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76 light of what painters call studies; in other words, of those slight sketches which were originally designed for the improvement or amusement of the artist; but which, on that account, are the more likely te be useful in developing the germs of similar endowments in others.

Without a union of these two powers (reflection and observation), the study of Man can never be successfully prosecuted. It is only by retiring within ourselves that we can obtain a key to the characters of others; and it is only by observing and comparing the characters of others that we can thoroughly understand and appreciate our own.

After all, however, it may be fairly questioned, notwithstanding the scrupulous fidelity with which Montaigne has endeavoured to delineate his own portrait, if he has been always sufficiently aware of the secret folds and reduplications of the human heart. That he was by no means exempted from the common delusions of self-love and self-deceit, has been fully evinced in a very acute, though somewhat uncharitable, section of the Port-Royal logic; but this consideration, so far from diminishing the value of his Essays, is one of the most instructive lessons they afford to those who, after the example of the author, may undertake the salutary but humiliating task of self-examination.

As Montaigne’s scientific knowledge was, according to his own account, “very vague and imperfect;” and his book-learning rather sententious and gossipping, than comprehensive and systematical, it would be unreasonable to expect, in his philosophical arguments, much either of depth or of solidity. The sentiments he hazards are to be regarded but as the impressions of the moment; consisting chiefly of the more obvious doubts and difficulties which, on all metaphysical and moral questions, are apt to present themselves to a speculative mind, when it first attempts to dig below the surface of common opinions. In reading Montaigne, accordingly, what chiefly strikes us, is not the novelty or the refinement of his ideas, but the liveliness and felicity with which we see embodied in words the previous wanderings of our own imaginations. It is probably owing to this circumstance, rather than to any direct plagiarism, that his Essays appear to contain the germs of so many of the paradoxical theories which, in later times, Helvetius and others have laboured to systematise and to support with the parade of metaphysical discussion. In the mind of Montaigne, the same paradoxes may be easily traced to those deceitful appearances which, in order to sti-