In fact, he took very little part in the tragic events which upset the whole country during his lifetime.

Apparently Montaigne experienced only moderate joys and sorrows, and was incapable of any others. He married, at the age of thirty-three, a woman who evidently fulfilled the condition of "mediocrity" which he sought in everything; and that he was an indifferent father we can judge from the fact that he does not know exactly how many children he had. For two persons, however, he appears to have had a sincere affection for his father, and for his friend La Boétie.

Two editions of his essays were published by himself in 1580 and in 1588; but the last, and probably the best, original edition we have is the one published by Mdlle. de Gournay in 1595, three years after the death of Montaigne, from a copy revised and enlarged by the author during the four years preceding his death.

Though some readers of Montaigne's time were interested in his essays, hardly any understood their depth. At first sight his book seems made up of thoughts thrown at random on paper when they chanced to come to him. The contents of his chapters do not always respond to their title. He jumps from one subject to another, or, rather, he passes from one to another, following one idea for a time and then the next idea that comes to his mind. Yet, even when he is playing truant, he pursues a definite aim, and here he is on the same ground as the great Molière. Man is all he looks at, all he paints. And man, being eternally the same, it is not only a picture of his contemporaries that he gives us, but just as much a picture of our own century in a different garb. The great author, like the great artist, is never really old-fashioned in the eyes of the generations that follow him. This is the

real test of genius, and Montaigne stands it as well as Molière, as well as Shakespeare.

Even in his days those who read the essays were vaguely awakened to the fact that the study of man is the greatest of all studies; that the exact painting of the struggle between good and evil is more thrillingly interesting than the description of fictitious beings, impossible heroes. In the next century we can already see the influence of Montaigne in the struggle between passion and duty which we find in the French classic tragedy and in the character studies of Molière; but it is especially in the eighteenth century that we can observe to what an extent the philosophers strengthened their arguments against tyranny with the works of La Boétie and Montaigne. And to-day, at the close of the nineteenth century, with all the knowledge acquired since the essays were written, men and books are still influenced by the so-called careless philosopher of the sixteenth century, and we can all, even the wisest of us, repeat his motto: "Que sais-je?"-" What Do I Know?"

Every man, says Montaigne, "bears the whole form of human condition," and therefore by studying himself, as a type of the species, he was bound to see man as he is. And how did he see him? I will quote here one of our critics, who says:

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Man, as Montaigne understood him, is an animal who is distinguished from the others by a singular and remarkable elasticity. He is superior because he is illimited. The other animals are penned up in their nature that is to say, in the limits of their needs of nutrition and reproduction. Man has no prescribed limits. How high or how low he can go no one here below can know. He obeys nature—and, also, custom,

which is often directly opposed to nature. He obeys custom-and also personal conscience, which not seldom is opposed to both nature and custom."

Giving him such an illimited elasticity for good or evil, we can easily imagine how intensely interesting the study of man must have been to one who belongs to that class of beings who by temperament can observe the golden mean, and who on that account can see more clearly both what is going on above and below them.

If, however, in the essays there is a remarkable study of man as he was at the time of Rome and Greece, as he was in the sixteenth century, and as he should be in all centuries, Montaigne's work, nevertheless, will not rank with some of the great productions of the human mind because his horror of all effort prevented him from making a well-composed and welldefined whole. This lack of energy had, at least, one good result. It gave him that love for a quiet life and for books which kept him away from the strifes of the period and enabled him keenly to observe himself and others.

Strange to say, his very faults contributed to his value as an author, for while Ronsard and La Pléiade were laboriously striving to create artificially, by the intaking of words coined from Latin and Greek, a language worthy of a great literature, Montaigne, avoiding work, ingeniously gave us a most precious document of the language of the time, purified by perfect good taste and enriched by the large vocabulary of a learned, intellectual man. In his capricious review of a large number of subjects we find a deep knowledge of life and of the human heart, and this knowledge is not given to us in the pedantic fashion of most moralists, but with an amiable frankness which gives such a

charm to his essays that they are still read to-day, not only with profit but with pleasure.

Montaigne has been called a skeptic-in fact, he has remained the most popular representative of skeptical indifference. This belief is due to Pascal, and later to the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, perhaps purposely, misunderstood his philosophy. There is certainly no trace of skepticism in his chapters devoted to the education of children. His socalled skepticism consists in saying that metaphysical truths are inaccessible and that we must not seek them.

By the influence of his essays on the thought of the following centuries, by his picture of man in every conceivable phase of life, by his language so distinctly personal, Montaigne is a precious and unique representation of the sixteenth century and its literature.

EDOUARD P. BAILLOT.

Northwestern University.

SELECTED STUDIES.

I.

Although the literature of the fifteenth century in France is not in itself of the greatest importance, and though it was marked by many signs of decadence, yet, side by side with these, there may be noted in it other signs pointing to a new growth of letters. The great movement which is called the renaissance, and which resulted mainly, though not wholly, from the recurrence to Greek and Roman literature and art as models, was working in Italy throughout the century, and the close connection between French and Italians

resulting from the wars of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. was certain to spread its influence northward. Independently of this the studies of native Frenchmen pointed in the same direction. Moreover, in the fifteenth-century literature of France are to be found other promising signs. In the works of Antoine de la Salle satire assumed a wider range and a more polished tone than in those of the fabliau writers. The passion for dramatic compositions, which enabled spectators to sit out mysteries that took weeks in the performance, was the certain forerunner of a great development of this class of literature. The gradual disuse of the allegorical fashion of love-poetry promised something more personal and genuine in this direction, as in others the discovery of new countries promoted a general spirit of adventure and inquiry in intellectual as well as commercial matters; the invention of printing gave an otherwise impossible opportunity to this spirit; and, lastly, the great religious revolution, of which Erasmus was the forerunner and Luther the author, gave the amplest exercise to men's power of speaking and writing. From the very first the reformers fought the battle of the vernacular against the learned tongues, both as a matter of religious belief and of worldly prudence, for it was by the use of the vernacular that they gained adherents. In France, especially, the literary influence of the reformation was immense, and it would hardly be too much to say that the "Psalms of Marot and the "Institutions" of Calvin set for the first time the example of works destined to exercise a wide popular influence in French verse and in French prose.—Saintsbury.