to the worldly, I need only say this: that he reveals (among other things) the impression made upon a most discursive and wayward but strangely shrewd and humorous observer by the bitter controversies and religious wars of the sixteenth century. His amazing good temper and humorous delight in conversation enables him to explore with unfailing amusement the multitudinous foibles of human nature–– the ambitions, and self-seekings, and hypocrisies displayed by the actors in the great tragi-comedy of life. The inevitable philosophical conclusion for such a man is the famous que sais-je? of Montaigne's motto—in other words, complete scepticism. This conclusion, too, is explicitly drawn, often in words adopted by Pascal, in Montaigne's most elaborate essay on the Apology of Raymond de Sebonde. Here, in a comment upon a professed demonstration of natural theology, Montaigne, in his queer discursive fashion, manages to intimate his own opinion. It is, briefly, that man is but one of the animals—a doctrine confirmed, it is true, by a set of anecdotes as to elephants and dogs which would startle even the editor of the Spectator—that the reason of which we boast is thus little more than a blind custom, and that to suppose man capable by
