was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its
people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically
lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have
touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he
looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had,
in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country,"
through a series of chapters, every one of which had told
emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and
new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old
perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been
certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice,
incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The
variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man,
concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature,
making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional;
a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray
of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all
the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and
nature and of the individual mind;--such was the sense of this open
book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly
enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies;
disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious
sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of
character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements,
the soul and potency of the man.

How imperceptibly had darkness crept over them, effacing everything
but the interior of [90] the great circular chamber, its book-shelves
and enigmatic mottoes and the tapestry on the wall,--Circe and her
sorceries, in many parts--to draw over the windows in winter. Supper