of a king.  Everything is important which relates to himself.  That his mustache, if stroked with his perfumed glove, or handkerchief, will retain the odour a whole day, is related with as much gravity as the loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague.  Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness.  His Essays are like a mythological landscape—­you hear the pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr leers from the thicket.  At the core of him profoundly melancholy, and consumed by a hunger for truth, he stands like Prospero in the enchanted island, and he has Ariel and Caliban to do his behests and run his errands.  Sudden alternations are very characteristic of him.  Whatever he says suggests its opposite.  He laughs at himself and his reader.  He builds his castle of cards for the mere pleasure of knocking it down again.  He is ever unexpected and surprising.  And with this curious mental activity, this play and linked dance of discordant elements, his page is alive and restless, like the constant flicker of light and shadow in a mass of foliage which the wind is stirring.

Montaigne is avowedly an egotist; and by those who are inclined to make this a matter of reproach, it should be remembered that the value of egotism depends entirely on the egotist.  If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless.  If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.  If Shakspeare had left personal revelations, how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense left them—­if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelations altogether—­the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun at once in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo.  But calling Montaigne an egotist does not go a great way to decipher him.  No writer takes the reader so much into his confidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty of confidence.  He tells us everything about himself, we think; and when all is told, it is astonishing how little we really know.  The esplanades of Montaigne’s palace are thoroughfares, men from every European country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building there is a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himself wears the key.  We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his daughter’s governess, of his cook, of his page, “who was never found guilty of telling the truth,” of his library, the Gascon harvest outside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favourite speculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us.  His daughter’s governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are never introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrate and set off the subject on which he happens to be writing.