MONTAIGNE, mon-tan' (Fr. mon-tan ye), Michel Eyquem de, French essayist: b. Château Montaigne, Perigord, 28 March 1533; d. there, 11 Sept. 1592. He was educated by his father after a fashion all his own, learning Lat'n from house servants who never spoke French, and being roused from bed every morn ing by soft music. At six he was sent to the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where he stayed for seven years, apparently under the charge of the great classical scholars, Bu chanan and Muretus. Thereafter he probably studied law at Bordeaux and Toulouse, •and when he came of age was made a member of the Cour des Aides at Perigueux. This court was abolished three years afterward and Mon taigne with the other members was appointed counsellor to the Bordeaux parliament, a body in which he made the acquaintance of La Bade about 1559. For the next few years he was at court, now at Paris, now at Bar-le-Duc; we know that in 1562 he swore allegiance to the Catholic Church on his own motton; that in 1565 he married Francoise de la Chassaigne, daughter of one of his fellow-counsellors, and that the death of La Boetie in 1563 and that of his father in 1568 had greatly lessened Mon taigne's interest in public affairs. These events had also no doubt sobered him — he admits that his youth had been wild; at any rate in 1571, having prepared La Boetie's posthumous works for the press, having received himself the Order of Saint Michel for a rather mediocre version of the 'Theologia Naturalis) of Ray mond de Sebonde, his only literary venture so far, after selling his post as counsellor, he retired to Montaigne. There he began, and in the next nine years completed, the first two books of his essays, whether purposing them for publication or not is unknown, though their style seems to point to the fact that in their earliest form they must have been mere jot tings in a commonplace book. By the middle of 1580 his health had so much failed that he left Château Montaigne for the first time since 1571, save for an occasional trip to Paris, and traveled through Switzerland, Germany and Italy, meeting Tasso at Florence. His 'Jour nal' of this trip, discovered and published in 1774, adds nothing to his literary fame and not much more to our knowledge of his person ality. During this absence from France, and apparently quite against his will, Montaigne was elected mayor of Bordeaux; he served in this office from 1581 to 1583 and then was re-elected for another two years; at the close of this suc cessful administration, in which with no small skill he had steered safely the Icing's lieutenant in Guyenne and the king of Navarre, governor of the province, he refused to be present in the city as was required for the election of his suc cessor, because of the plague — one of the lights on his personal character and not a pleas ant one. The three years immediately follow ing (1585-88) were occupied in the revision of his two books of essays and the addition of a third. He received the rites of the Church
upon his death-bed. His wife bore him children; °two or threes he says, died in in fancy; and one, a daughter of whom he was very fond, survived him. But his family ties were not strong; his life with his wife seems to have been a philosophic makeshift; and his love for his daughter cannot compare with his attachment to Mlle. de Gournay, a Parisian, who was attracted to him by his literary fame, was called by him his adopted daughter and was fortunate enough to receive from Mon taigne's widow a copy of his 'Essays' with manuscript additions and corrections, the basis of a new edition, published in 1595. Mon taigne's literary reputation is safe, though in the hands of the few, not the many. His spirit is skeptical, essentially typical of his time, and it was not for nothing that his study at Chateau Montaigne was decorated with texts from Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Lucretius and Horace, for he was akin to these ancient writers who proclaim the vanity of all things. His theme is varied, his treatment discursive and his charm largely due to this very variety, together with a quaintness and raciness of style that did much for French prose and was mostly original even if patterned on Amyot. His manner of approaching the questions of life and criticism is apparently purely subjective; indeed, his delightful egoism that makes his own life, experiences and thoughts the theme of the essays seems at first to be quite inde pendent of so serious a purpose. But this sub jective manner brings him nearly as close to the analysis of universal problems as does the dramatic objectivity of a Shakespeare. His entire attitude is skeptical, but he is not to be ranked as the enemy of religion. He is the curious, interested skeptic, not the doubting cynic. Professor Saintsbury well says that the nearest spiritual parallel to Montaigne in liter ature is Charles Lamb.
Montaigne affected English literature scarcely less than he did French. His essays, trans lated by Florio (1603), seem to have been known to Shakespeare in their English form, and this same version, revised by Hazlitt (1893), is still the standard in English. The best editions of the original are those by (1820) and Le Clerc (1865). (See MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYS, FLORIO'S TRANS LATION or). Consult the appreciations by Emer son, Men' (1850) Church, Essays' ; Pattison, says' (1889), and Pater, de Latour' (1896) ; also Bonnefon, et ses Amis) (1892)i Stapfer, ; Lowndes, de Montaigne' (1898) ; Guizot, (1899) ; Champion, troduction aux Essais de Montaigne' (1900) ; Dowden, E., de Montaigne' (Phila delphia 1905) ; Woodberry G. 'Great Writers' (Garden City 1907) ; Sichel, E., de Montaigne' (New York 1911).