Authors and their 'borrowed beauties'.

Montaigne's was,
in fact, a famous borrower. 

He himself warns his readers to be careful
how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch,
or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. 

Montaigne
is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature of the man of
genius exercising his prescriptive right to help himself to his own
wherever he may happen to find it. 

But Montaigne has in turn been freely
borrowed from. Bacon borrowed from him, Shakespeare borrowed from him,
Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron--these, with many more, in England;
and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau--directly
or indirectly, almost every writer since his day