g traveller,
always eager to be going on, delighted with every place he visited, and
yet anxious for constant change of scene and for new experience. To be
amusingly and simply selfish is ever part of the charm of Montaigne. He
adds to his reader's pleasure in life by the keenness with which he
relished his own existence, and savoured every little incident as a man
relishes the bouquet of wine. Without selfishness, how can this be
managed? and without perfect simplicity and the good faith on which he
prided himself, how could Montaigne, how could Pepys, have enriched the
world as they have done? His essays are among the few works that really
and literally make life more opulent with accumulated experience,
criticism, reflection, humour. He gives of his rich nature, his lavish
exuberance of character, out of that fresh and puissant century to this
rather weary one, just as his society in youth might have been given to
the sick old man.

Besides what he has to give in this manner, Montaigne seems to express
French character, to explain the French genius and the French way of
looking at life, more clearly and completely than any other writer. He
has at bottom the intense melancholy, the looking forward to the end of
all, which is the ground-note of the poetry of Villon, and of Ronsard, as
of the prose of Chateaubriand. The panelled library in Montaigne's
chateau was carven with mottoes, which were to be charms against too
great fear of death. "For my part," he says, "if a man could by any
means avoid death, were it by hanging a calf-skin on his limbs, I am one
that would not be ashamed of the shift." Happy it is, he thinks, that we
do not, as a rule, meet death on a sudden, any more than we encounter the
death of youth in one day. But this is only the dark background of the
enjoyment of life, to which Montaigne clings, as he says, "even too
eagerly." Merely to live, merely to muse over this spectacle of the
world, simply to feel, even if the thing felt be agony, and to reflect on
the pain, and on how it may best be borne--this is enough for Montaigne.
This is his philosophy, reconciling in a way the maxims of the schools
that divided the older worlds, the theories of the Stoic and wiser
Epicurean. To make each moment yield all that it has of experience, and
of reflection on that experience, is his system of existence. Acting on
this idea, all contrasts of great and petty, mean and divine, in human
nature do no