More pleasant reading, both for its sweeter matter and its ease of style, is the work of the Gascon, Michel de Montaigne—a contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney—whose _Essays_, while the first example in that domain of writing, have remained unique in their kind. To the reading of Seneca and of Amyot’s Plutarch he confessedly owed much, but his conception of the essay as an easy-going monologue of moralizing self-revelation is his own. He chooses a theme, begins to discourse in an amiable conversational way concerning it, rambles from it into side paths, plucking the flowers of quotation, and returns to it when it so pleases him. Meanwhile, his real subject is himself. Montaigne the writer is serenely contemplating Montaigne the man. He is submitting him, his tastes, views, habits, and feelings, to a friendly inspection, recorded in the easy style of a man of the world, which charms the reader as he might be charmed by varied and fruity talk. It charms him all the more because the self depicted by Montaigne is always in many respects the self of the listener, who feels all through that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. For Montaigne is no narrow egotist or pedant. He displays a wide sympathy or tolerance, and he is no dogmatist. His motto was _Que sçais-je?_ To Elizabethan England the _Essays_ were well known, either directly or through the translation of Florio, with which Shakespeare was familiar. The _Essays_ of Bacon, with all their unlikeness to Montaigne, are clearly indebted to his example. How far the Frenchman’s influence has since extended is rendered incalculable by its very breadth and pervasiveness. * * * * * For the sake of easier apprehension we may now briefly review French poetry proper, noting its characteristics and its effects on the poetry of England. Early French poetry, we have said, consisted of romances, of chivalrous adventures, allegories, and _fabliaux_. The nature of these troubadour and trouvère compositions has been described. Till after Chaucer’s day the romances and allegories of France flourished almost as well on English soil, whether read and sung in the original French or adapted—like the _Romance of Alexander_ or the _Romance of the Rose_—in English dress. Chaucer himself translated the _Roman de la Rose_, and otherwise made free use of the French material, including the _fabliaux_. His contemporary, Gower, is almost wholly a copier of the French, and, during all the epoch which is called the Chaucerian, authors known and nameless used the stock of mediaeval France as freely and as monotonously as the French themselves. This was the first period of our debt. It passed away wholly with all other things mediaeval, with chivalry and feudalism, superstition and ignorance.