to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the
great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still
lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a
certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a
preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and
savoured of his native earth.

Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively,
as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life,
towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely
interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest,
truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service
as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays
were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he
cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with
itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed,
outward stimulus--physical motion, some text shot from a book, the
queries and objections of a living voice.--"My thoughts sleep, if I
sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but
thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked
them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions,
many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting
their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual
publication at last to none of the usual literary motives--desire for
fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell--but to the sociable desire for
a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for
companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance";
speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."--"If there
be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who
can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but