of all ideals, realistic, empirical,
wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faint
pipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow the
voices of the prophets and the high doctrines of the leaders of men.

Its wisdom is the wisdom of lazy noons in spacious corn-fields; of
dewy mornings in misty lanes and moss-grown paths; of dreamy
shadows in deep grass when the apple boughs hang heavily
earthward, and long nights of autumn rain have left amber-coloured
pools in the hollow places of the trees and in the mud trodden by the
cattle.

Its sanity is the sanity of farm-yards and smoking dung-heaps and
Priapian jests beneath wintry hedges, and clear earth-sweet
thoughtless laughter under large, liquid, mid-summer stars.

The nonchalant "What do I know?"--"What does any one know?"--of
this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of
pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken
things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the
kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of any
desperate fall.

What lends the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne such massive and
enduring weight is the very fact of its being the natural pagan
wisdom of generations of simple souls who live close to the earth.
No wonder he was popular with the farmers and peasants of his
countryside and with the thrifty burgesses of his town. He must have
gathered much wisdom from his wayfaring among the fields, and
many scandalous sidelights upon human nature as he loitered among
the streets and wharfs of the city.

It is indeed the old joyous, optimistic, pagan spirit, full of courage
and gaiety; full too, it must be confessed, of a humorous terror now
and then, and yet capable enough sometimes of looking very
formidable antagonists squarely in the face and refusing to quit the
quiet ways it has marked out and the shrewd middle path it has
chosen!

Turning over the pages of Cotton's translation--it is my fancy to
prefer this one to the more famous Florio's--there seems to me to
arise from these rambling discourses, a singularly wholesome savour.
I seem to see Montaigne's massive and benignant countenance as he
jogs home, wrapped against the wind in the cloak that was once his
father's, along the muddy autumn lanes, upon his strong but not
over-impetuous nag. Surely I have seen that particular cast of
features in the weather-beaten face of many a farm labourer,