own day he remains so still; for his impressionism, which he carried to such lengths in originating it, is the most modern of literary inspirations; and all our successive literary and artistic developments are either phases of the same inspiration or transient reactions against it. Where literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within sight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most interesting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards absolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his, which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our bonne foi is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he probes through them to rouse anew the living nerve. And there is no theme on which he does not some time or other dart his sudden and searching glance. It is truly said of him by Emerson that "there have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man

with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shakespeare's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the incomparable old-new French of the original, was in itself a revelation. And it spoke to one for whom, as player and as playwright, it had come to be an imperative need to substitute a living and lifelike speech for the turgid and unreal rhetoric of the would-be academics who had created the English drama as he found it; one who, after his narrative poems had won success, turned his back once for all on the prolixities of the school of Spenser.

I have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to Shakespeare a vibration of style as well as of thought; and it would be difficult to overstate the importance of such an influence. A writer affects us often more by the pulse and pressure of his speech than by his matter. Some such action is indeed the secret of all great literary reputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and the beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They must have affected Shake

speare as they have affected so many others; and in point of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous tension and pith, fairly attributable in part to the stirring impact of the style of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of colour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging stride. Seek in any of Shakespeare's earlier plays for such strenuous rush of feeling and rhythm as pulses through the soliloquy :

"How all occasions do inform against me,"

and you will gather that there has been wrought a technical change, no less than a moral and an intellectual. The poet's nerves have felt a new impulsion.

But it was not merely a congenial felicity and energy of utterance that Montaigne brought to bear on his English reader, though the more we consider this quality of spontaneity in the essayist the more we shall realise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's book is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and reflective intelligence: it is the living quintessence of all Latin criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh and pungent as the essayist's expression of

his special individuality. For Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the Renaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of his contact with Latin literature. Other men must have come to know Latin as well as he; and hundreds could write it with an accuracy and facility which, if he were ever capable of it, he must, by his own confession, have lost before middle life,' though he read it perfectly to the last. But he is the only modern man whom we know to have learned Latin as a mother tongue; and this fact was probably just as important in psychology as was the similar fact, in Shakespeare's case, of his whole adult culture being acquired in his own language. It seems to me, at least, that there is something significant in the facts: (1) that the man who most vividly brought the spirit or outcome of classic culture into touch with the general European intelligence, in the age when the modern languages first decisively asserted their birthright, learned his Latin as a living and not as a dead tongue, and knew Greek literature almost solely by translation; (2) that the dramatist who of all of his craft has put most of breathing vitality into his pictures of ancient history, despite endless

1 Cp. the Essais, ii, 17; iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol. ii. pp. 40, 231.)

inaccuracies of detail, read his authorities only in his own language; and (3) that the English poet who in our own period has most intensely and delightedly sympathised with the Greek spirit -I mean Keats-read his Homer only in an English translation.

As regards Montaigne, the full importance of the fact does not seem to me to have been appreciated by the critics. Villemain, indeed, who perhaps could best realise it, remarked in his youthful éloge that the fashion in which the elder Montaigne had his child taught Latin would bring the boy to the reading of the classics with an eager interest where others had been already fatigued by the toil of grammar; but beyond this the peculiarity of the case has not been much considered. Montaigne, however, gives us details which seem full of suggestion to scientific educationists. "Without art, without book, without grammar or precept, without whipping, without tears, I learned a Latin as pure as my master could give"; and his first exercises were to turn bad Latin into good.' So he read his Ovid's METAMORPHOSES at seven or eight, where other forward boys had the native fairy tales; and a wise teacher led him later through Virgil and

1 Essais, i, 25; cp. i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i, pp. 304, 429.)