“There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things,” Michel de Montaigne lamented in his late essay “Of Experience” (1588), “and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.”
Admittedly, the “swarming” of which Montaigne spoke hardly seems overwhelming now. The books in question—commentaries on the Bible, Greco-Roman worthies, and the law—were printed in runs that often numbered in the hundreds, their clientele restricted to the deeper-pocketed sort like our noble Michel, who indeed owned such commentaries and drew on them while writing the Essays.
Yet Montaigne was onto something. The infestation of comments in the world of print would only increase in the next two centuries, thanks to the growth of what Samuel Johnson would later call “the papers of the day,” which make only a handful of appearances in the Essays (as when Montaigne mentions “the thousands of little pamphlets” distributed by Protestants).