ons and
abstract dogmas; and he began by teaching us what he himself was. In
criticising books he did not compare them with rules and systems, but told
us what he saw to like or dislike in them. He did not take his standard of
excellence "according to an exact scale" of Aristotle, or fall out with a
work that was good for any thing, because "not one of the angles at the
four corners was a right one." He was, in a word, the first author who was
not a bookmaker, and who wrote not to make converts of others to
established creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own mind of the
truth of things. In this respect we know not which to be most charmed
with, the author or the man. There is an inexpressible frankness and
sincerity, as well as power, in what he writes. There is no attempt at
imposition or concealment, no juggling tricks or solemn mouthing, no
laboured attempts at proving himself always in the right, and every body
else in the wrong; he says what is uppermost, lays open what floats at the
top or the bottom of his mind, and deserves Pope's character of him, where
he professes to

"----pour out all as plain
As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne."[128]

He does not converse with us like a pedagogue with his pupil, whom he
wishes to make as great a blockhead as himself, but like a philosopher and
friend who has passed through life with thought and observation, and is
willing to enable others to pass through it with pleasure and profit. A
writer of this stamp, I confess, appears to me as much superior to a
common bookworm, as a library of real books is superior to a mere
book-case, painted and lettered on the outside with the names of
celebrated works. As he was the first to attempt this new way of writing,
so the same strong natural impulse which prompted the undertaking, carried
him to the end of his career. The same force and honesty of mind which
urged him to throw off the shackles of custom and prejudice, would enable
him to complete his triumph over them. He has left little for his
successors to achieve in the way of just and original speculation on human
life. Nearly all the thinking of the two last centuries of that kind which
the French denominate _morale observatrice_, is to be found in Montaigne's
Essays: there is the germ, at least, and generally much more. He sowed the
seed and cleared away the rubbish, even where others have reaped the
fruit, or cultivated and decorated the soil to a greater