Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

mon-tan', Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592), a French essayist. He was born at the family chateau of Montaigne, near Bordeaux, France. He appears to have been educated thoroughly in the classics by private teachers. He attended also the college in Bordeaux in which Buchanan, the celebrated Scottish scholar, was at the time a professor. His youth was wild. He was for a time mayor of Bordeaux, a position which he appears to have filled with small credit. He was a great reader and became a noted writer. His reputation rests chiefly on his Essays. The first two books appeared in 1580 when he was forty-seven years old. They are lively, chatty, discussions of men, manners, and events, written without any pretension to the prevailing style of the period. The moral tone is that of the age in which he lived, with a vein of the skepticism for which French writers are noted. Montaigne's Essays are regarded as the beginning of modern essay writing. Montaigne has been more popular in England than in the United States . In Representative Men Emerson offers a valuable criticism of the man and his writings. A copy of the Essays with Shakespeare's name, the only book known to have been owned by him, is preserved in the British Museum . See Bacon ; Emerson SAYINGS. For a desperate disease a desperate cure. A wise man never loses anything if he has himself. Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. There are some defeats more triumphant than victories. How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputations. He who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying. He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts. I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together. The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould. . . . The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor causes a war between princes.