esponding
variety of style. His very discursiveness and the constant flow of new
thoughts that welled up in him helped him to avoid the great curse of
all the vulgar tongues in the Renaissance--the long jointed sentence;
the easy colloquial manner at which he aimed reflected itself in a style
less familiar indeed than avowed burlesque, but at the same time more
familiar than any writer had before used in treating of similar
subjects. Yet no one was more capable than Montaigne, on the rare
occasions when he judged it proper, of showing his mastery of sustained
and lofty eloquence. The often-quoted passage in which he rebukes the
vanity of man (who, without letters patent or privilege, assumes to
himself the honour of being the only created being cognisant of the
secret of the universe) yields to nothing that had been written or was
to be written for many years, fertile as the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries were in both its characteristics, solemnity and
dignity of expression. That a book which was thus rich in vocabulary,
richer still in idiosyncrasy of expression, gracefully familiar in
general style, and admirably eloquent in occasional passages, should at
once become popular, and should remain so, could not be without a happy
effect on the general standard of literary taste and the general
acquaintance with the capabilities of the French language. That
Montaigne himself was a sound critical judge and not merely a lucky
practitioner of style, may be judged from his singling out Amyot as the
great master of it among his own immediate predecessors. In so far,
indeed, as prose style goes, master and scholar must undoubtedly take
rank at the head of all the writers of the century when bulk and variety
of examples are taken into account.

[Sidenote: Charron.]

Although, as has been already noted, Montaigne has many sides, his most
striking peculiarity may be said to be the mixture of philosophical
speculation, especially on ethical and political topics, with attention
to the historical side of human life both in the past and in the
present. He was, however, by no means the only teacher of ethics and
political philosophy in his century. His own mantle was taken up, or
attempted to be taken up, by Pierre Charron[215]. Born at Paris in 1541,
he was thoroughly educated; studied law, in which he proceeded to a
doctor's degree, and was called to the Paris bar, but then suddenly
entered the Church, and became renowned