Montaigne’s health had been declining for some time; he was afflicted with gravel and cholic, and he was obstinately resolved against consulting physicians. In September, 1592, he fell ill of a malignant quinsy, which kept him speechless for three days, during which he had recourse to his pen to signify to his wife his last intentions. He desired that several gentlemen of the neighbourhood should be requested to come and take leave of him. When they were assembled in his room, a priest said mass, and at the elevation of the host, Montaigne half raised himself on his bed, with his hands joined together, and in that attitude expired, September 13, 1592, in the sixtieth year of his age. His body was buried at Bordeaux, in the church of the Feuillans, where a monument was erected to him by his widow. He left an only daughter, heiress of his property. Montaigne’s Essays have been the subject of much and very conflicting criticism. If we consider the age and the intellectual condition of the country in which the author was born, we must pronounce them a very extraordinary work, not so much on account of the learning contained in them, as for the philosophical spirit and the frank, independent, liberal tone that pervades their pages. Civilization and literature were then at a low ebb in France; the language was hardly formed, the country was still torn by the rude turbulence, and subject to the oppression, of feudal lords and feudal laws; and was, moreover, distracted by ignorant fanaticism, by deadly intolerance, and by civil factions, rendered more fierce by religious feuds. It is very remarkable that, in a remote province of a country so situated, a country gentleman, himself belonging to the feudal aristocracy, should have composed a work full of moral maxims and precepts, conceived in the spirit of the philosophers of Greece and Rome, and founded, not on the sanctions of revealed religion, but on a sort of natural system of ethics, on the beauty of virtue, on the innate sense of justice, on the lessons of history. It is almost more remarkable that such a book should have been read with avidity amidst the turmoil of factions, the din of civil war, the knell of persecution and massacre.