ard, or in his library, beneath the rafters
engraved with epicurean maxims, he jotted his thoughts hastily on the
volume in his hand--on the Pliny, or Suetonius, or Livy. His library was
probably not a large one, for he had but a few favourite authors, the
Latin historians, moralists, and anecdotists, and for mere amusement
Terence and Catullus, Boccaccio and Rabelais. His thoughts fell asleep,
he says, if he was not walking about, and his utter want of memory made
notes and note-books necessary to him. He who could not remember the
names of the most ordinary tools used in agriculture, nor the difference
between oats and barley, could never keep in his head his enormous stock
of classical anecdotes and modern instances. His thoughts got innocently
confused with his recollections, and his note-books will probably show
whence he drew many of his stories, and the quotations that remain
untraced. They will add also to our knowledge of the man and of his
character, though it might seem difficult to give additional traits in
the portrait of himself which he has painted with so many minute touches.

With the exception of Dr. Johnson, there is scarcely any great man of
letters whom we are enabled to know so intimately as the Sieur de
Montaigne. He has told us all about himself; all about his age, as far
as it came under his eager and observant eyes; all about the whole world,
as far as it made part of his experience. Rousseau is not more frank,
and not half so worthy of credit, for Rousseau, like Topsy in the novel,
had a taste for "'fessing" offences that he had never committed rather
than not "'fess" at all. Montaigne strikes no such attitudes; he does
not pose, he does not so much confess as blab. His life stands before
the reader "as in a picture." We learn that his childhood was a happier
one than usually fell to the lot of children in that age when there was
but little honey smeared on the cup of learning. We know that his father
taught him Greek in a kind of sport or game, that the same parent's
relations with the fair sex were remarkable, and that he had
extraordinary strength in his thumb. For his own part, Montaigne was so
fresh and full of life that Simon Thomas, a great physician, said it
would make a decrepit old man healthy again to live in his company. One
thinks of him as a youth like the irrepressible Swiss who amused the
_ennui_ of Gray.

Even in his old age, Montaigne was a gay, cheerful, untirin