. His Essays are like a mythological landscape--you hear the
pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr
leers from the thicket. At the core of him profoundly melancholy, and
consumed by a hunger for truth, he stands like Prospero in the
enchanted island, and he has Ariel and Caliban to do his behests and
run his errands. Sudden alternations are very characteristic of him.
Whatever he says suggests its opposite. He laughs at himself and his
reader. He builds his castle of cards for the mere pleasure of
knocking it down again. He is ever unexpected and surprising. And
with this curious mental activity, this play and linked dance of
discordant elements, his page is alive and restless, like the constant
flicker of light and shadow in a mass of foliage which the wind is
stirring.

Montaigne is avowedly an egotist; and by those who are inclined to make
this a matter of reproach, it should be remembered that the value of
egotism depends entirely on the egotist. If the egotist is weak, his
egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of
distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a
possession of the race. If Shakspeare had left personal revelations,
how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense left
them--if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelations
altogether--the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun at
once in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne an egotist
does not go a great way to decipher him. No writer takes the reader so
much into his confidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty of
confidence. He tells us everything about himself, we think; and when
all is told, it is astonishing how little we really know. The
esplanades of Montaigne's palace are thoroughfares, men from every
European country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building there
is a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himself
wears the key. We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his
daughter's governess, of his cook, of his page, "who was never found
guilty of telling the truth," of his library, the Gascon harvest
outside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favourite
speculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us.
His daughter's governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are
never introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrate