Montaigne also loved the strong sense of Plutarch's own personality that comes across in his work: "I think I know him even into his soul." This was what Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in

*him: the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries. Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close. (67)

He preferred to converse with the ancients in a tone of camaraderie, sometime even teasing them, as when he twits Cicero for his pomposity or suggests that Virgil could have made more of an effort.