Montaigne has taken pains to tell us of his affection for him, and his Essays are full of the proofs of it.  “I never seriously settled myself,” he says, “to the reading of any book of solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca."[G] And in another essay he adds,—­“The familiarity I have had with these two authors, and the assistance they have lent to my age, and to my book wholly built up of what I have taken from them, oblige me to stand up for their honor."[H] And again he declares,—­“The hooks I chiefly use to form my opinions are Plutarch, since he became French, and Seneca."[I] The genial humanity and liberal wisdom of Plutarch claimed the sympathy of Montaigne, while his discursive style and love of story-telling suited no less the taste of his disciple.  Montaigne, as it were, makes Plutarch a modern, and uses his books to illustrate the passing times.  He introduces him to new characters, and reads his judgment upon them.  He finds in him a hundred things that others had not seen.  It is a wide step from Montaigne to Rousseau, and yet, spite of the naturalness of the one and the artificiality of the other, there were some points of resemblance between them, and they harmonize in their love for a common master, Rousseau has written of Plutarch as Montaigne felt,—­“Dans le petit nombre de livres que je lis quelquefois encore, Plutarque est celui qui m’attache et me profite le plus.  Ce fut la premiere lecture de mon enfance, et sera la derniere de ma vieillesse; c’est presque le seul auteur que je n’ai jamais lu sans en tirer quelque fruit."[J] Plutarch’s Lives was one of the few books recommended to Catharine II. of Russia, as she herself tells us, wherewith to solace and instruct herself during the first wretched years of her miserable married life.  It is, perhaps, not impossible to trace in some passages of her later life the results of what she then read.

[Footnote G:  Essays. Book I., Chapter 25.]

[Footnote H:  Essays, II. 23.]

[Footnote I:  Ibid. II. 10.]

[Footnote J:  Les Reveries d’un Promeneur Solitaire. Quatrieme Promenade.]

And thus we might go on accumulating the names of men and women whom all the world knows, who have confessed their obligations to the old biographer,—­philosophers like Bacon, warriors like Bussy d’Amboise, poets like Wordsworth; while many a one has owed much to him who has made no open acknowledgment of his debt.  Montaigne somewhere complains of the unlicensed stealings from his author; and Udall, in his Preface to the Apophthegms of Erasmus, declares,—­“It is a thing scarcely believable, how much, and how boldly as well, the common writers that from time to time have copied out his [Plutarch’s] works, as also certain that have thought themselves liable to control and amend all men’s doings, have taken upon them in this author, who ought with all reverence to be handled of them, and with all fear to have been preserved from altering, depraving, or corrupting."[K]