A man who spent his days in seclusion in his library in the tower of his castle, he writes not of books but of every conceivable human interest and commonplace reality. His wisdom turns to such considerations as, “By diverse means men come to a like end.” “How the soul dischargeth her passions upon false objects.” “Whether the captaine of a place besieged ought to sally forth to parley.” He writes of “Idleness,” of “Liars,” or “Virtue,” of “Drunkenness,” of “Exercise or Practice,” of “Profit and Honesty,” of “Repenting,” of “Coaches,” of “The Verses of Virgil,” of “Vanity,” of “The affection of fathers to their Children,” of “Seneca” and “Plutarch” and “Julius Caesar.” Always his interest is in human experience. Shrewd personal observations are mingled with stories from antiquity and quaint philosophic maxims in a mind which is at once mature and inquisitive, loquacious and sceptical, candidly self-revealing, without pretention, equally at home among books and things. Let those who object to the teaching of the classics on the ground that they tend to a “separation of education from life” go back and re-read Montaigne. Although the two were by temperament very different, Montaigne would have pleased Erasmus. His education and philosophy of life were very much the type that Erasmus strove to encourage. When Montaigne was born, in 1533, the influence of the Renaissance had already made itself felt in France. He was three years old when Erasmus died. But his casual mention of “The Adages” and “Colloquies” of Erasmus would indicate that sometime in his youth these books formed part of his education. His knowledge of Greek and Latin began at a very early period in his life. It is said that when he was a mere infant his father placed him in the home of a neighboring scholar so that he would grow up with the same familiarity with these languages as with his mother tongue. He entered what was called a “college” at the age of six. It was, I suppose, a preparatory school. It must have come under the influence of the revival of learning for it had on its faculty some of the ablest scholars in France at that time. At the age of thirteen he entered a university to study Law, took his degree at twenty, and at twenty-one was appointed councilor for the Parliament of Bordeaux. He seems to have had some military experience also, and to have spent some gay years at court.