things of
this life. His body he used to get him pleasures of the body. In
pleasures of the body he sunk and drowned his conscience,--if he ever
had a conscience. But his intelligence survived. He became, at last,--if
he was not such from the first,--almost pure sense, without soul.

Yet we have no doubt Montaigne was an agreeable gentleman. We think we
should have got on well with him as a neighbor of ours. He was a
tolerably decent father, provided the child were grown old enough to be
company for him. His own lawful children, while infants, had to go out
of the house for their nursing; so it not unnaturally happened that all
but one died in their infancy. Five of such is the number that you can
count in his own journalistic entries of family births and deaths. But,
speaking as "moral philosopher," in his "Essays," he says, carelessly,
that he had lost "two or three" "without repining." This, perhaps, is
affectation. But what affectation!

Montaigne was well-to-do; and he ranked as a gentleman, if not as a
great nobleman. He lived in a castle, bequeathed to him, and by him
bequeathed,--a castle still standing, and full of personal association
with its most famous owner. He occupied a room in the tower, fitted up
as a library. Over the door of this room may still, we believe, be read
Montaigne's motto, "_Que scai-je?_" Votaries of Montaigne perform their
pious pilgrimages to this shrine of their idolatry, year after year,
century after century.

For, remember, it is now three centuries since Montaigne wrote. He was
before Bacon and Shakspeare. He was contemporary with Charles IX., and
with Henry of Navarre. But date has little to do with such a writer as
Montaigne. His quality is sempiternal. He overlies the ages, as the long
hulk of "The Great Eastern" overlay the waves of the sea, stretching
from summit to summit. Not that, in the form of his literary work, he
was altogether independent of time and of circumstance. Not that he was
uninfluenced by his historic place, in the essential spirit of his
work. But, more than often happens, Montaigne may fairly be judged out
of himself alone. His message he might, indeed, have delivered
differently; but it would have been substantially the same message if he
had been differently placed in the world, and in history. We need
hardly, therefore, add any thing about Montaigne's outward life. His
true life is in his book.

Montaigne the Essayist is the consummate, the ideal, e