des Rieux, who speaks for the noblesse. The choice of this man--an historical character who was finally hanged as a brigand--to speak for the nobles is in itself a most ingenious stroke. He was a thorough military ruffian of the worst stamp, low-born and ignorant, who had obtained command of a castle, and who lived by plundering his neighbours. Des Rieux begins by giving it as his opinion that nothing could prove the excellence of the League more fully than just this, that the like of him could come to speak for the nobles. He goes on in the same tone, which is the swagger of a vulgar adventurer who feels himself safe. No more artful way of showing to what the League was reducing France could have been chosen. The speech of Des Rieux is attributed to Jacques Gillot, clerk to the Parliament of Paris. Then the tone of burlesque is dropped, and a vigorous denunciation of the League is delivered by M. d’Aubray as the spokesman of the Third Estate, the Burgesses. This, the longest of all, is said to be the work of Pierre Pithou. The verse, partly scattered through the book and partly collected at the end, belongs to Jean Passerat, the successor of Ramus at the Collége Royal, and to Gilles Durant, a lawyer and country gentleman. Both Passerat and Durant wrote other verse of excellence. All this memoir, history, and satire is interesting, but no part of it belongs to the literature which every thinking man in every country has read, or knows that it would be good to read. They may be all left aside, not without loss indeed, yet without irreparable loss. But whoever has not read the _Essays_ of Montaigne has missed something necessary for the “criticism of life”--the exposition of a habit of thought, a way of looking at things, of discussing and deciding questions of conduct and principle, which are not only French and peculiar to one time, but human and universal. [SN: _Montaigne._]