Montaigne's appreciation of La Boétie uses terminology that one has come to consider the highest accolade for the Renaissance writer: the contemporary author is seen as comparable with classical antiquity, its true heir, imitator, and emulator. It is a remark that Montaigne endorses at the close of his essay, declaring that La Boétie's “mind was molded in the pattern of other ages than this” (F144,V194). There appears to be no finer compliment. Yet by an irony that is rarely far from Montaigne's work, the essayist's veneration of his friend is couched in terms that are the opposite of his evaluation of himself and his own enterprise: where La Boétie is outstanding “in the matter of natural gifts” (F135, V184), Montaigne's “ability does not go far enough for [him] to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art” (F135, V183). The difference is intensified precisely because one writer is alive and the other dead; La Boétie has become absorbed into that classical pantheon that reverses the movement from past to present that is an assumption of the Renaissance intellectual heritage. As one reads on, it becomes apparent that La Boétie's surviving writings, of which Montaigne is the literary executor, are only a pale shadow compared to what might have been had he lived.