MONTAIGNE was the first great essayist of modern times, and, except in Bacon, modern times have scarcely produced a greater. His master was Plutarch, whose amiable discursiveness he reproduces in all its charm as Bacon does the intensity of Aristotle in all its severity. In the great art of digression Montaigne is unrivaled, far surpassing Plutarch, who alone could have suggested to him its possibilities. Although he frequently devotes no inconsiderable attention to what he professes to be talking about, his professions are still more frequently mere pretexts which conceal his real purpose of digressing into a hundred subjects on which he is well assured that he knows something worth saying. His essay on “Certain Verses of Virgil” not only illustrates this habit, but also the attractive egotism which enabled him to put so much of himself into his work. We learn thus, much that is of singular interest concerning him. He was the product of an educational system. His father began experimenting on him from the cradle, intending to make a great man of him. Thus he was taught Latin as one of his “mother tongues” and much of what is usually considered “higher education,” and difficult of attainment, he learned as a child without having opportunity to suspect its difficulty. In addition to this home education, he graduated from the college at Bordeaux and studied law. From 1559, when he went to the court of Francis II., until 1580, when his “Essays” appeared at Bordeaux, he amused himself, traveled, or idled, and wrote in retirement on his estate. The second volume of the “Essays” appeared in 1588. In 1581, when in Rome, he was summoned to France by the news of his election as Mayor of Bordeaux. He did not make a bad mayor as appears from the fact that he was elected for a second term, but he made no pretense of being enthusiastic in the public service. He defined the object of his “Essays” as self-expression, without regard to utility or reputation. He wished to express what he had in himself with its flaws unconcealed. His life seems to have had the same purpose as his “Essays,” and in this he does not seem to have differed in principle from Goethe, who had much the same theory of the object of existence. Montaigne, however, had nothing of Goethe’s concentrated power and intensity. He went through the world as an inquisitive but well-trained child goes through a strange flower garden, examining every flower with earnest curiosity, but plucking none. Emerson chooses him as the type of the “skeptic,” but his was not the skepticism of mere negation and unfaith. He examined all things for the pleasure the examination gave him, but he was not an agnostic and he had a singularly clear conception of the difference between the rational and the absurd. In him is drawn for the first time a clearly defined line between the mediæval and the modern. He may be called with justice the first great writer of modern prose, and he might be called the first great modern thinker but for his persistent habit of avoiding conclusions. He meditates, studies, reflects, and reasons, but think he does not,—that is, if we are to understand by “thought” that concentrated and determined effort in which every faculty of the mind co-operates to co-ordinate its knowledge and through co-ordination to reach a conclusion. Montaigne’s knowledge was vast, uncoördinated, vague, centrifugal, tending always to lose itself in the Infinite to which he so manifestly belongs. If any one else had written much of what is his, we might wish it changed for the better! Yet who could change Montaigne except for the worse?