as he could; he employed in a manner useful to all alike the gifts of sincerity and conciliation; the personal attraction with which nature endowed him was a quality of the highest value in the management of men.  He preferred to warn men of evil rather than to take on himself the honour of repressing it:  “Is there any one who desires to be sick that he may see his physician’s practice?  And would not that physician deserve to be whipped who should wish the plague amongst us that he might put his art into practice?” Far from desiring that trouble and disorder in the affairs of the city should rouse and honour his govern ment, he had ever willingly, he said, contributed all he could to their tranquillity and ease.  He is not of those whom municipal honours intoxicate and elate, those “dignities of office” as he called them, and of which all the noise “goes from one cross-road to another.”  If he was a man desirous of fame, he recognised that it was of a kind greater than that.  I do not know, however, if even in a vaster field he would have changed his method and manner of proceed ing.  To do good for the public imperceptibly would always seem to him the ideal of skill and the culminating point of happiness.  “He who will not thank me,” he said, “for the order and quiet calm that has accompanied my administration, cannot, however, deprive me of the share that belongs to me by the title of my good fortune.”  And he is inexhaustible in describing in lively and graceful expressions the kinds of effective and imperceptible services he believed he had rendered—­services greatly superior to noisy and glorious deeds:  “Actions which come from the workman’s hand carelessly and noiselessly have most charm, that some honest man chooses later and brings from their obscurity to thrust them into the light for their own sake.”  Thus fortune served Montaigne to perfection, and even in his administration of affairs, in difficult conjunctures, he never had to belie his maxim, nor to step very far out of the way of life he had planned:  “For my part I commend a gliding, solitary, and silent life.”  He reached the end of his magistracy almost satisfied with himself, having accomplished what he had promised himself, and much more than he had promised others.

The letter lately discovered by M. Horace de Viel-Castel corroborates the chapter in which Montaigne exhibits and criticises himself in the period of his public life.  “That letter,” says M. Payen, “is entirely on affairs.  Montaigne is mayor; Bordeaux, lately disturbed, seems threatened by fresh agitations; the king’s lieutenant is away.  It is Wednesday, May 22, 1585; it is night, Montaigne is wakeful, and writes to the governor of the province.”  The letter, which is of too special and local an interest to be inserted here, may be summed up in these words:—­Montaigne regretted the absence of Marshal de Matignon, and feared the consequences of its prolongation; he was keeping, and would continue to keep, him acquainted