he proofs of it. "I never
seriously settled myself," he says, "to the reading of any book of
solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."[G] And in another essay he
adds,--"The familiarity I have had with these two authors, and the
assistance they have lent to my age, and to my book wholly built up of
what I have taken from them, oblige me to stand up for their honor."[H]
And again he declares,--"The hooks I chiefly use to form my opinions are
Plutarch, since he became French, and Seneca."[I] The genial humanity
and liberal wisdom of Plutarch claimed the sympathy of Montaigne, while
his discursive style and love of story-telling suited no less the taste
of his disciple. Montaigne, as it were, makes Plutarch a modern, and
uses his books to illustrate the passing times. He introduces him to new
characters, and reads his judgment upon them. He finds in him a hundred
things that others had not seen. It is a wide step from Montaigne
to Rousseau, and yet, spite of the naturalness of the one and the
artificiality of the other, there were some points of resemblance
between them, and they harmonize in their love for a common master,
Rousseau has written of Plutarch as Montaigne felt,--"Dans le petit
nombre de livres que je lis quelquefois encore, Plutarque est celui
qui m'attache et me profite le plus. Ce fut la premiere lecture de mon
enfance, et sera la derniere de ma vieillesse; c'est presque le seul
auteur que je n'ai jamais lu sans en tirer quelque fruit."[J] Plutarch's
Lives was one of the few books recommended to Catharine II. of Russia,
as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during
the first wretched years of her miserable married life. It is, perhaps,
not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results
of what she then read.

[Footnote G: _Essays._ Book I., Chapter 25.]

[Footnote H: _Essays_, II. 23.]

[Footnote I: _Ibid._ II. 10.]

[Footnote J: _Les Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire._ Quatrieme
Promenade.]

And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom
all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old
biographer,--philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d'Amboise,
poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has
made no open acknowledgment of his debt. Montaigne somewhere complains
of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface
to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,--"It is a thi