A brawl in his own kitchen he does not consider worthy of being specially set down, but he has seen and heard everything:  it comes in his way when travelling in some remote region, and accordingly it finds a place.  He is the frankest, most outspoken of writers; and that very frankness. and outspokenness puts the reader off his guard.  If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.  The Essays are full of this trick.  The frankness is as well simulated as the grape-branches of the Grecian artist which the birds flew towards and pecked.  When Montaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, leaving his fires burning.  In other ways, too, he is an adept in putting his reader out.  He discourses with the utmost gravity, but you suspect mockery or banter in his tones.  He is serious with the most trifling subjects, and he trifles with the most serious.  “He broods eternally over his own thought,” but who can tell what his thought may be for the nonce?  He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many minds, illogical.  His sequences are not the sequences of other men.  His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale.  His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch.  He begins an essay about trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world.  And the peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of mind.  He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and his reader.  He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare in Hamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way.  When he is gayest, be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety.  Singularly shrewd and penetrating—­sad, not only from sensibility of exquisite nerve and tissue, but from meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces of things—­fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by death—­sceptical, yet clinging to what the Church taught and believed—­lazily possessed by a high ideal of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps often to strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his own goodness, or of the goodness of his fellows—­and with all these serious elements, an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms, now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now blistering scorn—­humour in all its shapes, carelessly exercised on himself and his readers—­with all this variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost of intellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his bewildering Essays—­with the exception of Rabelais, the greatest Modern Frenchman—­the creator of a distinct literary form, and to whom, down even to our own day, even in point of subject-matter, every essayist has been more or less indebted.