I appreciate Montaigne, and so should you.

If anyone asks what I did tonight, I'll tell them, 'I read Montaigne.'
'Hmmm,' they might say, 'that's really great.'
'Yes I'd say so, it was very great' I would say.
If a bold inquierer so dares to queery, "On what?"
'Hmmm?'
"Montaigne on what, what was he writing on?"
"Oh, uh; he was writing on some verses of Virgil" I'd snap.
Because honesty is the best policy, and if anyone asks I would tell them the truth: Tonight I read Montaigne on Virgil.
What I got out of this.........................................................
Somewhere elluded me.

I really do like Montaigne. I've read him before, he's really not SO difficult to keep up with, translations varying, but his style opposes the assumptions that any modern reader brings to a text. We often associate precision with concision, but montaigne's sentences each contain an exhausting anatomical correctitude. An occasional fragment would be cathartic for the Montaigne reader, instead his heavy punctuation weighs down his prose and encumbers the eyelids of his readers.
Not that it's bad -his writing- it's brilliant, but it opposes the standards of contemporary lit, in way incomparable even to the dry, dense sentences of some modernist like James and Joyce.

"Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition: it thinks itself rich enough of itself without any addition of repute; and is best pleased where most retired. A young man should be whipped who pretends to a taste in wine and sauces; there was nothing which, at that age, I less valued or knew; now I begin to learn; I am very much ashamed on`t; but what should I do? I am more ashamed and vexed at the occasions that put me upon`t. `Tis for us to dote and trifle away the time, and for young men to stand upon their reputation and nice punctilios; they are going toward the world and the world`s opinion; we are retiring from it: "Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam, sibi natationes, et cursus habeant: nobis senibus ex lusionibus multis, talos relinquant et tesseras;" the laws themselves send us home. I can do no less in favor of this wretched condition into which my age has thrown me, than furnish it with toys to play withal, as they do children; and, in truth, we become such. Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by alternate services in this calamity of age:
"Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem."


-In the preceding passage Montaigne establishes a truism. Then he draws it out. Then he relates it to himself. Then he draws it out.

His style is not flawed, relative to the era it may have been revolutionary (I really don't know). The thesis of his paragraph 'Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition' may have, in Montaigne's age, seemed like a cutting edge observation rather than a grandfather's parable; but today the reader expects more relation to the immediate.
Montaigne has by no means lost relevance, his place in the canon, his work as a leg of the pedestol on which the great writers of all time stand, is by no means ephemeral. However, the approach that readers take montaigne has changed. We're not reading for content but analysis, not of his substance but his style.