The French National Library has recently, as it is said, made an acquisition of great value and interest.  The books, and better still the notes, of Montaigne, the essayist, have been bought up at the not very exorbitant price of thirty-six thousand francs.  The volumes are the beautiful editions of the sixteenth century—­the age of great scholars and of printers, like the Estiennes, who were at once men of learning and of taste.  It is almost certain that they must be enriched with marginal notes of Montaigne’s, and the marginal notes of a great man add even more to the value of a book than the scribblings of circulating library readers detract from its beauty.  There is always something characteristic in a man’s treatment of his books.  Coleridge’s marginalia on borrowed works, according to Lamb, were an ornament of value to his friends, if they were lucky enough to get the books back again.  Poe’s marginalia were of exquisite neatness, though in their printed form they were not very interesting.  Thackeray’s seem mostly to have taken the shape of slight sketches in illustration of the matter.  Scaliger’s notes converted a classic into a new and precious edition of one example.  Casaubon’s, on the other hand, were mere scratches and mnemonic lines and blurs, with which he marked his passage through a book, as roughly as the American woodsman “blazes” his way through a forest.  “None could read the comment save himself,” and the text was disfigured.  We may be sure that Montaigne’s marginalia are of a very different value.  As he walked up and down in his orchard, or in his library, beneath the rafters engraved with epicurean maxims, he jotted his thoughts hastily on the volume in his hand—­on the Pliny, or Suetonius, or Livy.  His library was probably not a large one, for he had but a few favourite authors, the Latin historians, moralists, and anecdotists, and for mere amusement Terence and Catullus, Boccaccio and Rabelais.  His thoughts fell asleep, he says, if he was not walking about, and his utter want of memory made notes and note-books necessary to him.  He who could not remember the names of the most ordinary tools used in agriculture, nor the difference between oats and barley, could never keep in his head his enormous stock of classical anecdotes and modern instances.  His thoughts got innocently confused with his recollections, and his note-books will probably show whence he drew many of his stories, and the quotations that remain untraced.  They will add also to our knowledge of the man and of his character, though it might seem difficult to give additional traits in the portrait of himself which he has painted with so many minute touches.