emancipating ethic into current coin. To Pascal, looking back upon
the sixteenth century as a whole, Montaigne was to figure as the
impersonation of its intellectual licence; while Shakespeare, who
represents the free spirit of the Renaissance moulding the drama,
hints, by his well-known preoccupation with Montaigne's writings,
that just there was the philosophic counterpart to the fulness and
impartiality of his own artistic reception of the experience of life.

Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a
life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been
accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated
modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston
presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season,
that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he
took, Montaigne--the acclivity--of Saint Michael, just thirty-six
years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the
neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return
thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his
days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of
the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life,
a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and
unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with
seeming indolence at home.

It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his
house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been
rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war
shelters: and openness--that all was wide open, searched through by
light and warmth and air from the soil--was the impression it made on
Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court,