rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast
rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that
style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor
feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne's "Essays" have been a great
and a beneficent formative force in the development of prose style in
French.

For substance, Montaigne is rich in practical wisdom, his own by
original reflection, or by discreet purveyal. He had read much, he had
observed much, he had experienced much. The result of all, digested in
brooding thought, he put into his "Essays." These grew as he grew. He
got himself transferred whole into them. Out of them, in turn, the world
has been busy ever since dissolving Montaigne.

Montaigne's "Essays" are, as we have said, himself. Such is his own way
of putting the fact. To one admiring his essays to him, he frankly
replied, "You will like me, if you like my essays, for they are myself."
The originality, the creative character and force, of the "Essays," lies
in this autobiographical quality in them. Their fascination, too,
consists in the self-revelation they contain. This was, first,
self-revelation on the part of the writer; but no less it becomes, in
each case, self-revelation in the experience of the reader. For, as face
answereth to face in the glass, so doth the heart of man to man,--from
race to race, and from generation to generation. If Montaigne, in his
"Essays," held the mirror up to himself, he, in the same act, held up
the mirror to you and to me. The image that we, reading, call Montaigne,
is really ourselves. We never tire of gazing on it. We are all of us
Narcissuses. This is why Montaigne is an immortal and a universal
writer.

Here is Montaigne's Preface to his "Essays;" "The Author to the Reader,"
it is entitled:--

Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset
forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to
myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no
consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My
powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to
the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that,
having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein
recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that means
preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
me. Had my inte