attach,
a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that
deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner
must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be
ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach
life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far,
that is, as the European situation permits.

C. B.
_February 1918._

MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE[1]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1913_]

Let it be understood at once that the appearance of this magnificent
work is a bibliophilic rather than a literary event. The literary event
was the publication by M. Fortunat Strowski, in 1909, of "L'Edition
Municipale," an exact transcription of that annotated copy of the 1588
quarto known to fame as "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux." What the same
eminent scholar gives us now is a reproduction in phototype of
"L'Exemplaire." Any one, therefore, who goes to these volumes in search
of literary discoveries is foredoomed to disappointment. Indeed, the
same might have been said of "L'Edition Municipale"; for the "Motheau et
Jouaust" edition, reprinted by MM. Flammarion in their "Bibliotheque
classique," was complete enough to satisfy all but the most meticulous
scholars, while for general literary purposes the edition published in
1595, three years after the author's death, by his niece, Mlle. de
Gournay, is sufficient and adequate.

Though five editions of the "Essais" were printed during their author's
life--1580 and 1582 at Bordeaux, 1584 (probably) and 1587 at Paris, 1588
at Bordeaux--to critics in search of dramatic spiritual changes a
comparative study will afford but meagre sport. To be sure, the editions
of '84 and '87 were nothing more than what we should now call reprints;
but the edition of 1588, of which "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux" is a copy,
represents so thorough an overhauling and so generous an enlarging of
the old book that some have been tempted to reckon it a new one. Yet,
though it garners the fruit of eight fertile years of travel and public
service, it reveals no startling change in the outlook, nor in what is
more important, the insight, of its author. We need feel no surprise.
Had Montaigne been the sort of man whose views and sentiments are
profoundly affected by travel or office, he would not have been the
object of that cult of which the three volumes before us are the latest,
and perhaps the most signific