Montaigne by Virginia Woolf

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily, / had painted of himself, and asked, "Why is it not, in like manner, / lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a / crayon? " Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing / could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are / almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, / the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, / and overwhelming difficulty.

After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in / drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau / perhaps. The _Religio Medici_ is a coloured glass through which darkly / one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright / polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other / people's shoulders in the famous biography. But this talking of oneself, / following one's own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and / circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its / imperfection -- this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne. As the / centuries go by, there is always a crowd before that picture, gazing / into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the / longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they / see. New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the / Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes[3] Cotton's / translation; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the / complete works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to / which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research.