"It is the mind that maketh good or ill." 1

Shakespeare might have met with the thought, indeed, in Dolman's translation of Cicero's TuscuLANS.2 But in HAMLET we find the formula felt; and this in the midst of matter pointing independently to Montaigne for its stimulus. In EUPHUES it is put as the wayward utterance of the young Euphues justifying his waywardness against an old man's chiding. Iago and Hamlet speak in a deeper sense; and it is by Montaigne that such formulas are best vitalised. Of any moral influence from Spenser, Shakespeare shows no trace.

VII. Hamlet's apostrophe to his mother on the power of custom-a passage which, like the others above cited, first appears in the Second Quarto is similarly an echo of a favourite proposition of Montaigne, who devotes to it the essay3 OF CUSTOM, AND HOW A RECEIVED LAW In that there

SHOULD NOT EASILY BE CHANGED.

occur the typical passages :

"Custom doth so blear us that we cannot distinguish the usage of things. . . . Certes, chastity is an excellent virtue, the commodity whereof is very well known; but to use it, and according to nature to prevail with it, is as hard as it is easy to endear it and to prevail with it according to custom, to laws and precepts." "The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom " (Morley, pp.45-46). 1 Faerie Queene, B. VI, c. ix, st. 30.

2 Tusc. Disp. iii, 11; iv, 7.

3 B. I, Ch. 22.

Again, in the essay OF CONTROLLING ONE'S WILL1 we have: "Custom is a second nature, and not

"That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat

Of habits devil, is angel yet in this

That to the use of actions fair and good

He likewise gives a frock or livery

That aptly is put on . .

...

For use can almost change the stamp of nature."

8

No doubt the idea is a classic commonplace; and in Shakespeare's early comedy Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA [adapted, I think, from one by Greene'] we actually have the line, "How use doth breed a habit in a man "; but here again there seems reason to regard Montaigne as having suggested Shakespeare's vivid and many-coloured wording of the idea in the tragedy. Indeed, even the line cited from the early comedy may have been one of the poet's many later additions to his text.

VIII. A less close but still a noteworthy resemblance is that between the passage in which Hamlet expresses to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

1 B. III, Ch. 10.

2 In the essay OF GLORY (B. II, Ch. 16, end) we have a citation from Cicero (De Fin. ii.): “ that alone is called honest which is glorious by popular report"; and there are many other allusions to the theme in the Essays; but in these the application is different. 3 Act V, Sc. 4.

4 Cp. Anders, The Books of Shakespeare, 1904, pp. 145-6.

the veering of his mood from joy in things to disgust with them, and the paragraph in the APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE in which Montaigne sets against each other the splendour of the universe and the littleness of man. Here the thought diverges, Shakespeare making it his own as he always does, and altering its aim; but the language is curiously similar. Hamlet says:

"It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory: this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man !

How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a God! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

Montaigne, as translated by Florio, has :

...

"Let us see what hold-fast or free-hold he [man] hath in this gorgeous and goodly equipage. . Who hath persuaded him, that this admirable moving of heaven's vaults, that the eternal light of these lamps so fiercely rolling over his head... were established . . . for his commodity and service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor of this universe? . . . [To consider . . . the power and domination these [celestial] bodies have, not only upon our lives and conditions of our fortune . but also over our

dispositions and inclinations, our discourses and wills, which they rule, provoke, and move at the pleasure of their influences.] . . . Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world. . . and yet dareth imaginarily place. himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the same imagination that he dare equal himself to God."

The passage in brackets is left here in its place, not as suggesting anything in Hamlet's speech, but as paralleling a line in MEASURE for Measure, to be dealt with later. But it will be seen that the rest of the passage, though turned to quite another purpose than Hamlet's, brings together in the same way a set of contrasted ideas of human greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight firmament.' And though a partly similar train of thought occurs in Cicero's

1 On reverting to Mr. Feis's book I find that in 1884 he had noted this and others of the above parallels, which I had not observed when writing on the subject in that year. In view of some other parallels and clues drawn by him, our agreements leave me a little uneasy. He decides, for instance (p. 93), that Hamlet's phrase "foul as Vulcan's stithy" is a "sly thrust at Florio" who in his preface calls himself "Montaigne's Vulcan"; that the Queen's phrase "thunders in the index" is a reference to "the Index of the Holy See and its thunders"; and that Hamlet's lines "Why let the stricken deer go weep" are clearly a satire against Montaigne, "who fights shy of action." Mr. Feis's book contains so many propositions of this order that it is difficult to feel sure that he is ever judicious. Still, I find myself in agreement with him on some four or five points of textual coincidence in the two authors.

TUSCULANS, of which there was already an English translation, and which Shakespeare elsewhere seems to have possibly read, the antithetic element is there lacking.

3

IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the national vice of drunkenness,2 of which all save the beginning is added in the Second Quarto just before the entrance of the Ghost, has several curious points of coincidence with Montaigne's essay on THE HISTORY OF SPURINA, which discusses at great length a matter of special interest to Shakespeare-the character of Julius Cæsar. In the course of the examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the epithet "drunkard" to Cæsar could not have been meant literally; that the same Cato admitted Cæsar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is after making light of Cæsar's faults in other matters of personal conduct that the essayist comes to this decision :

"But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this furious passion of ambition. . . . To conclude, this only vice (in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest natura and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made his memory abominable to all honest minds."

1 Tusc. Disp. i, 28.

2 Act I, Sc. 4.

3 B. II, Ch. 33.