ABSTRACT
One of the most artful of Roger North’s writings is the incomplete or, perhaps, uncompleted autobiography, Notes of Me, which ends abruptly with an account of the practices used in executing the Lely trust. Although North's Notes of Me has been available in a bowdlerised edition since the end of the nineteenth century and more in a complete edition, there has been no study of North's indebtedness to Montaigne. Like Montaigne, North also describes his responses to experiences such as illness, pleasures, reading and professional offices or duties. Like Montaigne, then, North's morality is one of self-governance, not one of obedience, for the formula is internal, not external—it derives from North's own experience and his responses to it. Moral truth is derived from an original divine revelation—for North, the two commandments in the Gospel that specify our duties to God, to ourselves and others—and that truth is transmitted traditionally 'to others universally in an historical way'.
