parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living." But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.

"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself."