elieving....
If sometimes we see one art to flourish, or a belief, and
sometimes another, by some heavenly influence; ... men's
spirits one while flourishing, another while barren, even as
fields are seen to be, what become of all those goodly
prerogatives wherewith we still flatter ourselves?"[155]

All this, of course, has a further bearing than Montaigne gives it in
the context, and affects his own professed theology as it does the
opinions he attacks; but none the less, the passage strikes at the
dogmatists and the pragmatists of all the preceding schools, and hardily
clears the ground for a new inductive system. And in the last essay of
all he makes a campaign against bad laws, which unsays many of his
previous sayings on the blessedness of custom.

In tracing his influence elsewhere, it would be hard to point to an
eminent French prose-writer who has not been affected by him.
Sainte-Beuve finds[156] that La Bruyere "at bottom is close to
Montaigne, in respect not only of his style and his skilfully
inconsequent method, but of his way of judging men and life"; and the
literary heredity from Montaigne to Rousseau is recognised by all who
have looked into the matter. The temperaments are profoundly different;
yet the style of Montaigne had evidently taken as deep a hold of the
artistic consciousness of Rousseau as had the doctrines of the later
writers on whom he drew for his polemic. But indeed he found in the
essay on the Cannibals the very theme of his first paradox; in
Montaigne's emphatic denunciations[157] of laws more criminal than the
crimes they dealt with, he had a deeper inspiration still; in the essay
on the training of children he had his starting-points for the
argumentation of _Emile_; and in the whole unabashed self-portraiture of
the ESSAYS he had his great exemplar for the _Confessions_. Even in the
very different case of Voltaire, we may go at least as far as Villemain
and say that the essayist must have helped to shape the thought of the
great freethinker; whose _Philosophe Ignorant_ may indeed be connected
with the APOLOGY without any of the hesitation with which Villemain
suggests his general parallel. In fine, Montaigne has scattered his
pollen over all the literature of France. The most typical thought of La
Rochefoucauld is thrown out[158] in the essay[159] _De l'utile et de
l'honneste_; and the most modern-seeming currents of thought, as M.
Stapfer remarks, can be detected in the