrating eye had been clearly revealed
the majesty of the truth which the Reformers taught, and the majesty
of the sufferings which they endured in its defence; but not one glow
of enthusiasm could they ever kindle in his bosom, as they toiled in
indigence, and died in martyrdom, to evangelise the world. Secure in the
absolution of Clement VII for whatever he had done and written against
the church, and secure in the license of Francis I, to publish whatever
else he might please, Rabelais delighted to assume the character of a
chartered libertine, or, as it might almost be said, of an intellectual
debauchee. And yet, voluptuary, scoffer, and sceptic as he was, his
laughter was so hearty, his glee so natural, his frolic so riotous, and
his buffoonery so irresistible, that he became, not merely the tolerated,
but the favoured and privileged, Momus of his times. He became also a
proof to all later times, that, by the great mass of mankind, anything
will be forgiven or permitted to genius, when, abandoning its native
supremacy, it condescends to undertake the strangely inappropriate office
of master of the revels.[c]
“In the works of Rabelais,” says Michelet,[f] “the French language
appeared in a greatness it never possessed before nor since. What
Dante accomplished for Italian, Rabelais did for French. He employed
and blended every dialect, the elements of every period and province
developed in the Middle Age, adding the while a wealth of technical
expression furnished by art and science. Another man would have been
overwhelmed by this immense variety, but he,--he harmonised everything.
Antiquity, especially the Greek genius, and a knowledge of all modern
languages permitted him to envelop and master that of France.”
Saintsbury[e] declares that the only two men who can be compared to
him in character of work and force of genius combined are Lucian and
Swift, adding: “He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is
entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the
ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages; the _rire immense_ which
distinguishes him is altogether good-natured; but he is nearer to Lucian
than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most necessary
to know in order to understand him rightly.”[a]
CALVIN
[Illustration: CALVIN]
One cannot better show how contrarieties are related than by the
immediate transition from Francis Rabelais to John Calvin;[84] for,
probably, no two men of commanding minds were ever more curiously
contrasted with each other, as certainly no two minds were ever enshrined
in bodies more dissimilar. To look upon, Rabelais was a drunken Silenus,
Calvin a famished Ugolino. The one emptied his bottle before he wrote,
while he was writing, and after he had written; the other contented
himself with a repast of bread and water once in each six-and-thirty
hours. Reposing in his easy chair, the merry doctor was hailed as lord of
misrule by all the jovial spirits of his age; enthroned in the consistory
of Geneva, the inexorable divine was dreaded as the disciplinarian of
himself and of the whole subject city. The witty physician was L’Allegro,
the austere minister Il Penseroso, of their generation. The reader of the
_Gargantua_ yields by turns to disgust, to admiration, and to merriment;
but Democritus himself would not have found matter for one passing smile
throughout the whole of the _Christian Institute_. To Rabelais, human
life appeared a farce as broad as the knights of Aristophanes; to Calvin,
a tragedy more dismal than the Agamemnon of Æschylus. And as they wrote,
so they also lived. The traditional stories about Rabelais, if true,
attest his love, and, even if untrue, they attest his reputed love, of
that kind of wit which is called practical; all the traditions of Calvin
represent him as a man at whose appearance mirth instantly took flight.
The gay doctor is made in these tales to play off his tricks on the
graduates in medicine, on the chancellor du Prât, on the king and queen
of France, and even on the mule of the pope himself; while the solemn
theologian makes his domiciliary visits to ascertain that no dinner table
at Geneva was rendered the pretext for levity of discourse, or for excess
of diet.
What, then, is the congruity on which to found any comparison between
these most incongruous minds? The answer is (to borrow an expressive
word), that they were both devoted _ergoists_, each of them being at once
a mighty master, and a submissive slave, of logic.[c] With the religious
significance of Calvin’s teaching we have no present concern. We shall
have occasion to see something more of this in the course of our study of
the Reformation. Here we are concerned rather with Calvin the writer--the
author of the _Institution Chrétienne_.
