ophie_ and _Philosophie
Morale des Stoiques_ he endeavoured, with honest purpose, rather than
with genius, to ally speculation to religion, and to show how human
reason can lead the way to those ethical truths which are the guiding
lights of conduct.

Perhaps certitude sufficient for human life may be found by
limitation; a few established truths will, after all, carry us from
the cradle to the grave; and beyond the bounds of certitude lies a
limitless and fascinating field for observation and dubious
conjecture. Amid the multitude of new ideas which the revival of
antiquity brought with it, amid the hot disputes of the rival churches,
amid the fierce contentions of civil war, how delightful to possess
one's soul in quiet, to be satisfied with the needful knowledge, small
though it be, which is vouchsafed to us, and to amuse the mind with
every opinion and every varying humour of that curious and wayward
creature man! And who so wayward, who so wavering as one's self in
all those parts of our composite being which are subject to the play
of time and circumstance? Such, in an age of confusion working towards
clearness, an age of belligerency tending towards concord, were the
reflections of a moralist, the most original of his century--Michel
de Montaigne.

MICHEL EYQUEM, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE, was born at a chateau in
Perigord, in the year 1533. His father, whom Montaigne always
remembered with affectionate reverence, was a man of original ideas.
He entrusted the infant to the care of peasants, wishing to attach
him to the people; educated him in Latin as if his native tongue;
roused him at morning from sleep to the sound of music. From his sixth
to his thirteenth year Montaigne was at the College de Guyenne, where
he took the leading parts in Latin tragedies composed by Muret and
Buchanan. In 1554 he succeeded his father as councillor in the court
_des aides_ of Perigueux, the members of which were soon afterwards
incorporated in the Parliament of Bordeaux. But nature had not
destined Montaigne for the duties of the magistracy; he saw too many
sides of every question; he chose rather to fail in justice than in
humanity. In 1565 he acquired a large fortune by marriage, and having
lost his father, he retired from public functions in 1570, to enjoy
a tranquil existence of meditation, and of rambling through books.
He had published, a year before, in fulfilment of his father's desire,
a translation of the _Theologia Natu