with his essays in French philology, as well as Ronsard and his friends by their classical crusade.  Simultaneously with the language there was being created a public intelligent, inquiring, and eager.  Scarcely had the translation of Plutarch by Amyot appeared, when it at once became, as Montaigne says, “the breviary of women and of ignoramuses.”  “God’s life, my love,” wrote Henry IV. to Mary de’ Medici, “you could not have sent me any more agreeable news than of the pleasure you have taken in reading.  Plutarch has a smile for me of never-failing freshness; to love him is to love me, for he was during a long while the instructor of my tender age; my good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who set so great store on my good deportment, and did not want me to be (that is what she used to say) an illustrious ignoramus, put that book into my hands, though I was then little more than a child at the breast.  It has been like my conscience to me, and has whispered into my ear many good hints and excellent maxims for my behavior and for the government of my affairs.”

Thanks to Amyot, Plutarch “had become a Frenchman:”  Montaigne would not have been able to read him easily in Greek.  Indifferent to the Reformation, which was too severe and too affirmative for him, Montaigne, “to whom Latin had been presented as his mother-tongue, rejoiced in the Renaissance without becoming a slave to it, or intoxicated with it like Rabelais or Ronsard.  “The ideas I had naturally formed for myself about man,” he says, “I confirmed and fortified by the authority of others and by the sound examples of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment in conformity.”  Born in 1533, at the castle of Montaigne in Perigord, and carefully brought up by “the good father God had given him,” Michael de Montaigne was, in his childhood, “so heavy, lazy, and sleepy, that he could not be roused from sloth, even for the sake of play.”  He passed several years in the Parliament of Bordeaux, but “he had never taken a liking to jurisprudence, though his father had steeped him in it, when quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men of law had muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary.”  He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie, an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux.  “If I am pressed to declare why I loved him,” Montaigne used to say, “I feel that it can only be expressed by answering, because he was he, and I was I.”  Montaigne gave up the Parliament, and travelled in Switzerland and Italy, often stopping at Paris, and gladly returning to his castle of Montaigne, where he wrote down what he had seen; “hungering for self-knowledge,” inquiring, indolent, without ardor for work, an enemy of all constraint, he was at the same time frank and