Published in 1536 this book was received with unbounded delight.[a]
We may, indeed, reject the story, that a thousand editions of it were
sold in his own lifetime; but we cannot dispute that, during a century
and a half, it exercised an unrivalled supremacy over a large part of
Protestant Europe. For that dominion it was indebted, in part, to the
novelty and comprehensiveness of the design it accomplished,--to the
vast compass of learning, scriptural, patristic, and historical, which
it embraced,--to the depth and the height of the morality which it
inculcated,--and to the calm but energetic keenness with which it exposed
the errors of his adversaries. But the popularity and the influence of
this remarkable book is also, in part, to be ascribed to its literary
merits. Calvin has been described as the Bossuet of his age. Of all
the French authors whom France had as yet produced, he was the most
philosophical when he speculated, the most sublime when he adored, the
most methodical and luminous in the development of truth, the most acute
in the refutation of error, and the most obedient to that law or spirit
of his nation, which demands symmetry in the proportions, harmony in the
details, and concert in all the parts of every work of art, whether it be
wrought by the pen, the pencil, or the chisel. In the ninth chapter of
Bossuet’s _Histoire des Variations_ may, indeed, be found the best, as
it is a very reluctant, eulogy on the literary excellence of his great
rival and predecessor. Even in the haughty gloom which the bishop of
Meaux discovers in the style and tone of the reformer of Geneva, there is
a not inappropriate interest. The beautiful lake of that city, and the
mountains which encircle it, lay before his eyes as he wrote; but they
are said to have suggested to his fancy no images, and to have drawn from
his pen not so much as one transient allusion. With his mental vision
ever directed to that melancholy view of the state and prospects of our
race, which he had discovered in the book of life, it would, indeed, have
been incongruous to have turned aside to depict any of those glorious
aspects of the creative benignity which were spread around him in the
book of nature.
MONTAIGNE
The immediate effect of the servitude into which Calvin had subdued
the minds of his disciples was to provoke a formidable revolt. When he
was giving his latest touches to his _Institution Chrétienne_, Michel
de Montaigne,[85] then in his twenty-second year, had just taken his
seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. That he afterwards became a deputy
in the states-general of Blois, though maintained by no inconsiderable
authorities, seems to me impossible; but it is clear that his early
manhood was devoted to public, and especially to judicial, affairs. He
was thus brought into contact with the busy world at the moment of a
greater agitation of human society than had occurred since the overthrow
of the Roman Empire. Marvellous revolutions, and discoveries still more
marvellous, in the world of letters, of politics, of geography, and of
religion,--the welfare of inappeasable passions,--the working of whatever
is most base, and of whatever is most sublime, in our common nature,--and
calamities which might seem to have fulfilled the most awful of the
apocaliptic visions, had passed in rapid succession before the eyes
of this acute and curious observer. It was an unwelcome and repulsive
spectacle. He turned from it to seek the shelter and the repose of his
hereditary mansion. In that retirement he indulged, or cherished, a
spirit inflexibly opposed to the spirit by which his native country was
convulsed. The age was idolatrous of novelties; and, therefore, Montaigne
lived in the retrospect of a remote antiquity. It was an age of restless
ambition; and, therefore, he passively committed himself and his fortunes
to the current of events. The minds of other men were exploring the
foundations, and criticising the superstructure, of every social polity;
and, therefore, his mind was averted altogether from the affairs of the
commonwealth. Because his neighbours yielded themselves to every gust
of passion, he must be passionless. Because the times were treacherous,
he must punctiliously cherish his personal honour. Because they were
inhuman, he cultivated all the amenities of life. Because calamity swept
over the world, he was enamoured of epicurean ease. Heroism was the boast
of not a few, and to their virtues he paid the homage of an incredulous
obeisance. Dogmatism was the habit of very many; and, therefore,
Montaigne must surrender himself to an almost universal scepticism.
[Illustration: MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE]
The contrast was as captivating as it was complete. With a temper easily
satisfied,--with affections as tranquil as they were kindly,--with a
curiosity ever wakeful, but never impetuous,--with competency, health,
friends, books, and leisure, Montaigne had all the means of happiness
which can be brought within the reach of those to whom life is not a
self-denying existence, but a pleasant pastime. Yet, with him, it was
the pastime of an active, enlightened, and amiable mind. The study of
man as a member of society was his chosen pursuit, but he conducted it
in a mode altogether his own. The individual man, Michel Montaigne,
such as he would be in every imaginable relation and office of society,
was the subject of his daily investigation. He became, of all egotists,
the most pleasant, versatile, and comprehensive. He produced complete
sketches of himself with an air of the most unreserved frankness, and in
a tone frequently passing from quiet seriousness to graceful badinage.
