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 humorist. Perhaps the only actual parallel to Montaigne in literature is Lamb. There are differences between them, arising naturally enough from differences of temperament and experience; but both agree in their attitude—an attitude which is sceptical without being negative and humorous without being satiric. There is hardly any writer in whom the human comedy is treated with such completeness as it is in Montaigne. There is discernible in his essays no attempt to map out a complete plan, and then to fill up its outlines. But in the desultory and haphazard fashion which distinguishes him there are few parts of life on which he does not touch, if only to show the eternal contrast and antithesis which dominate it. The exceptions are chiefly to be found in the higher and more poetical strains of feeling to which the humorist temperament lends itself with reluctance and distrust, though it by no means excludes them. The positiveness of the French disposition is already noticeable in Rabelais; it becomes more noticeable still in Montaigne. He is always charming, but he is rarely inspiring, except in a very few passages where the sense of vanity and nothingness possesses him with unusual strength. As a general rule, an agreeable grotesque of the affairs of life (a grotesque which never loses hold of good taste sufficiently to be called burlesque) occupies him. There is a kind of anticipation of the scientific spirit in the careful zeal with which he picks up odd aspects of mankind and comments upon them as he places them in his museum. Such a temperament is most pleasantly shown when it is least personal. A dozen generations of men have rejoiced in the gentle irony with which Montaigne handles the ludicrum humani saeculi, in the quaint felicity of his selection of examples, and in the real though sometimes fantastic wisdom of his comment on his selections.

Montaigne did not very long survive the completion of his book. On his way to Paris for the purpose of getting it printed he stayed for some time at Blois, Where he met De Thou. In Paris itself he was for a short time committed to the Bastille by the Leaguers, as a kind of hostage, it is said, for a member of their party who had been arrested at Rouen by Henry of Navarre. But he was in no real danger. He was well known to and favoured by both Catherine de’ Medici and the Guises, and was very soon released. In Paris, too, at this time he made a whimsical but pleasant friendship. Marie de Jars de Gournay (1565–1645), one of the most learned ladies of the 16th and 17th centuries, had conceived such a veneration for the author of the Essays that, though a very young girl and connected with many noble families, she travelled to the capital on purpose to make his acquaintance. He gave her the title of his “fille d’alliance” (adopted daughter), which she bore proudly for the rest of her long life. She lived far into the 17th century, and became a character and something of a laughing-stock to the new generation; but her services to Montaigne’s literary memory were, as will be seen, great. Of his other friends in these last years of his life the most important were Étienne Pasquier and Pierre Charron. The latter, indeed, was more than a friend, he was a disciple; and Montaigne, just as he had constituted Mlle de Gournay his “fille d’alliance,” bestowed on Charron the rather curious compliment of desiring that he should take the arms of the family of Montaigne. It has been thought from these two facts, and from an expression in one of the later essays, that the marriage of his daughter Léonore to Gaston de La Tour had not turned out to his satisfaction. But family affection, except towards his father, was by no means Montaigne’s strongest point. When Henry of Navarre came to the throne of France, he wished Montaigne, whom he had again visited in 1587, to come to court, but the essayist refused. It would seem that he returned from Paris to his old life of study and meditation and working up his Essays. No new ones were found after his death, but many alterations and insertions. His various maladies grew worse; yet they were not the direct cause of his death. He was attacked with quinsy, which rapidly brought about paralysis of the tongue, and he died on the 15th of September 1592, in circumstances which, as Pasquier reports them, completely disprove any intention of displaying anti-Christian or anti-Catholic leanings. He was buried, though not till some months after his death, in a church in Bordeaux, which after some vicissitudes became the chapel of the collége. During the Revolution the tomb, and as it was supposed the coffin, were transferred with much pomp to the town museum; but it was discovered that the wrong coffin had been taken, and it was afterwards restored to its old position. Montaigne’s widow survived him, and his daughter left posterity which became merged in the noble houses of Ségur and Lur-Saluces. But it does not appear that any male representative of the family survived.

 MONTALBÁN, JUAN PEREZ DE (1602–1638), Spanish dramatist, poet and novelist, was born at Madrid in 1602. At the age of eighteen he became a licentiate in theology, was ordained priest in 1625 and appointed notary to the Inquisition. In 1619 he began writing for the stage under the guidance of Lope de Vega, who is said to have assisted him in composing El Orfeo en lengua castellana (1624), a poem obviously intended to compete with Jáuregui’s Orfeo, published earlier in the same year. The prose tales in Sucesos y prodigios de amor (1624) and Para todos (1632) were very popular. Montalbán’s father, a publisher at Madrid, issued a pirated edition of Quevedo’s Buscón, which roused an angry controversy. The violence of these polemics, the strain of overwork, and the death of Lope de Vega so affected Montalbán that he became insane; he died at Madrid on the 25th of June 1638. His last work was a eulogistic biography of Lope de Vega in the Fama póstuma (1636). His plays, published in 1635–1638, are all in the manner of that great dramatist, and were represented with much success, but, with the exception of Los Amantes de Teruel, are little