This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the _life_-side of literature, as the only one that really interests him; and, in addition, he has an obstinate prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not seem to be nearly so chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here, not merely as our first very great French man of letters,[197] who has left us literary opinions, but as the very light and glory of the French intellect at the meeting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as thus giving an index of the greatest value to its tastes and opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the ways just mentioned, and others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general literary attitude of the time—an active, practical, striving towards performance, a rather conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther past, a contempt, or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer, and fair, if vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in this direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they do. ----- Footnote 197: Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ do contain matter touching on literature. But Rabelais comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor” and other things are simply alarums and excursions of his general campaign against the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his references to French poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to have wished to get beyond—complacent acquiescence in _rhétoriqueur_ pedantry. ----- CHAPTER V. ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.