should not grudge him his meed.  It is in this indirect way that great writers take their place among the forces of the world.  In the long run, genius and wit side with the right cause.  And the man fighting against wrong to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps he is himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the metaphor of that, the song of the other, although the writers themselves professed indifference, or were even counted as belonging to the enemy.

Montaigne’s hold on his readers arises from many causes.  There is his frank and curious self-delineation; that interests, because it is the revelation of a very peculiar nature.  Then there is the positive value of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour.  Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never a separate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man’s possession, and which bears the same relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up the orb of the sun.  And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.  In literature, the charm of style is indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life.  In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it.  Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.  “But Shadwell never deviates into sense,” for instance.  Young Roscius, in his provincial barn, will repeat you the great soliloquy of Hamlet, and although every word may be given with tolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace as himself; the great actor speaks it, and you “read Shakspeare as by a flash of lightning.”  And it is in Montaigne’s style, in the strange freaks and turnings of his thought, his constant surprises, his curious alternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, familiar form of address, and the grace with which everything is done, that his charm lies, and which makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as the first.

And on style depends the success of the essayist.  Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way.  Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa.  The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.  Love is an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in the downcast eyes and blushes of young maidens.  And so, although he fluttered in Eden, Cupid is young to-day.  If Montaigne had lived in Dreamthorp, as I am now living, had he written essays as I am now writing them, his English Essays would have been as good as his Gascon ones.  Looking on, the country cart would not for nothing have passed him on the road to market, the setting sun would be arrested in its splendid colours, the idle chimes of the church would be translated into a thoughtful music.  As it is, the village life goes on, and there is no result.  My sentences are not much more brilliant than the speeches of the clowns; in my book there is little more life than there is in the market-place on the days when there is no market.