He describes his tastes, his humours, his opinions, his frailties,
his pursuits, and his associates with the most exuberant fertility of
invention, and has wrought out a general delineation of our common
humanity from the profound knowledge of a single member of it. And, as
the variety is boundless, so is the unity well sustained. His essays
are a mirror in which every reader sees his own image reflected, but
in which he also sees the image of Montaigne reflecting it. There he
is, ever changing, and yet ever the same. He looks on the world with
a calm indifference, which would be repulsive were it not corrected
by his benevolent curiosity about its history and its prospects. He
has not one malignant feeling about him, except it be towards the
tiresome, and especially towards such of them as provoke his yawns and
his resentment by misplaced and by commonplace wisdom. He has a quick
relish for pleasure, but with a preference for such pleasures as are
social, inoffensive, and easily procured. He has a love for virtue, but
chiefly, if not exclusively, when she exacts no great effort, nor any
considerable sacrifice. He loves his fellow-men, but does not much, or
seriously, esteem them. He loves study and meditation, but stipulates
that they shall expose him to no disagreeable fatigue. He cherishes every
temper which makes life pass sociably and pleasantly. He takes things as
he finds them in perfect good humour, makes the best of them all, and
never burdens his mind with virtuous indignation, unattainable hopes, or
profitless regrets. In short, as exhibited in his own self-portraiture,
he is an Epicurean, who knows how to make his better dispositions
tributary to his comfort, and also knows how to prevent his evil tempers
from troubling his repose.
The picture of himself, which Montaigne thus holds up to his readers as a
representation of themselves, is not sublime, nor is it beautiful; but it
is a striking and a masterly likeness. It is drawn with inimitable grace
and freedom, and with the most transparent perspicuity; and they who are
best entitled to pronounce such a judgment, admire in his language a
richness and a curious felicity unknown to any preceding French writers.
Even they to whom his tongue is not native, can perceive that his style
is the easy, the luminous, and the flexible vehicle of his thoughts, and
never degenerates into a mere apology for the want of thought; and that
his imagination, without ever disfiguring his ideas, however abstract,
and however subtle they may be, habitually clothes them with the noblest
forms and the most appropriate colouring.
But our more immediate object is, to notice the relation in which
Montaigne stands to the other great moral teachers of his native land,
and to those habits of thought by which France is, and has so long
been, characterised. The antagonist in everything of the spirit of his
times, he seems to have regarded with peculiar aversion the peremptory
confidence by which the great controversy of his age was conducted, both
by the adherents of Rome and by the founder of Calvinism. Because they
would admit no doubt whatever, every form of doubt found harbour with
him. Because they were dogmatists, he must be a sceptic.
In M. Faugère’s edition of Pascal’s _Thoughts_ will be found the famous
dialogue on the scepticism of Montaigne, between Pascal and De Sacy,--a
delineation so exquisite, that it seems mere folly to attempt any
addition to it. The genius of Port Royal, however, exhibits there its
severity, not less than its justice; and a few words may not be misplaced
in the attempt to mitigate a little of the rigour of the condemnation.
Montaigne was a sceptic (as very many are), because his sagacity and
diligence were buoyant enough to raise his mind to the clouds which float
over our heads, but were not buoyant enough to elevate him to the pure
regions of light which lie beyond them. His learning was various rather
than recondite. It was drawn chiefly from Latin authors, and from the
Latin authors of a degenerating age; not from Cicero or Virgil, but from
Seneca and Pliny. Of Greek he knew but little, though he was profoundly
conversant with the translation of Plutarch, with which Amyot had lately
rendered all French readers familiar. From such masters Montaigne did
not learn, and could not have learned, the love of truth. They taught
him rather to content himself with loose historical gossip, and with
half-formed notions in philosophy. They taught him not how to resolve,
but how to amuse himself with the great problems of human existence. They
encouraged his characteristic want of seriousness and earnestness of
purpose. From such studies, and from the events of his life and times, he
learned to flutter over the surface of things, and to traverse the whole
world of moral, religious, and political inquiry, without finding, and
without seeking, a resting-place. His aimless curiosity and versatile
caprice form at once the fascination and the vice of his writings,
though not indeed their only vice, for the name of Montaigne belongs to
that melancholy roll of the great French sceptical writers--Rabelais,
Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire, and Diderot--who, not content to assault
the principles of virtue, have so far debased themselves, as laboriously
to stimulate the disorderly appetites of their readers.
