III.

MONTAIGNE.

Michel Montaigne was favoured by birth as few writers have been. He
was the son of a worthy nobleman who gave him, from early childhood, a
most carefully conducted education. He never tires in praising
the good qualities of his father, who had followed Francis I. to his
Italian campaigns, and, like that monarch, had conceived a preference
for those classical studies which were then again reviving. Even as
his king, he, too, wished to promote the new knowledge, and was bent
upon so initiating young Michel into it as to make him in the fullest
manner conversant with the conquests of Greece and Rome in the realm
of intellect.

In this, as a practical man who felt the greatest respect for erudition
without personally possessing a proper share of it, he allowed himself
to be thoroughly guided by 'men of learning and judgment.' He had been
told that the only reason why we do not 'attain to the greatness
of soul and intellect of the ancient Greeks and Romans was the length of
time we give to learning these languages which cost them nothing.' In
bringing up the boy, to whom the best masters were given, the procedures
chosen were therefore such that young Michel, in his sixth year, spoke
Latin thoroughly before he was able to converse in his own mother-tongue.

Montaigne relates [1] that he was much more at home on the banks of the
Tiber than on the Seine. Before he knew the Louvre, his mind's eye
rested on the Forum and the Capitol. He boasts of having always been