"When with much pains this boasted learning's got,
'Tis an affront to those who have it not."
CHURCHILL: /The Author/.

THERE was something in De Montaigne's conversation, which, without
actual flattery, reconciled Maltravers to himself and his career. It
served less, perhaps, to excite than to sober and brace his mind. De
Montaigne could have made no man rash, but he could have made many men
energetic and persevering. The two friends had some points in common;
but Maltravers had far more prodigality of nature and passion about
him--had more of flesh and blood, with the faults and excellences of
flesh and blood. De Montaigne held so much to his favourite doctrine of
moral equilibrium, that he had really reduced himself in much to a
species of clockwork. As impulses are formed from habits, so the
regularity of De Montaigne's habits made his impulses virtuous and just,
and he yielded to them as often as a hasty character might have done;
but then those impulses never urged to anything speculative or daring.
De Montaigne could not go beyond a certain defined circle of action. He
had no sympathy for any reasonings based purely on the hypotheses of the
imagination: he could not endure Plato, and he was dumb to the eloquent
whispers of whatever was refining in poetry or mystical in wisdom.

Maltravers, on the contrary, not disdaining Reason, ever sought to
assist her by the Imaginative Faculty, and held all philosophy
incomplete and unsatisfactory that bounded its inquiries to the limits
of the Known and Certain. He loved the inductive process; but he
carried it out to Conjecture as well as Fact. He maintained that, by a
similar hardihood, all the triumphs of science, as well as art, had been
accomplished--that Newton, that Copernicus, would have done nothing if
they had not imagined as well as reasoned, guessed as well as