ge, while excusing himself for the omission, from lack of space,
of Rousseau! A list of humorous works which should exclude _Gil Blas_ to
make room for _Emile_ or _Le Contrat Social_, might itself, one would
think, act as a provocative on the _esprit gaulois_.

These mysteries are not the only ones in Mr. Besant's volume to which we
have to confess our inability to discover a key. In closing his remarks
on Montaigne he touches with undissembled irony the question whether he
was a Christian, and, after contrasting the tone and sentiments of the
_Essais_ with those of the Gospels, bids us "remember that we are not in
the nineteenth century, but in the sixteenth, that Montaigne died in the
act of adoration, and cease to ask whether the man was a Christian;"
adding, "Christian? There was no better Christian than Montaigne in all
his century." It appears, therefore, that the sixteenth century, instead
of being, as we had supposed, one in which the Reformation had brought
with it a revival of religious earnestness and a reaction against
religious formalism, and in which on the battle-field, in the dungeon
and at the stake, as well as through voluntary exile and the
relinquishment of property, thousands in every country testified to the
fervor and sincerity of their religious convictions, was in truth, like
the eighteenth century, one in which a prevailing skepticism or
indifference paid to dead but not yet dethroned creeds its light homage
of affected "adoration." Mr. Besant informs us that "to the men of
culture the rival parties were but two political sides." How many men of
culture could be cited in support of this assertion? We grant him
Montaigne, but it was precisely because the case of Montaigne was an
exceptional one in the age of Erasmus and More, of Calvin and Coligny,
that the question in regard to him has not seemed altogether idle.

It appears from another passage that Mr. Besant has an easy method of
arriving at a judgment in regard to the character or general aspect of
an historical epoch. From the details in regard to food, dress and
furniture which he finds in the works of Eustache Deschamps, a satirical
poet of the fourteenth century, he infers that the bourgeois life of
that period was "comfortable, abundant and cheery." "History," he says,
"paints this as the worst and most disastrous period that Europe had
ever seen; yet here, in the most real poet of the century, we see how
life, as a whole, went on in t