hey say.
There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles
Lamb's are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a
country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His
habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress
of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he
comments upon material already existing. It is essential for him that
books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some
extent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusions
and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and
understand. And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giants
came first: Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and,
as yet, they are our best. In point of style, these essays are
different from anything that could now be produced. Not only is the
thinking different--the manner of setting forth the thinking is
different also. We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equally
of reaching the language. We can no more bring back their turns of
sentence than we can bring back their tournaments. Montaigne, in his
serious moods, has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence; and
Bacon's sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branch
beneath the weight of its fruit. Bacon seems to have written his
essays with Shakspeare's pen. There is a certain want of ease about
the old writers which has an irresistible charm. The language flows
like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet
recoil--the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to
the surface, and breaking the whole into babbling music. There is a
ceremoniousness in the mental habits of these ancients. Their
intellectual garniture is picturesque, like the garniture of their
bodies. Their thoughts are courtly and high mannered. A singular
analogy exists between the personal attire of a period and its written
style. The peaked beard, the starched collar, the quilted doublet,
have their correspondences in the high sentence and elaborate ornament
(worked upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney and
Spenser. In Pope's day men wore rapiers, and their weapons they
carried with them into literature, and frequently unsheathed them too.
They knew how to stab to the heart with an epigram. Style went out
wit