Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. The essays are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head, treating everything without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself; never shrieks, or protests, or prays. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; he likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. We are natural believers. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things, and all worlds are strung on it as beads. But though we reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, to the sceptical class, which Montaigne represents, every man at some time belongs. The ground occupied by the sceptic is the vestibule of the temple. The interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind. It stands in the mind of the wise sceptic that our life in this world is not quite so easy of interpretation as churches and school books say. He does not wish to take ground against these benevolences, but he says: "There are doubts. Shall we, because good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, 'There are no doubts--and lie for the right?' Is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness?" I may play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which we call scepticism; but I know they will presently appear to me in that order which makes scepticism impossible. For the world is saturated with deity and law. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; but by knaves as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward, and general ends are somewhat answered. The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams. So let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence. _Shakespeare_ Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare. So far from Shakespeare being the least known, he is the one person in all modern history known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of taste, of conduct of life has he not settled? What district of man's work has he not remembered? What king has he not taught statecraft? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved?