Coches' would in reality busy itself with the question
what virtues are most proper to a sovereign. On the other hand, such
large titles as 'De la Vanite de l'Experience,' etc. give room for
almost any and every excursion. All these are in the last book; the
shorter essays of the two first for the most part deal more definitely
with their nominal subjects, which are most frequently moral brocards:
such as 'Le Profit de l'Un est Dommage de l'Autre,' 'Par Divers Moyens
on arrive a Pareille Fin,' etc.

In a literary history, however, of the scale and plan of this present,
the question of Montaigne's subjects and sentiments, interesting as it
is, must not be allowed to obscure the question of the expression which
he gave to these sentiments. His book is of the greatest importance in
the history of French style, of an importance indeed which has been by
no means invariably recognised by French literary historians themselves.
It must be remembered that he at once attained, and never lost, an
immense popularity. Thus the comparative oblivion which, owing to the
reforms of the early seventeenth century and the brilliant period of
production which followed them, overtook most of the men of the
Renaissance, did not touch Montaigne. He, with Rabelais, remained a well
of undefiled French, which all the artificial filtering of Malherbe and
Boileau could not deprive of its refreshing and fertilising power.
Writing, too, at a period subsequent, instead of anterior to the
innovations of the Pleiade, Montaigne was able to incorporate, and thus
to save, not a few of the neologisms which, valuable as they were, the
purists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries neglected. Many
words which his immediate contemporaries, and still more his successors,
condemned, have made good their footing in the language, owing beyond
all doubt to his influence. His style, too, was valuable for something
else besides its vocabulary. It entered so seldom into the plan of
Rabelais to write in any other than a burlesque tone, that he was rarely
able to display his own incomparable faculty of writing ordinary French,
pure, vigorous, graceful, and flexible at once. The tale-tellers and
memoir-writers of the time matured an excellent narrative style, but one
less suited for other forms of writing. The theologians often obeyed the
Latinising influence too implicitly. But Montaigne, with his wide
variety of subject, required and wrought out for himself a corr