Montesquieu, in a memorable exclamation, said:  “The four great poets, Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Montaigne!” How true it is of Montaigne!  No French writer, including the poets proper, had so lofty an idea of poetry as he had.  “From my earliest childhood,” he said, “poetry had power over me to transport and transpierce me.”  He considered, and therein shows penetration, that “we have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry.  It is easier to write than to understand.”  In itself and its pure beauty his poetry defies definition; whoever desired to recognise it at a glance and discern of what it actually consisted would see no more than “the brilliance of a flash of lightning.”  In the constitution and continuity of his style, Montaigne is a writer very rich in animated, bold similes, naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very centre, in its interior, that join and bind it.  In that respect, fully obeying his own genius, he has gone beyond and some times exceeded the genius of language.  His concise, vigorous and always forcible style, by its poignancy, emphasises and repeats the meaning.  It may be said of his style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor, a style that has only been successfully employed by the French once, by Montaigne himself.  If we wanted to imitate him, supposing we had the power and were naturally fitted for it—­if we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns—­it would be necessary to force our language to be more powerful, and poetically more complete, than is usually our custom.  Style a la Montaigne, consistent, varied in the series and assortment of the metaphors, exacts the creation of a portion of the tissue itself to hold them.  It is absolutely necessary that in places the woof should be enlarged and extended, in order to weave into it the metaphor; but in defining him I come almost to write like him.  The French language, French prose, which in fact always savours more or less of conversation, does not, naturally, possess the resources and the extent of canvas necessary for a continued picture:  by the side of an animated metaphor it will often exhibit a sudden lacuna and some weak places.  In filling this by boldness and invention as Montaigne did, in creating, in imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished.  Style a la Montaigne would, in many respects, be openly at war with that of Voltaire.  It could only come into being and flourish in the full freedom of the sixteenth century, in a frank, ingenious, jovial, keen, brave, and refined mind, of an unique stamp, that even for that time, seemed free and somewhat licentious, and that was inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources.