solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of