Produced by David Widger
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1.
Preface
The Life of Montaigne
The Letters of Montaigne
The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency inour literature—a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This greatFrench writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the landof his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays,which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of hisproductions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Baconand Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, asHallam observes, the Frenchman's literary importance largely results fromthe share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval andsubsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of theessayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and thecircumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, thecomparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities ofintellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and hehas found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder atthe reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, withoutbeing aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. Hisbook was different from all others which were at that date in the world.It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It toldits readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer's opinion wasabout men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of newlight on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayistuncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism publicproperty. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. Hisessays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of thewriter's mind, made by himself at different levels and under a largevariety of operating influences.
Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the mostfascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and mosttruthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissecthis mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and whatrelation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mentalstructure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine themechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrationsabounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in abook.
Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design.He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But hedesired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be rememberedby, something which should tell what kind of a man he was—what he felt,thought, suffered—and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond hisexpectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work acertain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how hisrenown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost uniqueposition as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would beread, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions ofintelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, andwho are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in thesixteenth or the eighteenth cent