objects, the atmosphere, the lazy business, of the scene around. And
was that the quarter whence the dry daylight, the intellectual iron,
the chalybeate influence, was to come?--those coquettish, well-kept,
vine-wreathed towers, smiling over a little irregular old village,
itself half-hidden in gadding vine, pointed out by the gardeners (all
labourers here were gardeners) as the end of his long, pleasant
journey, as the abode of Monsieur Michel de Montaigne, the singular
but not unpopular gentleman living there among his books, of whom
Gaston hears so much over-night at the inn where he rests, before
delivering the great poet's letter, entering his room at last in a
flutter of curiosity.

In those earlier days of the Renaissance, a whole generation had been
exactly in the position in which Gaston now found himself. An older
ideal moral and religious, certain theories of man and nature
actually in possession, still haunted humanity, at the very moment
when it was [83] called, through a full knowledge of the past, to
enjoy the present with an unrestricted expansion of its own
capacities.--Might one enjoy? Might one eat of all the trees?--Some
had already eaten, and needed, retrospectively, a theoretic
justification, a sanction of their actual liberties, in some new
reading of human nature itself and its relation to the world around
it.--Explain to us the propriety, on the full view of things, of this
bold course we have taken, or know we shall take!

Ex post facto, at all events, that justification was furnished by the
Essays of Montaigne. The spirit of the essays doubtless had been
felt already in many a mind, as, by a universal law of reaction, the
intellect does supply the due theoretic equivalent to an inevitable
course of conduct. But it was Montaigne certainly who turned that