tongue, because certain passages therein could be read in different ways?

And here I would first give Mrs. Pott's reasons for believing that Bacon wrote the Essays of Montaigne. I quote from a recent letter:

I will try to tell you my grounds of belief:

1. Having examined "Florio's translation," 1603, I find it contains all the metaphors, similes, etc., of Bacon's early period. No other metaphors, etc., but certain Promus notes.

2. Having examined "Cotton's translation," published 1688, I find it to be very much enlarged, passages altered, paraphrased, etc., new passages introduced, and old opinions negatived.

3. The metaphors and similes now include a number of Bacon's later period, whereas in "Florio's" there is hardly a metaphor which cannot be found in plays and works prior to the date of The Merry Wives. In Cotton there are other forms introduced after Hamlet.

4. The French original cannot be made to match with both of these translations. If the French uses a metaphor thus: "A man should be careful how he repeats a tale lest he get out of the road and lose his way in the wood," Florio may translate it thus, but in Cotton you will find it changed to this extent, "he should be careful, etc., lest he lose his way and fall into the traps of his enemies." (I have not the books, but quote from memory.) Such alterations are frequent. Who made them? How did Florio, the Italian master in the Duke of Bedford's family, get employed to translate a volume of French essays into English? And how did he manage so completely to master the peculiarities of Bacon's style, that he could make it his own throughout the Essays?

5. And why is it that there is, in Montaigne's letters to friends, etc., bound up in the same volume with the Essays, not one Baconism of thought or diction? As to circumstantial evidence, we may observe:

6. That Montaigne was Mayor of Bourdeaux during the three years of Bacon's sojourn in those parts, when Bacon was known to be writing and studying. 7. Francis Bacon kept up the acquaintance which he formed with Montaigne by means of his brother, Anthony Bacon, who is recorded to have visited Montaigne, from England, after Anthony's return home. Montaigne also visited Francis Bacon in England. I think that in the Cipher the name Montaigne will be found rendered by Mountain, a word sometimes apparently hauled in somewhat irrelevantly. . . .

Montaigne's Essays, when one comes to dissect them, are only diffuse editions of Bacon's mature and condensed utterances in the Essays, The Advancement of Learning, and other works; mixed up with observations, scientific, medical, physiological and psychical, which are noted chiefly in the Sylva.

The object, as I take it, of his concealing the authorship of the early editions of this remarkable book was that he might utter, under the mask of old age and of French license of speech, opinions which would have been condemned as utterly unbecoming for a younger man, an Englishman, and of Puritan family.

But there are other reasons: If the reader will turn to the Encyclopædia Britannica' he will find that Montaigne never published anything, except the translation into French of a Spanish work,

1 Vol. xvi, pp. 768, etc.

until 1580, when he was forty-seven years of age; and that he never wrote anything but these Essays. It is true that a journal was found in the chateau of Montaigne, two hundred years after his death, giving an account of a journey he took, and which purported to be his work; but it is a vastly inferior performance to the Essays, "superfluous to a medical reader and disgusting to any other;" and his "last and best editors, MM. Courbet and Royar," do not accept it as "authentic."

Like Shakspere, little can be found out about him. The Encyclopædia Britannica says:

Not much is known of him in these latter years, and, indeed, despite the laborious researches of many biographers, of whom one, Dr. Payen, has never been excelled in persevering devotion, it cannot be said that the amount of available information about Montaigne is large at any time of his life.

And while the Essays are deistical, Montaigne died a devoted Catholic. He had the mass served in his bed-room just before his death.

We find, on page 242 of Montaigne, a curious commentary on the thought that the name is nothing, kindred to Shakespeare's “what's in a name?" He says:

Let us . . . examine upon what foundation we erect this glory and reputation, for which the world is turned topsy-turvy: wherein do we place this renown that we hunt after with so great flagrancy, and through so many impediments, and so much trouble? It is, in conclusion, Peter or William that carries it, takes it into his possession, and whom it only concerns. Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play withal. And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound when all is done?

Now, as the French for Peter is Pierre, we have "this William or Pierre that carries away this glory and takes it into his possession;" and William-Pierre comes singularly close to William Shake:Pierre.

And not many pages anterior to this utterance, and in the same chapter and train of thought, Montaigne says, on page 225:

All other things are communicable and fall into commerce; we lend our goods and stake our lives for the necessity and service of our friend; but to communicate a man's honor and to robe another with a man's own glory is rarely seen.

But he reflects, as above, what is glory, anyhow? William or Pierre takes it and carries it away, and it concerns him only.

And remember this translation was published long after Bacon's death; just as we have seen editions of the Folio published in

1632 and 1664 that agreed precisely in the arrangement of the type with that of 1623. And Mrs. Pott has shown that the translation does not adhere to the original; and we have a striking illustration of this on page 271, where the translator (an unheard-of thing) actually interjects into Montaigne quotations from Ben Jonson not found in the original. He says:

According to that of Mr. Jonson, which, without offense to Monsieur Montaigne, I will here presume to insert!

And is it not a little singular to find the Italian teacher quoting the play-writer Ben Jonson?

And again on page 259 he interpolates a poem from Plutarch, not in the original - an extraordinary liberty in any translator. And we see the author, as a young man, asserting himself on page 281:

For my part I believe our souls are adult at twenty, such as they are ever like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by that time given earnest of its force and virtue, will never after come to proof. Natural parts and excellences produce that they have of vigorous and fine, within that term, or never.

Surely no man who had written his first book at forty-seven would be likely to give birth to that radical and unfounded utterance; he would be more inclined to the belief of him of old, that "young men think old men to be fools, but old men know young men to be such."

And we find Montaigne expressing the exact root and groundwork of Bacon's philosophy in this extraordinary sentence (page 469):

The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge.

This was the very point where the philosophy of modern times diverged from that of antiquity: the latter turned for light to the operations of the human mind; the former to the facts of external nature, as revealed by the senses.

In fact, in reading these Essays we see the Novum Organum in its first forms, as they presented themselves to the youthful mind of Bacon. Montaigne says (page 50):

He cannot avoid owning, that the senses are the sovereign lords of his knowledge; but they are uncertain and falsifiable in all circumstances. 'Tis there that he is to fight it out to the last.