h the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in their shoes. We
write more easily now; but in our easy writing there is ever a taint of
flippancy: our writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awake
are to doublet and plumed hat.

Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, and
likeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon was
constitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom presses
the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its
serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives
amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too
familiar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial.
When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious
entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens,
he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden
"which is indeed prince-like." To read over his table of contents, is
like reading over a roll of peers' names. We have, taking them as they
stand, essays treating _Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and
Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism,
Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel_,--a book plainly to
lie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurture
the noblest natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on.
Montaigne was different from all this. His table of contents reads, in
comparison, like a medley, or a catalogue of an auction. He was quite
as wise as Bacon; he could look through men quite as clearly, and
search them quite as narrowly; certain of his moods were quite as
serious, and in one corner of his heart he kept a yet profounder
melancholy; but he was volatile, a humourist, and a gossip. He could
be dignified enough on great occasions, but dignity and great occasions
bored him. He could stand in the presence with propriety enough, but
then he got out of the presence as rapidly as possible. When, in the
thirty-eighth year of his age, he--somewhat world-weary, and with more
scars on his heart than he cared to discover--retired to his chateau,
he placed his library "in the great tower overlooking the entrance to
the court," and over the central rafter he inscribed in large letters
the device--"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND; I PAUSE; I EXAMINE." When he began
to write his Essays he had no great desire to shine as an author; he
wrote simply