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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Plutarch's Lives," were translated by Sir Thomas North and his book was "a household book for the whole of the seventeenth century." Montaigne's Essays had been "done into English" by John Florio, and to some of them at least Thomas Dudley was not likely to take exception.
I therefore carried with me the following books in handy volume size: Montaigne's Essays, Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Verse, Lockhart's Life of Napoleon, Autobiography of Cellini, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Lorna Doone, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, Les Miserables, Vanity Fair, Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, Pepys' Diary, Carlyle's French Revolution, The Last of the Mohicans, Westward Ho, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities, and Tolstoi's War and Peace.
Montaigne's 'Essais' were a work which made a strong mark, and created a deep sensation, in his own country. There, it had already gone through twelve editions before it was introduced in England eleven years after the death of its author by means of a translation. Here it found its first admirers among the highest aristocracy and the patrons of literature and art.
Montaigne's language is not Rabelais's, Pascal's is not Montaigne's, Montesquieu's is not Pascal's. Each of the four languages, taken by itself, is admirable because it is original. Every age has its own ideas; it must have also words adapted to those ideas. Languages are like the sea, they move to and fro incessantly.
Strange to say, De Montaigne's views did not discourage his own new and secret ardour for intellectual triumphs; not because he felt that he was now able to achieve them, but because he felt the iron of his own nature, and knew that a man who has iron in his nature must ultimately hit upon some way of shaping the metal into use.
Old Montaigne's advice in cases similar to those above cited is worthy of notice. "As to what concerns married people," says he, "having the year before them, they ought never to compel, or so much as offer at the feat, if they do not find themselves very ready.
We all remember Montaigne's famous illustration in which he said that if a woman began by carrying a calf about every day she would still be able to carry it when it became an ox. In the Paris hospitals, where the greater number of regular scientific experiments have been conducted, it is found that "trained subjects" are required for all of the more difficult demonstrations.
When Madame de Montaigne's song ceased, no rapturous plaudits followed the Italians were too affected by the science, Maltravers by the feeling, for the coarseness of ready praise; and ere that delighted silence which made the first impulse was broken, a new comer, descending from the groves that clothed the ascent behind the house, was in the midst of the party.
My dear fellow, if you read "Montaigne's Essays," you must own that he might call almost any one by the name of any other, and that an essay on the Moon or an essay on Green Cheese would be as appropriate a title as one of his on Coaches, on the Art of Discoursing, or Experience, or what you will.
IT seemed the laurel chaste and stubborn oak, And all the gentle trees on earth that grew, It seemed the land, the sea, and heaven above, All breathed out fancy sweet, and sighed out love. FAIRFAX'S Tasso. AT De Montaigne's villa, Evelyn, for the first time, gathered from the looks, the manners, of Maltravers that she was beloved. It was no longer possible to mistake the evidences of affection.
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