confessions, and one of the two
may dissect every nerve and fibre of his inmost soul, while the other
may ramble carelessly on about the places he has seen, and the
people he has met; yet in the ultimate result it may turn out that it is
the latter rather than the former who has revealed his identity.

Human personalities--the strange and subtle differences which
separate us from one another--refuse to give up the secrets of their
quality save at the magical summons of what we call "style." Mr.
Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managed
to put a peculiar flavour of style--with a rhythm and a colour all its
own--into his meticulous gossip.

Montaigne's essays are not by any means of equal value. The more
intimately they deal with his own ways and habits, the more
_physiological_ they become in their shameless candour, the better
do they please us. They grow less interesting to my thinking where
they debouch into quotations, some of them whole pages in length,
from his favourite Roman writers.

He seems to have kept voluminous scrap-books of such quotations,
and, like many less famous people, to have savoured a peculiar
satisfaction from transcribing them. One can imagine the deliberate
and epicurean way he would go about this task, deriving from the
mere bodily effort of "copying out" these long and carefully chosen
excerpts, an almost sensual pleasure; the sort of pleasure which the
self-imposed observance of some mechanical routine in a leisured
person's life is able to produce, not unaccompanied by agreeable
sensations of physical well-being.

But what, after all, is this "new soul" which Montaigne succeeded in
putting into our western civilisation at the very moment when
Catholic and Protestant were so furiously striving for the mastery?
What is this new tone, this new temper, this new temperamental
atmosphere which, in the intervals of his cautious public work and
his lazy compiling of scrap-books from the classics, he managed to
fling abroad upon the air?

It is a spiritual ingredient, composed, when one comes to analyse it,
of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoism
and of what we know as philosophic scepticism. Let us deal with the
former of these two elements first.

Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may be
regarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual's life to throw the
chief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, perso