who long survived him, he felt his latter years gladdened by the affection and reverence of Marie de Gournay (q.v.), a young lady, in whom the reading of the "Essays" had excited a strange yearning to see and converse with the writer of such wise words. After three years of fruitless longing her desire was accomplished, and from that time till the death of Montaigne, Marie was to him both a daughter and a disciple. The philosopher was flattered with the devotion of the young enthusiast, whilst the scholar enjoyed happiness beyond expression in the condescension, and as it were paternal regards of her master. Marie lived to an old age; but her devotion to the memory of Montaigne appeared to grow with her years. She defended him against all the critics, and spent much labour upon her editions of the "Essays." Another professed disciple, and one in whose conversation Montaigne found at once a pleasure and recreation, was the Abbé Charron. This man was a popular preacher, and aspired to the honours conferred by philosophy. His book on Wisdom has been translated into English. It is a very different production from those of his master, and apart from his relations with Montaigne, would scarcely have sufficed to preserve his name so long.
Montaigne, who had, as we have said, been long an acute sufferer, was suddenly seized with a quinsey in September, 1592. He had just made his last corrections and additions for a new issue of his "Essays;" but the superintendence of the printing had to be left to his adopted daughter. From the first his disease threatened to prove fatal. But the prospect of death took from him none of his usual clearness and serenity of mind. He manifested no signs of discomposure or regret. We are told that one day, feeling the approach of death, "he got up in his shirt, put on his morning gown, opened his cabinet, sent for all his valets and others to whom he had left legacies, and paid them the sums he had bequeathed them, 'foreseeing the difficulty which his heirs would raise.'" On the 13th September mass was celebrated in his chamber. At the moment of the elevation he tried to rise, but could not, and with his hands crossed fell back fainting and expired.
Montaigne's character has been a hard nut to the critics; at least, if we may so conclude from the various and widely different opinions it has occasioned; and no doubt, at first sight, it has a somewhat enigmatic aspect, though a closer observation dispels the apparent mystery. He did not act a part. There was as little studied secrecy about his sentiments and opinions as about his actions. But he was vain to the last degree, and his vanity took the shape of a desire to give a full, true, and particular account of himself to the world. It is easy to see the temptations which could not but present themselves in the execution of such a design, especially when the artist "could," as he says himself, "give no account of his life by his actions, fortune having placed them too low." He must do it then by his fancies. Heaven help the poor self-portrait painter who shall attempt to sit to himself in a kind of metaphysical nakedness. He will see a hundred different persons, and fail to combine the features of his picture into a consistent expression. It is precisely contradictions of this sort which occur in the "Essays." The book itself is one of perfect good faith, but his habitual self-consciousness was constantly luring him into inconsistencies and misrepresentations; and yet in spite of all these, nay, partly even in consequence of these, the reader soon forms an image and representation to himself of the garrulous old Gascon.
Montaigne's "Essays" are among the most remarkable of literary productions. Absolutely without order, method, or indeed anything like intelligible purpose, they have yet exercised an influence, particularly on French and English literature, greater perhaps than that of any other single book we could name. Several of his critics have suffered their indignation against the "confusion of the whole book," to carry them a great way further than was necessary; for, indeed, it is partly this want of formal arrangement that gives to the "Essays" their peculiar excellence. He is the very opposite of the grave and "regular" scholastics—whom in one of his chapters he describes with an inimitable mixture of drollery and sarcasm, and from the tyranny of whose barren methods none, save Bacon alone, has contributed more towards the deliverance of the human mind. He knows nothing of rules, he will be held to no method. "As things come into my head," he says, "I heap them in." It is not knowledge he offers to the reader—merely "fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself." One ignorant of his ways might come to the conclusion, from the frequency with which he asserts it, that his principal design was to "paint himself;" and no doubt this he does, and much more perfectly, too, than he was aware of. For if, as he says, he paints himself diversely, because he sees himself diversely, the reader can, by putting these diversities together and combining the result with other hints and glimpses quite unconsciously supplied, arrive at a truer estimate of his character than he himself probably ever entertained. But these touches of self-portraiture which we meet with in almost every page, form but a part, though a considerable one, of the value of the "Essays." It is quite impossible to convey an adequate notion of their unrestrained vivacity, energy, and fancy, of their boldness and attractive simplicity. They range over every subject connected with human life and manners; abound in observations—often most felicitously expressed—of great depth and acuteness, and never fail to entertain with their constant eagerness and gaiety. It is not too much to say that they supply the mind with at once the best stimulus and recreation, which the world of books contains. There are no doubt spots and blemishes in these essays. His scepticism, which had probably a constitutional rather than a philosophic origin, and the vanity with which he tittle-tattles of certain things which had better been passed over, frequently betray him into the expression of sentiments and opinions which no sane man will think defensible. But we do not think it probable that any one was ever made an infidel or licentious by reading Montaigne, and we are perfectly sure that none but the unreasonably fastidious could fail to receive from him a very high degree of entertainment and delight.—R. M., A.
MONTALEMBERT, Charles Forbes, Count de, politician and author, was born in London in 1810. His father is noticed below. His mother was one of the Scotch Forbeses. Educated in Paris he united himself in 1830 to Lamennais (q.v.), and was one of the founders of L'Avenir, which sought to ally Catholicism to democracy. One of the doctrines of the new school was the liberation of the Gallican church from state control, and when this claim failed it was sought to free public instruction from government interference. The government closed a public school which Montalembert and others had opened in Paris without leave being granted by the university, and the pope himself condemned the teachings of the Avenir, which accordingly ceased to appear. Montalembert did not, however, like Lamennais, withdraw his allegiance from the church of Rome. On the contrary, by his speeches in the house of peers and by his books, he came to be considered as one of the heads of the catholic party in France. By the expression of his sympathies for Ireland and Poland, both of them Roman catholic countries, he preserved a kind of connection with the democratic party, and on all social questions he advocated the cause of the people. After the revolution of 1848 his political opinions seem to have fluctuated. He was for a few weeks a member of the consultative commission appointed on the morrow of the coup dêtat, but soon resigned his seat, and subsequently pretty steadily opposed the policy of Napoleon III. In an article, "Un débat sur l'Inde au parlement Anglais," contributed to a Paris periodical, Le Correspondant, in October, 1858, he drew some contrasts between the government of France and that of England, not flattering to the former, and which brought him before the correctional tribune of the Seine. He was condemned to pay a fine and to suffer six months' imprisonment. Against M. de Montalembert's own wish, the emperor of the French would not allow the sentence of imprisonment to be executed. As an author M. de Montalembert first became known by his "Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," 1836, which produced the Saint's Tragedy of M. Kingsley. Among his numerous brochures the "Avenir politique de l'Angleterre," at least, has been translated into English, It is an eloquent and interesting panegyric on constitutional government as it exists in England. His last literary performance was a letter, in which the proceedings of the Œcumenical council, in 1870, were unsparingly denounced. He died on the 13th of March, 1870. In his combination of the utmost reverence for the papacy, spiritual and temporal, with the utmost zeal for constitutional freedom, M. de Montalembert stands almost alone among European thinkers. His "Moines d'Occident," a glowing plaidoyer for mediæval monasticism, has been recently translated into English.—F. E.
MONTALEMBERT, Marc-René-Anne Marie, Count de, father of the preceding, was born at Paris in 1777. After the