Yet the scepticism of Montaigne was not altogether such as theirs is. He
has none of their dissolute revelry in confounding the distinctions of
truth and falsehood, of good and evil. He does not, like some of them,
delight in the darkness with which he believes the mind of man to be
hopelessly enveloped. He rather placidly and contentedly acquiesces in
the conviction that truth is beyond his reach. He could amuse himself
with doubt, and play with it. With few positive and no dearly cherished
opinions, he had no ardour for any opinion, and had not the slightest
desire to make proselytes to his own Pyrrhonism. He was, on the contrary,
to the last degree, tolerant of dissent from his own judgment; and, in
the lack of other opponents, was prompt, and even glad, to contradict
himself. Of all human infirmities, dulness, and obscurity, and vehemence,
are those from which he was most exempt. Of all human passions, the zeal
which fires the bosom of a missionary is that from which he was the most
remote. We associate with him as one of the most pleasant of all our
illustrious companions, and quit him as one of the least impressive of
all our eminent instructors.[c]
Montaigne’s fame has passed through several very different phases. Among
his own contemporaries it grew without overstepping a somewhat restricted
circle of enlightened minds. After that, the main current of French
thought took a direction opposite to that of Montaigne’s. Dogmatism
returned and the seventeenth century in general adhered to it. Pascal
launched anathemas at Montaigne. But the sumptuous edifice of the age of
Louis XIV soon crumbled away, and Montaigne came forward again, hailed as
a glorious ancestor by the entire age of Voltaire and Rousseau. To-day
he has ceased to arouse any tempests, but he occupies his uncontested
place in the national pantheon. He will live as a writer as long as
French literature exists, for like the other great sixteenth century
writers, men of strong individualities like Rabelais and Calvin, he had
his own language as well as his own thought--a language sovereignly
free, eternally young, inimitable, and above all a fertile source of
rejuvenation for the whole language. He will live as a philosopher as
long as men practise the axiom of the _Essays_, “Know thyself.”[d]
FOOTNOTES
[83] [The date of Rabelais’ birth is not certain, although most
authorities place it about 1483. Of his early years very little is
known, but from 1519 his history is more definite. He was educated at a
convent school and, after his entrance into the Franciscan order, devoted
himself to serious study. In 1524 he became a Benedictine, this change of
order and dwelling-place being attributed by some to a disgust with the
cloister. Six years later he is found studying medicine in Montpellier
and afterwards practising in Lyons. John du Bellay, bishop of Paris, took
him with him to Rome in 1534 as physician. Rabelais died at Paris in
1553.]
[84] [John Calvin, the celebrated Protestant reformer and theologian,
was born at Noyon, Picardy, France, in 1509, and died at Genoa, May
27th, 1564. His father, Gerard Calvin, was a notary-apostolic and
procurator-fiscal for the lordship of Noyon, besides holding other
ecclesiastical offices. His early years are obscure, but from childhood
he showed great religious feeling and an intense earnestness. He studied
at Paris, Orleans, and Bourges, and although brought up with the
intention of entering the priesthood, after close study of the Bible, he
embraced the Reformation. In 1532 Calvin published his first work, an
edition of Seneca’s _De Clementia_ with an elaborate commentary. In 1533,
on account of speeches in opposition to the court, he was banished from
Paris and it is said it was during his retirement at Saintonge that he
made his first sketch of his _Institution Chrétienne_. His other works
are all of a religious nature, mostly controversial. A great many of
these are of an exegetical character, of which his expository comments
or homilies on the books of Scripture are by some considered the most
valuable of his works. (For a further account of Calvin, see the history
of the Reformation movement, volume xiii.)]
[85] Lacépède, referring to Montaigne’s _Essays_, says: “In a work that
one reads again with delight and self-improvement, Michel de Montaigne
has given a new glory to France.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, was born
at Périgord, of an ancient and noble family, in 1533. Perhaps the finish
of his _Essays_, his principal work, is due to his early training, his
father having so managed his education, that at the age of five he spoke
the purest Latin, and, as an old book gives it, “was also taught Greek by
way of recreation.” He was married at the age of thirty-three. He lived
at the court of Francis II and Henry VIII. He became mayor of Bordeaux in
1581 and in 1592; according to one old chronicle, “he died a constant and
philosophic death, when he was some months short of sixty.” His _Essays_
were first published in 1580; the edition of 1588 was the last to be
published in the author’s lifetime.
[Illustration]