work. Both these are susceptible of a good deal of
misconstruction, and both no doubt have been a good deal misconstrued.
His egotism, like most egotism, is a compound of frankness and
affectation, and its sincerity is not, as an attraction, equal to the
easy garrulity for which it affords an occasion of display. His
scepticism, however, is altogether _sui generis_. It is not exuberant,
like that of Rabelais, nor sneering, like that of Voltaire, nor
despairing, like that of Pascal, nor merely inquisitive and scholarly,
like that of Bayle. There is no reason for disbelieving Montaigne's
sincere and conscious orthodoxy in the ecclesiastical sense. But his own
temperament, assisted no doubt by the political and ecclesiastical
circumstances already described, by indifferent bodily health, and by
the period, if not exactly of excess, at any rate of free living, in his
younger days, to which he so constantly alludes, had produced in him a
general feeling that the _pros_ and _cons_ of different opinions and
actions balance each other more evenly than is generally thought. He
looks on life with a kind of ironical enjoyment, and the three books of
his _Essays_ might be described as a vast gallery of pictures
illustrating the results of his contemplations.

There are some considerable differences between the earlier and later
_Essays_, one of the most obvious of which concerns the point of length.
Thus the first book consists of fifty-seven essays, occupying rather
more than 500 pages[214], or an average of less than ten pages each. The
second (exclusive of the long 'Apologie de Raymond Sebonde,' which
occupies 300 pages by itself) contains thirty-six essays, of nearly 500
pages in all, or about twelve pages each. These books were published
together, and may be presumed to have been written more or less at the
same time. But the third and last book, though it contains full 550
pages, has only thirteen essays, which thus average more than forty
pages each, though their length is very unequal. Montaigne had, no
doubt, found that his pillar-to-post method of discourse was
sufficiently attractive to make fresh starting-points and definite
titles unnecessary; thus in the third book, his subjects (at least his
professed subjects) are sometimes much wider, and sometimes much more
whimsical, than in the two first. Oedipus himself could hardly divine
the actual subject of the essay 'Sur des Vers de Virgile,' or guess that
a paper 'Sur les