Word: gascon
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...were used to better society and have the air of the great world, of the world, that is, which makes fashions and is not made by them. They opened their Homer, their Sophocles, their Tacitus, their Horace, where we take up our newspaper or our novel. What an old Gascon prig would Montaigne have been but for the ancients, especially Plutarch. Yet his library did not swamp him, and though his essays are pockmarked all over with quotations, his temper is essentially modern, indeed, he is the first of the properly modern writers. It is not as ladders...
Dante told the Florentines that it was possible to be a philosopher under any stars; Montaigne proved that it was so in his remote Gascon turret. It is curious that Montaigne's Essays is the only speculative book which Shakespeare can be proved to have read. Dante in one sense fought a losing battle, for his life-long endeavor was to keep the thread of tradition unbroken, to reform through the past and not in spite of it. We Americans are apt to undervalue tradition, and for this very reason I think a study of the motives and principles...
Renan was of mixed Celtic and Gascon blood, and inherited the traits of both. From the Celtic or Breton side he had his deeply imaginative and conservative qualities and from the Gascons his light and vivacious nature. He received his early education in a Breton Roman Catholic seminary, where thought was simple and religion sincere. From there he went to Paris, where he found everything more gorgeous and splendid and less real and earnest. To complete his education he went to another seminary, where he first learned that he was not a Christian in the real sense of the word...