publication, as a whole, in an English dress.]


The author of the Essays was born, as he informs us himself, between
eleven and twelve o'clock in the day, the last of February 1533, at the
chateau of St. Michel de Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, esquire,
was successively first Jurat of the town of Bordeaux (1530), Under-Mayor
1536, Jurat for the second time in 1540, Procureur in 1546, and at
length Mayor from 1553 to 1556. He was a man of austere probity, who had
"a particular regard for honour and for propriety in his person and
attire . . . a mighty good faith in his speech, and a conscience and
a religious feeling inclining to superstition, rather than to the other
extreme."[Essays, ii. 2.] Pierre Eyquem bestowed great care on the
education of his children, especially on the practical side of it. To
associate closely his son Michel with the people, and attach him to those
who stand in need of assistance, he caused him to be held at the font by
persons of meanest position; subsequently he put him out to nurse with a
poor villager, and then, at a later period, made him accustom himself to
the most common sort of living, taking care, nevertheless, to cultivate
his mind, and superintend its development without the exercise of undue
rigour or constraint. Michel, who gives us the minutest account of his
earliest years, charmingly narrates how they used to awake him by the
sound of some agreeable music, and how he learned Latin, without
suffering the rod or shedding a tear, before beginning French, thanks to
the German teacher whom his father had placed near him, and who never
addressed him except in the language of Virgil and Cicero. The study of
Greek took precedence. At six years of age young Montaigne went to the
College of Guienne at Bordeaux, where he had as preceptors the most
eminent scholars of the sixteenth century, Nicolas Grouchy, Guerente,
Muret, and Buchanan. At thirteen he had passed through all the classes,