"A quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science? Regardons a terre, les pauvres gens que nous y voyons espandus, la teste panchante apres leur besongne: qui ne scavent ny Aristote ny Caton, ny exemple ny precepte. De ceux-la, tire Nature tous les iours, des effects de constance et de patience, plus purs et plus roides, que ne sont ceux que nous estudions si curieusement en l'escole. Combien en vois ie ordinairement, qui mescognoissent la pauvrete: combien qui desirent la mort, ou qui la passent sans alarme et sans affliction? Celui la qui fouit mon iardin, il a ce matin enterre son pere ou son fils. Les noms mesme, dequoy ils appellent les maladies, en addoucissent et amollissent l'asprete. La phthysie, c'est la toux pour eux: la dysenterie, devoyment d'estomach: un pleuresis, c'est un morfondement: et selon qu'ils les nomment doucement, ils les supportent aussi. Elles sont bien griefves, quand elles rompent leur travail ordinaire: ils ne s'allitent que pour mourir." This passage is exceptional; it is not the less sincere. Of its sincerity no one who reads and feels can doubt. But generally the instances of eximious virtue are what Montaigne delights to honour. Nothing in him is more lovable than this passionate hero-worship; and what quality is more lovable or more common in the ordinary man? "Le plus sage des Francais," Sainte-Beuve called him; the judgment is typical of the critic and his age. We need not stay to quarrel with it. We can hold that there is a higher wisdom than the quest of golden mediocrity without disparaging either Horace or his disciple. If the man-in-the-street be one who approaches the obvious in the spirit of a pioneer, we must admit that Montaigne rises superior to his class, for he not only explored that country, but possessed and cultivated it too, and forced it to yield an ampler harvest of good sense and humanity than any other husbandman before or since. France has ever been rich, and is as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of moderation to the heights of sublime philosophy. FOOTNOTE: [1] "Reproduction en Phototypie de l'Exemplaire, avec Notes manuscrites marginales, des Essais de Montaigne appartenant a la Ville de Bordeaux." Publiee, avec une Introduction, par Fortunat Strowski. 3 vols. (Paris, Hachette.) IBSEN[2] [Sidenote: _Athenaeum June 1912_]