with "the web of our life, which is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together." It inquires what human life is and has been, to shew
what it ought to be. It follows it into courts and camps, into town and
country, into rustic sports or learned disputations, into the various
shades of prejudice or ignorance, of refinement or barbarism, into its
private haunts or public pageants, into its weaknesses and littlenesses,
its professions and its practices--before it pretends to distinguish right
from wrong, or one thing from another. How, indeed, should it do so
otherwise?

"Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit."

The writers I speak of are, if not moral philosophers, moral historians,
and that's better: or if they are both, they found the one character upon
the other; their premises precede their conclusions; and we put faith in
their testimony, for we know that it is true.

Montaigne was the first person who in his Essays led the way to this kind
of writing among the moderns. The great merit of Montaigne then was, that
he may be said to have been the first who had the courage to say as an
author what he felt as a man. And as courage is generally the effect of
conscious strength, he was probably led to do so by the richness, truth,
and force of his own observations on books and men. He was, in the truest
sense, a man of original mind, that is, he had the power of looking at
things for himself, or as they really were, instead of blindly trusting
to, and fondly repeating what others told him that they were. He got rid
of the go-cart of prejudice and affectation, with the learned lumber that
follows at their heels, because he could do without them. In taking up his
pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he
became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his
mind, in its naked simplicity and force, that he thought any ways worth
communicating. He did not, in the abstract character of an author,
undertake to say all that could be said upon a subject, but what in his
capacity as an inquirer after truth he happened to know about it. He was
neither a pedant nor a bigot. He neither supposed that he was bound to
know all things, nor that all things were bound to conform to what he had
fancied or would have them to be. In treating of men and manners, he spoke
of them as he found them, not according to preconceived noti