‘This language [Latin] was my mother tongue’, says a country squire, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92), in the first volume of his Essais, c. 25. This is how it came about. Before the boy could speak his father engaged as tutor a German latinist who did not know a word of French. Orders were given that no member of the household was to speak anything but Latin in the boy's hearing. The father and mother as well as the servants, including the chambermaid, picked up the foreign language; ‘we became so soaked in Latin that it flooded the villages around us, and even to-day (1580) the Latin names of artisans and tools are still heard in the neighbourhood. I was above six years of age before I understood any more French or Périgordin than I did Arabic’ (i. 25). He tells us elsewhere that the only verses he ever composed were in Latin. Among his tutors was the Scottish poet Buchanan, a distinguished latinist: Scott tells us that the Laird of Tully-Veolan ‘read the classic poets, to be sure, and the Epithalamium of Georgius Buchanan’ (Waverley, c. 13).

At the age of six Montaigne was sent to the ‘Collège de Guienne, the best in France’. There, under the influence of the macaronic jargon spoken around him, his Ciceronian diction soon ‘became debased’ (s'abastardit). ‘When I was about seven or eight, I used to escape from all other pleasures to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the easiest book known to me, and, because of the subject-matter, the best-suited to my feeble age.’