I had gone so far in one of my readings of Melville, and was beginning to wonder in the back of my head what a Typee introduced into our civilization could find to say of us half as pleasant as the things their guest had noted of them, when I recalled that another had long ago put the like question to himself when he was in much better position to answer it. It was when the New World was very much newer than it is now, that Villegaignon landed in a country he surnamed Antarctic France, where dwelt a people of cannibals the very counterpart (as I judge) of our friends the Typees. “Three of these people,” the Sieur de Montaigne records, “were at Rouen in the reign of our late King, Charles the Ninth, who talked with them a great while. They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a fair city; afterwards some demanded their advice, and would needs know of them what things of note and admirable they had observed amongst us. They answered three things,” ... of which Montaigne seems particularly impressed with this one: “They had perceived [they said] there were men among us full gorged with all sorts of commodities, and others which hunger-starved and bare with need and poverty begged at their gates: and found it strange these moieties [they have a phrase whereby they call men but a moiety one of another]--strange these moieties so needy could endure such an injustice, and that they took not the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.” I do not suppose Montaigne approved, any more than we can, the touch of savagery that concludes these observations; but on the whole they seem to have confirmed him in certain opinions he had already formed on the pretended advantages of civilized over barbarous life. For this occasion on which he actually met and conversed with the cannibals was not the first acquaintance he had with them. There had long been with him a certain serving-man who had spent some ten or twelve years in their country, and seems to have given his master much the same account of them as Melville has given us of the Typees. I cannot refrain from recalling in Montaigne’s own words his reflections on the whole spectacle of savagery and civilization: