I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne.
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