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the boy's bodily development first came under notice. That he might not acquire the silken proportions of a Sir Paris was his chief object. He was accordingly, as he afterwards tells us, provided with god-parents of the meanest fortune, and taken from the cradle to be nursed at the breast of a common villager. Hardy as was his infantine training, it does not, however, seem to have produced the usual fruit. Years after, the essayist declared that he could not hear the rattle of an arquebus without starting, or see a chicken's neck pulled off without trouble, or endure the cry of a hare in his dog's teeth. The next consideration was the subject of education. It had formed one of the principal topics of discussion at the chateau on more than one occasion. The inconvenience of the ordinary method was particularly insisted upon, and more than one commentator on Seneca and Aristotle had pronounced that the tedious course by which the languages were acquired was the sole cause the moderns could not arrive at the perfection of Athenians and Romans. It is probable, too, that he had read Rabelais, and been struck with the manner in which he makes the youthful Garagantua discuss the gossip of Pliny and Athenæus over his intervals of quince marmalade.

At any rate he hit upon a pleasant project for making his son a good classic. He had him, 'before he could speak,' delivered into the hands of a German tutor, imported expressly from his own country, at a very large salary. Two assistants were associated with him, whose conversations were only to be held in the dialect of Cicero and Terence. The very household were converted into scholars to forward the education of the youthful pedant. Not a man-servant nor a maid-servant in the domain that had not a scrap of dog-Latin ready to respond to the lisp of their young master. The whole village threatened to lose its native tongue, and when the essayist wrote, stable-boys and artisans still made use of terms that had less of Gascon than Roman in them.

To the acquisition of Greek the road was not so level. To puzzle the son's brains was not the father's design. A superstition in the matter of children's weakness of brain had already suggested to him the process of awakening the boy to the sound of the flute or the violin. It was with a similar precaution that he now devised the method of tossing out parisyllabics and imparisyllabics on the table after the manner of those who play at chess. The conception, however worthy of the intuitive system of Pestalozzi himself, was an acknowledged failure. 'Of Greek,' said Montaigne, in one of those singular fits of candour which have thrown a charm over his Confessions, not

surpassed by Rousseau's, 'I had never anything but a smattering.' Eventually the good man's eccentricity fairly succumbed to the force of common opinion, and at the age of six young Montaigne was despatched to study the humanities at the college of Guienne, at that time, according to the testimony of contemporary historians, the best and most flourishing in France. Here, however, his early training stood him in good stead. He was at once, on his entrance, preferred to the first form, and at thirteen he had gone through the academical course. The study of others was his amusement, and whilst other boys were reading the adventures of Amadis he would slip away from the tennis-court or the morris-dance to pour over the transformations of Ovid, and enjoy the jokes of Plautus. His schoolfellows were amazed that a lad who could not speak Perigordian or French should act the Latin plays of the great Muretus with the spirit of a young Roscius, and make scholars like Buchanan look to their scholarship.

There was great danger of Montaigne's falling a victim to this youthful precocity. He was in a fair way of turning out a prodigy or a pedant. Happily for posterity his natural disposition completely neutralized the effect of his training. Had we not his own repeated assurance, it would be difficult to believe that he was as indolently inclined as he professed to be. He seems to have possessed very little of the materials for making a student. His wit, he complains, was slothful, going no faster than it was led; his understanding slow, his invention languishing. The least cloud arrested his progress. He never proposed to himself a riddle, be it never so easy, that he could find out. The smallest subtlety was in danger of gravelling him. In games where quickness and originality are required, nothing but the commonest points could he venture to apprehend. Chess, he particularly tells us, he hated, as far too grave and serious a diversion for him. His application was singularly lethargic. If he turned over a book he did not study it, and the books that he did turn over must be such as are pleasant and easy, and tickle his fancy. If one book did not please him, he took another, and even that he never meddled with, but at such times as he was weary of doing nothing. Anything that did not come to him as kindly as his Decameron or Pantagruel, he fairly threw aside. To bite his nails about difficulties was no part of his philosophy. He never travelled, indeed, without books, but days and sometimes months passed over without his looking at them. His very Latin, which was to him as his mother tongue, he soon lost the use of speaking or writing, though so strong was the force of habit, that on one occasion, after a lapse

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of forty years, on seeing his father swoon, he involuntarily caught himself using Latin interjections. One of the circumstances which must undoubtedly have contributed to retard his reputation was his wonderful deficiency of memory. His defect in that faculty is, according to his own account, almost incredible. He would sometimes take up a book for new, which but a year before he had scribbled all over with notes and comments. His library was situated in a corner of his house. If he had anything in his head, he could not go across the basscourt that led to it without forgetting it. In speaking, the slightest digression from the subject left him bewildered. Verses that any of his playmates would have learnt in twenty minutes, took him three hours to acquire by heart. The very names of his servants were beyond his powers of retention. He could tell that they had three syllables, that they sounded harsh, that they began or ended with such or such a letter, but that was all. He sometimes fancied that he should resemble that Messala of whom Pliny, in his Natural History, has written, that he forgot his own name. It more than once befel him to forget the watchword he had a few hours previously given or received, and in spite of Cicero's experience, to put his purse in a lock-up that afterwards escaped his recollection. Sometimes his memory played him tricks similar to those that are recorded of Wycherly, and he would either forget his own compositions and writings, or appropriate those of a brother author's for his own.

