'[R. L. Stevenson] ... nominated ["The Egoist"], together with a couple of Scott's novels, a Dumas, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Moliere, as one of that handful of books which ... he read repeatedly -- four or five times in the case of "The Egoist", he declared in 1887.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
The seventeenth-century waterman-poet John Taylor had read More's Utopia, Plato's Republic, Montaigne, and Cervantes in translation, but he never mastered a foreign language and he relentlessly satirised latinate prose:
I ne'er used Accidence so much as now,
Nor all these Latin words here interlaced
I do not know if they with sense are placed,
I in the book did find them".'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Taylor Print: Book
" ... [Alexander Pope's surviving books] allow us to be confident about his having read certain works, such as the essays of Montaigne."
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Alexander Pope Print: Book
"Lady Mary [Wortley Montagu] used French for some of the (relatively few) notes in her Montaigne."
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Print: Book
"In 1617 the Countess [of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery] noted recreational books that she was reading:
"'Began to have Mr. Sandy's book read to me about the Government of the Turks.
"'Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne's Plays [Essays] and Moll Neville in the Fairy Queen.
"'I sat and read much in the Turkish History and Chaucer.
"'The 12th and 13th I spent most of the time in playing Glecko and hearing Moll Neville read the Arcadia.'"
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Rivers Print: Book
'After the breakdown of her marriage in 1752, Sarah Scott read voraciously and eclectically, the "History of Florence" and Lord Bacon's essays, and the Old Plays, Christianity not founded on argument, Randolph's answer to it... and some of David's Simple Life... an account of the Government of Venice, Montaigne's Essays.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Sarah Scott Print: Book
Mary Berry to a friend, 14 December, 1798: 'During my illness I have finished the 2nd vol. of Wraxhall which I had just begun at Brandsby, and which I like better and better the farther I go. I have consulted, too, one of his authorities for many things in the age of Henry the Third, Montaigne's Essays, a very curious and an [italics]astonishing[end italics] book, considering the times in which it was written, and which one never consults without entertainment. I have re-read, too, Condorcet's book, and compared his ideas and arguments on the subject of population with those of the Essay [by Malthus] we have been reading, and certainly the Essay has not only the best of the argument [...] but is absolute [italics]conviction[end italics]on the subject of the different ratios in which population, and the means of subsisting that population, increase'.
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Berry Print: Book
'I do sometimes wish for my library here, where it costs trouble to other people to get books for me, and yet I have done well enough lately with Montaigne, and a bit of Moliere with the boys, now and then, and I Promessi Sposi with Fanny discovering thereby that I can read Italian almost like French or English, which I was not aware of'.
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Martineau Print: Book
'I am alone in the house, and so I allowed myself, at dinner, the first light reading I have indulged in since my return in the shape of some Montaigne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'As Montaigne says, talking of something quite different:"Pour se laisser tomber a plomb, et de si haut, il faut que se soit entre les bras d'une affection solide, vigoureuse et fortunee."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Robert Southey to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, c. 1-10 October 1795, 'I have got an old translation of Montaignes essays & hugely delighted am I with this honest egotism! buy Cottles poems for the mans sake — I love him so well that I would have you love whatever comes from him — read nothing but the monody — omne ignotum pro magnifico — & you will think him a first rate poet. it is a most masterly composition.'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Southey Print: Book