y."[5]

So modest a claim, coming from the French side, can hardly be blamed on
the score of that very modesty. It is the fact, however, that, though
M. Stapfer has in another work[6] compared Shakspere with a French
classic critically enough, he has here understated his case. He was led
to such an attitude in his earlier study of Shakspere by the slightness
of the evidence offered for the claim of M. Chasles, of which he wrote
that it is "a gratuitous supposition, quite unjustified by the few
traces in his writings of his having read the Essays."[7] But that
verdict was passed without due scrutiny. The influence of Montaigne on
Shakspere was both wider and deeper than M. Stapfer has suggested; and
it is perhaps more fitting, after all, that the proof should be
undertaken by some of us who, speaking Shakspere's tongue, cannot well
be suspected of seeking to belittle him when we trace the sources for
his thought, whether in his life or in his culture. There is still,
indeed, a tendency among the more primitively patriotic to look
jealously at such inquiries, as tending to diminish the glory of the
worshipped name; but for anyone who is capable of appreciating
Shakspere's greatness, there can be no question of iconoclasm in the
matter. Shakspere ignorantly adored is a mere dubious mystery; Shakspere
followed up and comprehended, step by step, albeit never wholly
revealed, becomes more remarkable, more profoundly interesting, as he
becomes more intelligible. We are embarked, not on a quest for
plagiarisms, but on a study of the growth of a wonderful mind. And in
the idea that much of the growth is traceable to the fertilising contact
of a foreign intelligence there can be nothing but interest and
attraction for those who have mastered the primary sociological truth
that such contacts of cultures are the very life of civilisation.

II.

The first requirement in the study, obviously, is an exact statement of
the coincidences of phrase and thought in Shakspere and Montaigne. Not
that such coincidences are the main or the only results to be looked
for; rather we may reasonably expect to find Shakspere's thought often
diverging at a tangent from that of the writer he is reading, or even
directly gainsaying it. But there can be no solid argument as to such
indirect influence until we have fully established the direct influence,
and this can only be done by exhibiting a considerable number of
coincidences. M. Chasles,