ABSTRACT
Montaigne did not have French as his mother tongue. At the age of 6 Montaigne had the pattern of one language in his mind, and that was Latin. He explains in 1588 how Latin and French operate within his own mind. Art is by its very nature a heightening of consciousness. The passage from Lucretius that Montaigne quotes is unlike Botticelli’s painting ‘Mars and Venus’ now in the National Gallery. Botticelli chooses to set his picture after the intercourse. Montaigne hits on the compression, the allusiveness and the rich texture of all good poetry. Verse and literary prose are different attempts to express things well: Longinus and Montaigne have in mind that the ‘meaning’ of a literary work is not that of a message, but of an artistic design which is inexhaustible.
