upulous, indiscriminate and _casual_ reader; and if we
treat him in the same spirit as that in which he treated the classical
authors he loved most, we shall at least be acting under the cloak of
his approval, however much we annoy the Calvins and Scaligers of
our age.

The man must have been a colossal genius. No human writer has
done quite what he did, anticipating the methods and spiritual
secrets of posterity, and creating for himself, with sublime
indifference to contemporary usage and taste, the sort of intellectual
atmosphere that suited him.

When one thinks how sensitive we all are to the intellectual
environments in which we move--how we submit for instance, at
this very moment, without being able to help ourselves, to the ideas
set in motion by Nietzsche, say, or Walt Whitman--it seems
impossible to overrate as a sheer triumph of personal force, the thing
that Montaigne did in disentangling himself from the tendencies of
his age, and creating almost "in vacuo," with nothing to help him but
his own temperament and the ancient classics, a new emotional
attitude toward life, something that might without the least
exaggeration be called "a new soul."

The magnitude of his spiritual undertaking can best be estimated if
we conceive ourselves freeing our minds, at this moment, from the
influences of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky and Whitman and Pater
and Wilde, and launching out into some completely original attitude
toward existence, fortified it may be by the reading of Sophocles or
of Lucretius, but with so original a mental vista that we leave every
contemporary writer hopelessly behind.

Suppose we looked about us with a view to the undertaking of so
huge an intellectual venture, where should we go to discover the
original impetus, the first embryonic germ, of the new way?

In ourselves? In our own temperament? Ah! that is the crux of the
whole matter. It was in his temperament that he found the force and
inexhaustible riches to carry the matter through--but have we got
such power at our disposal? It is doubtful. It is hard to even dream
that we have. And yet--consider the simplicity of what he did!

He just took himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain
unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament,
and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of
posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his
apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices and