and
listened too, from the same lips, to just as relishing a commentary
upon the surprising ways of providence with mortal men.

Full of a profound sense of a physical well-being, which the
troublesome accidents of chance and time only served to intensify,
Montaigne surveyed the grotesque panorama of human life with a
massive and indelible satisfaction.

His optimism, if you can call it by such a name, is not the optimism
of theory; it is not the optimism of faith, far less is it that mystic and
transcendental optimism which teases one, in these later days, with
its swollen words and windy rhetoric. It is the optimism of simple,
shrewd, sane common sense, the optimism of the poor, the optimism
of sound nerves, the optimism of cab-men and bus drivers, of
fishermen and gardeners, of "tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors,
apothecaries and thieves."

What Montaigne really does is to bring into the courts of philosophy
and to heighten with the classic style of one who was "brought up
upon Latin," the sheer, natural, incorrigible love of life, of such
persons, rich or poor, as have the earth in their blood and the shrewd
wisdom of the earth and the geniality of the earth, and the
mischievous wantonness of the earth, and the old, sly chuckling
malice of the earth, in their blood and in their soul.

He can record, and does often record, in those queer episodic dips
into his scrap-book, the outrageous stories of a thousand freaks of
nature. He loves these little impish tricks of the great careless gods.
He loves the mad, wicked, astounding, abnormal things that are
permitted to happen as the world moves round. He reads Tacitus and
Plutarch very much as a Dorsetshire shepherd might read the
_Western Gazette,_ and makes, in the end, much of the same
commentary.

In a certain sense Montaigne is the most human of all great geniuses.
The whole turbulent stream of the motley spectacle passes through
his consciousness and he can feel equal sympathy with the heroism
of a Roman patriot and with the terrors of a persecuted philosopher.

What pleases him best is to note the accidental little things--"life's
little ironies"--which so frequently intervene between ideal
resolutions and their results in practise and fact. He chuckles over
the unfortunate lapses in the careers of great men much as a
mischievous gossip in a tavern might chuckle over similar lapses in
the careers of local potentates.

Montaigne's scepticism is the result