The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this devotion was especially inevitable. [Sidenote: _Montaigne: his references to literature._] That his dealings with the subject are dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is unnecessary to say. Not many things could be more characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I. 24), in which the whole spirit and motive, not merely of the _Pléiade_, but of the sixteenth century generally, are subjected to the irregular glancing criticism of the essayist. This single paper would enable one to understand the fling of a man like Ben Jonson—the reverse of unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but full of erudition, and of sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the essayists, even their master Montaigne.” On the general question whether what is commonly called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s verdict comes simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise on Du Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study of Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming oneself against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of Seneca.”[192] The much longer chapter on Education, addressed to Diane de Foix, which immediately follows, contains one of the worst expressions of Renaissance contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast that “of the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux, with which childhood amuses itself,” he did not know so much as the name. “My Lord Michael” is great, but even he might have been greater if he _had_ known them. ----- Footnote 192: Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. _Je n’aime point cette suffisance relative et mendiée_, he goes on with his own absolute and unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet. ----- Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing ancient instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above about Plato and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[193] with inimitable freshness and gusto; and at another again informing the scholar, with much coolness, that if he will take off hood and gown, drop Latin, and not deafen men’s ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he will be at the level of all the world, and perhaps below it. ----- Footnote 193: Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv. 37 _ed. cit._) -----