and set off the subject on which he happens to be writing. A brawl in
his own kitchen he does not consider worthy of being specially set
down, but he has seen and heard everything: it comes in his way when
travelling in some remote region, and accordingly it finds a place. He
is the frankest, most outspoken of writers; and that very frankness.
and outspokenness puts the reader off his guard. If you wish to
preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. The Essays are full of
this trick. The frankness is as well simulated as the grape-branches
of the Grecian artist which the birds flew towards and pecked. When
Montaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, leaving his
fires burning. In other ways, too, he is an adept in putting his
reader out. He discourses with the utmost gravity, but you suspect
mockery or banter in his tones. He is serious with the most trifling
subjects, and he trifles with the most serious. "He broods eternally
over his own thought," but who can tell what his thought may be for the
nonce? He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many
minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men.
His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy
tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his
banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about
trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the
peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all
writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of
mind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and his
reader. He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare in
Hamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way. When he is gayest,
be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety. Singularly shrewd and
penetrating--sad, not only from sensibility of exquisite nerve and
tissue, but from meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces of
things--fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by death--sceptical,
yet clinging to what the Church taught and believed--lazily possessed
by a high ideal of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps often
to strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his own goodness,
or of the goodness of his fellows--and with all these serious elements,
an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms,
now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now b