"We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply ourselves to diverse fashions. It is a being, but not a life, to be tied and bound by necessity to one only course. The goodliest minds are those that have most variety and pliableness in them. . . . Life is a motion unequal, irregular, and multiform.

"... My fortune having inured and allured me, even from my infancy, to one sole, singular, and perfect amity, hath verily in some sort distasted me from others. . . . So that it is naturally a pain unto me to communicate myself by halves, and with modification.

...

"I should commend a high-raised mind that could both bend and discharge itself; that wherever her fortune might transport her, she might continue constant. . . . I envy those which can be familiar with the meanest of their followers, and vouchsafe to contract friendship and frame discourse with their own servants."

Again, La Boëtie is panegyrised by Montaigne for his rare poise of character; in the essay in which Montaigne with his boundless frankness avows his own changeableness and perturbability:

"Of a great man in general, and that hath so many excellent parts together, or but one in such a degree of excellence as he may thereby be admired, or but compared to those of former ages whom we honour, my fortune hath not permitted me to see one. And the greatest I ever knew living (I mean of natural parts of the mind, and the best borne) was Estienne de la Boëtie. Verily it was a complete

1 B. II, Ch. 17. Elsewhere (B. II, Ch. 11) Montaigne names Socrates as his ideal man, and this on the score of his absolute and invariable self-possession; and in naming La Boëtie as the one modern whom he has met fit to be tested by the ancient standard he ascribes to him a similar type of personality.

mind, and who set a good face and showed a fair countenance upon all matters; a mind after the old stamp (Florio, p. 358).

Seeing then that also in the essay OF THREE COMMERCES Montaigne has brought the ideal of the imperturbable man into connection with his ideal of friendship, it could well be-though we cannot hold the point as proved that in this as in other matters the strong general impression that Montaigne was so well fitted to make on Shakespeare's mind was the source of such a change in the conception and exposition of Hamlet's relation to Horatio as is set up by Hamlet's protestation of his long-standing admiration and love for his friend. Shakespeare's own relations with the friend of the Sonnets might make him specially alive to such suggestion.

XVI. We now come to the suggested resemblance between the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and the general tone of Montaigne on the subject of death. On this resemblance I am less disposed to lay stress now than I was on a first consideration of the subject, many years ago. While I find new coincidences of detail on a more systematic search, I am less impressed by the alleged general resemblance of tone. In point of fact, the general drift of Hamlet's soliloquy is rather alien to the general

tone of Montaigne on the same theme. That tone, as we shall see, harmonises much more nearly with the speech of the Duke to Claudio, on the same theme, in MEASURE FOR MEASURE. What really seems to subsist in the "To be" soliloquy, after a careful scrutiny, is a series of echoes of single thoughts.

First, there is the striking coincidence of the word "consummation" (which first appears in the Second Quarto), with Florio's translation of anéantissement in the essay OF PHYSIOGNOMY, as above noted. Secondly, there is a curious resemblance between the phrase "take arms against a sea of troubles" and a passage in Florio's version of the same essay, which has somehow been overlooked in the disputes over Shakespeare's line. It runs :

"I sometimes suffer myself by starts to be surprised with the pinchings of these unpleasant conceits, which, whilst I arm myself to expel or wrestle against them, assail and beat Lo here another huddle or tide of mischief, that on the neck of the former came rushing upon me."

me.

There arises here the difficulty that Shakespeare's line had been satisfactorily traced to Aelian's story of the Celtic practice of rushing into the sea to resist a high tide with weapons;

1

1 Varia Historia, XII, 23.

and the matter must, I think, be left open, on the ground that such a story would pass from mouth to mouth, and so may easily have been heard by Shakespeare, even if he had not met with it in any translation or citation.1

Again, the phrase "Conscience doth make cowards of us all" is very like the echo of two passages in the essay OF CONSCIENCE: "Of such marvellous working power is the sting of conscience; which often induceth us to bewray, to accuse, and to combat ourselves"; "which as it doth fill us with fear and doubt, so doth it store us with assurance and trust"; and the lines about "the dread of something after death' might point to the passage in the fortieth essay in which Montaigne cites the saying of Augustine that "Nothing but what follows death, makes death to be evil" (malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem) cited by Montaigne in order to dispute it. The same thought, too, is dealt with in the essay on A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA, which contains a passage suggestive of Hamlet's earlier soliloquy on self-slaughter. But,

3

1 The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, iii 1, and in Nicolas of Damascus ; while Strabo (VII, ii, § 1) gives it further currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.

2 B. II, Ch. 5.

3 B. II, Ch. 3.

for one thing, Hamlet's soliloquies are contrary in drift to Montaigne's argument; and, for another, the phrase "Conscience makes cowards of us all" existed in the soliloquy as it stood in the First Quarto, while the gist of the idea is actually found twice in a previous play, where it has a proverbial ring. And "the hope of something after death" figures in the First Quarto also, where it may be one of the many errors of the piratical reporter.

Finally, there are other sources than Montaigne for parts of the soliloquy, sources nearer, too, than those which have been pointed to in the Senecan tragedies. There is, indeed, as Dr. Cunliffe has pointed out,2 a broad correspondence between the whole soliloquy and the chorus of women at the end of the second Act of the TROADES, where the question of a life beyond is pointedly put :

"Verum est ? an timidos fabula decepit,

Umbras corporibus vivere conditis?"

It is true that the choristers in Seneca pronounce definitely against the future life:

"Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil . .
Rumores vacui verbaque inania,

Et par sollicito fabula somnio."

1 Richard III, 1, 4 ; V, 3.

2 The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, 1893, pp. 80-85.