The passage may very well have given Shakespeare his cue; but as it happens there is another possible source in a passage of Kyd's translation of Garnier's CORNELIA,' published in 1594:

“O lofty towers, O stately battlements
O glorious temples, O proud palaces,

And you brave walls, bright heaven's masonry
Grac'd with a thousand kingly diadems."

Here the verbal coincidences are a little more noticeable, though the idea of the vanishing of all is not developed as in Stirling's lines. In any case, the sonorities of one or the other set of verses 2

1 Act IV, Sc. 2, 5-8.

2 Echoes of this kind may derive proximately from Spenser :

"My pallaces possessed of my foe,

My cities sacked, and their sky-threating walls
Raced and made smooth fields."

(Faerie Queene, B. V, c. x, st. 33.)

"High towers, faire temples, goodlie theaters
Strong walls, rich porches, princelie pallaces
All these (O pitie !) now are turned to dust.

(The Ruines of Time, st. 14.)

“Triumphant Arcks, spires, neighbours to the sky.

"These haughtie heapes, these palaces of olde,

These walls, these arcks, these baths, these temples hie. . . ."
(Version of Bellay's Ruines of Rome, st. 7 and 27.)

"All his glory gone

And all his greatness vapourèd to nought."

(Ruines of Time, st. 32.)

"All that in this world is great or gay

Doth as a vapour vanish and decay.”

(Id. st. 8.)

If any should resent the suggestion that Shakespeare's muse was

seem to have vibrated in the poet's brain amid the memories of the prose which had suggested to him so much; and the verse and prose alike are raised to an immortal movement in the great lines of Prospero :

"These our actors,

As I foretold you, are all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

In the face of that large philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason, as some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his Utopia of incivilisation, Shakespeare so arranges the dialogue as to express his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will be remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, the two villains of the piece, and Alonso, the king who had abetted the usurping brother. The kind Gonzalo talks of the ideal community to distract Alonso's troubled ever spurred in this fashion, what do they make of the echo of Lyly's song on the lark (Alexander and Campaspe, Act V, Sc. 1) :

"How at heaven's gate she claps her wings";

in "Hark, bark, the lark at heaven's gate sings," and in Sonnet xxix.

thoughts; Sebastian and Antonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, "Pr'ythee, no more, thou dost talk nothing to me." Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was meant to state Shakespeare's prophetic derision for all communisms and socialisms and peace congresses, Shakespeare being the foreordained oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the principle of "Gott mit uns." And it may well have been that Shakespeare, looking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that he humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in the mouth of a surly villain: he has done as much elsewhere. But he was surely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no more Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than As You LIKE IT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay, which was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted with some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man to repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban' as the real "cannibal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his impression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET,

1 In all probability this character existed in the previous play, the name being originally, as was suggested last century by Dr Farmer, a mere variant of "Canibal."

MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had reached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong the sane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he could not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old tragedy of revenge which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he found didactically enough set down in the essay OF DIVERSION :'

"Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great and natural impression I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that passion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the good-will he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I diverted him to ambition."

And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the drama :

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury,

Do I take part; the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance..

The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's polity; even the cursed and cursing Caliban had

1 B. III, Ch. 4.

before been recognised as a necessary member of

it:

"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,

Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices
That profit us";

and the plotting Caliban, like the plotting villains,
is finally forgiven. It is surely not unwarrantable
to pronounce, then, in sum, that the poet who thus
watchfully lit his action from the two sides of
passion and sympathy was in the end at one with
his "guide, philosopher, and friend," who in that
time of universal strife and separateness could of
his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and
say:
2 "I esteem all men my compatriots, and
embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman, subordinating
this national tie to the common and universal."
Here, too, was not Montaigne the first of the

moderns?

1 Act II, Sc. 2.

2 B. III, Ch. 9.