ant, monument. That is a peculiar man whose
crossings and dottings and deletions are judged worthy of photographic
record by the authorities of a great industrial city.

Montaigne was thoroughly normal, not to say commonplace, in his ability
to pass through foreign countries without suffering anything so alarming
as a conversion. He left home on his travels in Germany, Switzerland,
and Italy, a learned and extremely intelligent man of affairs, who had
taken, rather late in life perhaps, to playing the part of a French
country gentleman; he returned with a store of acute observations and
pleasant anecdotes, a little older, a little mellower, otherwise
unchanged. Of those magically expanded views, those sudden yawnings of
sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not
by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find
scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was
unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary
sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with
difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad
was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne
was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have
confirmed in his native predispositions and prejudices. As he grew older
he grew vainer, rather more garrulous, fonder of his favourite authors,
and a little less open-minded; and his travels were nothing more than a
long and agreeable stage on the longest journey. There are people for
whom travel provides nothing but supplementary evidence in a cause that
has already been judged. Those who can find nothing good at home will
smack their lips over the sourest wines abroad; and "Old Meynell" need
not have left his garden to arrive at that conclusion commended by Dr.
Johnson: "For anything I see, foreigners are fools." Montaigne was not
of these, either; too normal to be above patriotism, he was too proud
and too intelligent to be blindly patriotic.

Montaigne was the ideal man-in-the-street. We do not mean that he was
typical; but if there are men-in-the-street in heaven, they will
resemble Montaigne. And though we rank a third-rate saint or artist a
great deal higher than a first-rate good fellow, we recognize that there
is something about any kind of perfection that dazzles even those who
are most alive to its essential inferiority. Montaigne is the exemplar
of good fee