subtle, gentle, humane, and moderate.  As an inquiring spectator, without personal ambition, he had taken for his life’s motto, “Who knows? (Que sais-je?)” Amidst the wars of religion he remained without political or religious passion.  “I am disgusted by novelty, whatever aspect it may assume, and with good reason,” he would say, “for I have seen some very disastrous effects of it.”  Outside as well as within himself, Montaigne studied mankind without regard to order and without premeditated plan.  “I have no drill-sergeant to arrange my pieces (of writing) save hap-hazard only,” he writes; “just as my ideas present themselves, I heap them together; sometimes they come rushing in a throng, sometimes they straggle single file.  I like to be seen at my natural and ordinary pace, all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens.  The parlance I like is a simple and natural parlance, the same on paper as in the mouth, a succulent and a nervous parlance, short and compact, not so much refined and finished to a hair as impetuous and brusque, difficult rather than wearisome, devoid of affectation, irregular, disconnected, and bold, not pedant-like, not preacher-like, not pleader-like.”  That fixity which Montaigne could not give to his irresolute and doubtful mind he stamped upon the tongue; it came out in his Essays supple, free, and bold; he had made the first decisive step towards the formation of the language, pending the advent of Descartes and the great literature of France.

The sixteenth century began everything, attempted everything; it accomplished and finished nothing; its great men opened the road of the future to France; but they died without having brought their work well through, without foreseeing that it was going to be completed.  The Reformation itself did not escape this misappreciation and discouragement of its age; and nowhere do they crop out in a more striking manner than in Montaigne.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Rabelais is a satirist and a cynic, he is no sceptic; there is felt circulating through his book a glowing sap of confidence and hope; fifty years later, Montaigne, on the contrary, expresses, in spite of his happy nature, in vivid, picturesque, exuberant language, only the lassitude of an antiquated age.  Henry IV. was still disputing his throne with the League and Spain.  Several times, amidst his embarrassments and his wars, the king had manifested his desire to see Montaigne; but the latter was ill, and felt “death nipping him continually in the throat or the reins.”  And he died, in fact, at his own house, on the 13th of September, 1592, without having had the good fortune to see Henry IV. in peaceable possession of the kingdom which was destined to receive from him, together with stability and peace, a return of generous hope.  All the writers of mark in the reign of Henry IV. bear the same imprint; they all yearn to get free from the chaos of those ideas and sentiments which the sixteenth century left