whence he drew many of his stories, and the quotations that remain
untraced. They will add also to our knowledge of the man and of his
character, though it might seem difficult to give additional traits in
the portrait of himself which he has painted with so many minute touches.

With the exception of Dr. Johnson, there is scarcely any great man of
letters whom we are enabled to know so intimately as the Sieur de
Montaigne. He has told us all about himself; all about his age, as far
as it came under his eager and observant eyes; all about the whole world,
as far as it made part of his experience. Rousseau is not more frank,
and not half so worthy of credit, for Rousseau, like Topsy in the novel,
had a taste for "'fessing" offences that he had never committed rather
than not "'fess" at all. Montaigne strikes no such attitudes; he does
not pose, he does not so much confess as blab. His life stands before
the reader "as in a picture." We learn that his childhood was a happier
one than usually fell to the lot of children in that age when there was
but little honey smeared on the cup of learning. We know that his father
taught him Greek in a kind of sport or game, that the same parent's
relations with the fair sex were remarkable, and that he had
extraordinary strength in his thumb. For his own part, Montaigne was so
fresh and full of life that Simon Thomas, a great physician, said it
would make a decrepit old man healthy again to live in his company. One
thinks of him as a youth like the irrepressible Swiss who amused the
_ennui_ of Gray.

Even in his old age, Montaigne was a gay, cheerful, untiring traveller,
always eager to be going on, delighted with every place he visited, and
yet anxious for constant change of scene and for new experience. To be
amusingly and simply selfish is ever part of the charm of Montaigne. He
adds to his reader's pleasure in life by the keenness with which he