ather know
what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on
the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He
had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that
keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to
hear heralds or criers. How he would have hated the flare of trumpets
that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing
"jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out
the favourite oaths of his province with violence.

"The Romans in their religion," he says, "were wont to say 'Hoc age';
which in ours we say, 'Sursum corda.'"

He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner; he does not care for the
_hors d'oeuvres_. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the
translation, by his dying father's command, of _Theologia naturalis sive
liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde_. He thinks that it is a
good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar
to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself
in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and
he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute
as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The
discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns
him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to
his contemporaries on the subject.

In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together
in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy
Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.

"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life
than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating
Europe from the Middle Ages."

It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de
Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the
precious sentences of Thomas [`a] Kempis. They are foils; at first sight
there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel
de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with
Thomas [`a] Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being
Montaignes, Thomas [`a] Kempis would have written for God alone. He would
have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had
erected. On the side toward the altar it