degree of nicety
and perfection. There is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more
applicable than to Montaigne, "_Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra
dixerunt_." There has been no new impulse given to thought since his time.
Among the specimens of criticisms on authors which he has left us, are
those on Virgil, Ovid, and Boccaccio, in the account of books which he
thinks worth reading, or (which is the same thing) which he finds he can
read in his old age, and which may be reckoned among the few criticisms
which are worth reading at any age.[129]

Montaigne's Essays were translated into English by Charles Cotton, who was
one of the wits and poets of the age of Charles II; and Lord Halifax, one
of the noble critics of that day, declared it to be "the book in the world
he was the best pleased with." This mode of familiar Essay-writing, free
from the trammels of the schools, and the airs of professed authorship,
was successfully imitated, about the same time, by Cowley and Sir William
Temple, in their miscellaneous Essays, which are very agreeable and
learned talking upon paper. Lord Shaftesbury, on the contrary, who aimed
at the same easy, _degage_ mode of communicating his thoughts to the
world, has quite spoiled his matter, which is sometimes valuable, by his
manner, in which he carries a certain flaunting, flowery, figurative,
flirting style of amicable condescension to the reader, to an excess more
tantalising than the most starched and ridiculous formality of the age of
James I. There is nothing so tormenting as the affectation of ease and
freedom from affectation.

The ice being thus thawed, and the barrier that kept authors at a distance
from common-sense and feeling broken through, the transition was not
difficult from Montaigne and his imitators, to our Periodical Essayists.
These last applied the same unrestrained expression of their thoughts to
the more immediate and passing scenes of life, to temporary and local
matters; and in order to discharge the invidious office of _Censor Morum_
more freely, and with less responsibility, assumed some fictitious and
humorous disguise, which, however, in a great degree corresponded to their
own peculiar habits and character. By thus concealing their own name and
person under the title of the Tatler, Spectator, etc. they were enabled to
inform us more fully of what was passing in the world, while the dramatic
contrast and ironical point of view to which the whole is subject