There was nothing, indeed, in his lazy, sluggish constitution, by which a careless observer could have intimated that the name of Montaigne was destined to form an epoch in the history of French literature and French philosophy. Liberty and laziness were, he says, his predominating qualities. Nothing was more distasteful to him than a matter of deliberation. He had rather have been cheated of four hundred crowns than be at the trouble of overlooking his accounts. The idea of consultation broke his rest. The very correction of his writings was a task beyond him. He could not bring himself even to revise his orthography or his punctuation. He had been solicited to write the history of his own times. Had he acceded to the request, it is probable that De Thou would never be taken from the book-shelf. But he refused. Not for the glory of Sallust would he submit himself to a labour of so much assiduity and perseverance. His bodily functions were apparently well attuned to this heavy disposition. His person was small, lower than the middle stature, though he does not forget to add that Aristotle had said little men are pretty, and that the Grand Duke Francis Maria de Medici was his height. But though strong and well knit he

never possessed the agility of his father. The most awkward page in his household could beat him in dancing, tennis, or wrestling. Swimming or fencing he never could learn. His hands were so clumsy that he could never so much as write so as to read what he had written.* He knew about as much of making a pen, or folding a letter, as a fishwife on the Petit Pont, and he could no more carve a capon than he could saddle a horse or lure a hawk. 'Extremely idle, both by nature and art,' are his own words, 'I would as willingly lend a man my blood as my pains.' His ignorance of common things was amazing. He had had his estate in his own hands since his predecessor had left him to succeed, yet he could not cast up the accounts of his rents, or reckon a counter, or even tell the names of the current coin. He had been bred up in the country amongst husbandmen, yet he did not know the difference between one grain and another, could scarcely distinguish between a cabbage and a lettuce, and had spent more than half his life in ignorance of the use of leaven in making bread, or fermentation in making wine. In compensation for all these disadvantages, he possessed one valuable qualification. Whatever he did put his mind to comprehend, he comprehended with a thoroughness that quicker intellects must have watched with despair. It is possible, that had he been of a less indolent or a more studious disposition, his literary renown had never reached a wider sphere than the Scaligers or Buchanans, or he might have realized the anticipation which Goldsmith, in one of his letters to his kinsfolk, amusingly makes about himself, and be still mentioned with profound respect in a German comment or a Dutch dictionary. As it was, he protested that he only nibbled on the outward crust of learning; that he only knew that there is a science of law, a science of physics, and four parts in mathematics; that he could never fathom the depths of Aristotle, and that the only books of solid learning he could ever seriously devote himself to were Plutarch and Seneca; and the result is, he has bequeathed to the remotest posterity a work far surpassing in interest the works of either Plutarch or Seneca.

To return to his biography. Montaigne's life, before the production of his Essays, had nothing of the easy chair of the philosopher about it. After quitting the college of Guienne he commenced the study of law, and at the age of twenty-one his biographers find him arrayed in the red robe of a councillor in the Parliament of Perigueux. The crisis in which he lived was in truth one of action, not contemplation. The career of France

* Le Bruyere (Des Jugements, vol. ii., p. 84,) relates a similar failing of the simple-hearted Corneille.

Character of Religious Wars in France.

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for the last half century or more, had been one of foreign aggression. Naples and the Milanese still remained to tempt the ambition of kings, and the daydream of conquest, which had roused the energies of Charles VII., had come down to Francis, rendered more attractive by the adventitious concurrence of a nature ostentatiously sensitive to the pretensions of chivalry. Independent of all personal considerations, the Governments of Europe had not yet ceased to vibrate at the first shock of that strange political maxim, unknown to the statesmen of earlier years, whose principle was proclaimed as the equilibrium of power. Nor was this all. By the side of that physical activity that attended the birth of the science of diplomacy into the world, there was in operation a revolution fated to produce results still more startling than even the alliance of the Most Christian King with the heir of Mahommed.

It has always struck us as a subject of peculiar interest, how it was that the religious reformation, which has done so much for political liberty in England, should, in spite of the vigour of its efforts, have done so little for constitutional progress in France. The inquiry is hardly adapted for a parenthesis, but it would not be difficult to offer a superficial explanation of the phenomenon. The wars of religion in France were, we think, leaving a small margin for the necessary intermixture of questions not purely moral-religious wars. Protestantism, that produced at different times its Anabaptists in Germany, and its Fifth-monarchy men in England, was, particularly in its infancy in France, systematically isolated from the consideration of politics. Nothing can afford a clearer proof of this than the language held, not in the ballads and pamphlets of the hour, but in the authorized enactments and manifestos, which were intended as counterstatements to the edicts of Catherine and the Lorraines. Free toleration of their religion, and free exercise of their worship, were, with scarcely an exception, the main articles of their treaties. The execrable day of St. Bartholomew,* says Chateaubriand, made France hosts of martyrs.' But confiscations, delations, the Estrapade and the Chambre Ardente, were not sufficient to make the martyrs democrats. When the cruelty of the Guises created the conspiracy of Amboise, the reformed refused to act with the malcontents till they had consulted the divines of Germany and Switzerland, and then only consented to co-operate when they found it lawful, with a Prince of the blood at their head, to oppose the Government of the Lorraines, and re-establish the Government of their King. Even after the Parliament of Paris had decreed the death of traitors to the heretics, the traitors themselves, in their proposal to bring

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