close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death; it is life that matters. It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul, every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice; carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves, there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe. Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father loved building. In short the soul is all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the world. “. . . plus je me hante et connois, plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et sans travail” Montaigne will write.