refined in parts, although in some aspects it was rough, violent, and seemingly coarse.  What it particularly lacked was taste, if by taste is meant the faculty of clear and perfect selection, the extrication of the elements of the beautiful.  But in the succeeding centuries taste quickly became distaste.  If, however, in literature it was crude, in the arts properly so-called, in those of the hand and the chisel, the sixteenth century, even in France, is, in the quality of taste, far greater than the two succeeding centuries:  it is neither meagre nor massive, heavy nor distorted.  In art its taste is rich and of fine quality,—­at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern, special to itself and original.  In the region of morals it is unequal and mixed.  It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all their crudity, an age of philosophy and fanaticism, of scepticism and strong faith.  Everything was at strife and in collision; nothing was blended and united.  Everything was in ferment; it was a period of chaos; every ray of light caused a storm.  It was not a gentle age, or one we can call an age of light, but an age of struggle and combat.  What distinguished Montaigne and made a phenomenon of him was, that in such an age he should have possessed moderation, caution, and order.

Born on the last day of February, 1533, taught the ancient languages as a game while still a child, waked even in his cradle by the sound of musical instruments, he seemed less fitted for a rude and violent epoch than for the commerce and sanctuary of the muses.  His rare good sense corrected what was too ideal and poetical in his early education; but he preserved the happy faculty of saying everything with freshness and wit.  Married, when past thirty, to an estimable woman who was his companion for twenty-eight years, he seems to have put passion only into friendship.  He immortalised his love for Etienne de la Boetie, whom he lost after four years of the sweetest and closest intimacy.  For some time counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux, Montaigne, before he was forty, retired from public life, and flung away ambition to live in his tower of Montaigne, enjoying his own society and his own intellect, entirely given up to his own observations and thoughts, and to the busy idleness of which we know all the sports and fancies.  The first edition of the Essays appeared in 1580, consisting of only two books, and in a form representing only the first rough draft of what we have in the later editions.  The same year Montaigne set out on a voyage to Switzerland and Italy.  It was during that voyage that the aldermen of Bordeaux elected him mayor of their town.  At first he refused and excused himself, but warned that it would be well to accept, and enjoined by the king, he took the office, “the more beautiful,” he said, “that there was neither renunciation nor gain other than the honour of its performance.”  He filled the office for four years, from July 1582 to July