trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the
peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all
writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of
mind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and his
reader. He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare in
Hamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way. When he is gayest,
be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety. Singularly shrewd and
penetrating--sad, not only from sensibility of exquisite nerve and
tissue, but from meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces of
things--fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by death--sceptical,
yet clinging to what the Church taught and believed--lazily possessed
by a high ideal of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps often
to strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his own goodness,
or of the goodness of his fellows--and with all these serious elements,
an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms,
now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now blistering scorn--humour in
all its shapes, carelessly exercised on himself and his readers--with
all this variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost of
intellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his bewildering
Essays--with the exception of Rabelais, the greatest Modern
Frenchman--the creator of a distinct literary form, and to whom, down
even to our own day, even in point of subject-matter, every essayist
has been more or less indebted.

Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately essayists,--Montaigne
the greatest of the garrulous and communicative. The one gives you his
thoughts on Death, Travel, Government, and the like, and lets you make
the best of them; the other gives you his on the same subjects, but he
wraps them up in personal gossip and reminiscence. With the last it is
never Death or Travel alone: it is always Death one-fourth, and