passages of the all-discussing
Gascon.

Among English-speaking writers, to say nothing of those who, like Sterne
and Lamb, have been led by his example to a similar felicity of freedom
in style, we may cite Emerson as one whose whole work is coloured by
Montaigne's influence, and Thoreau as one who, specially developing one
side of Emerson's gospel, may be said to have found it all where Emerson
found it, in the Essay on Solitude.[160] The whole doctrine of
intellectual self-preservation, the ancient thesis "flee from the press
and dwell in soothfastness," is there set forth in a series of ringing
sentences, most of which, set in Emerson or Thoreau, would seem part of
their text and thought. That this is no random attribution may be
learned from the lecture on "Montaigne: the Sceptic," which Emerson has
included in his REPRESENTATIVE MEN. "I remember," he says, telling how
in his youth he stumbled on Cotton's translation, "I remember the
delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had
myself written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to
my thought and experience." That is just what Montaigne has done for a
multitude of others, in virtue of his prime quality of spontaneous
self-expression. As Sainte-Beuve has it, there is a Montaigne in all of
us. Flaubert, we know, read him constantly for style; and no less
constantly "found himself" in the self-revelation and analysis of the
essays.

After all these testimonies to Montaigne's seminal virtue, and after
what we have seen of the special dependence of Shakspere's genius on
culture and circumstance, stimulus and initiative, for its evolution,
there can no longer seem to an open mind anything of mere paradox in the
opinion that the essays are the source of the greatest expansive
movement of the poet's mind, the movement which made him--already a
master of the whole range of passional emotion, of the comedy of mirth
and the comedy and tragedy of sex--the great master of the tragedy of
the moral intelligence. Taking the step from JULIUS CAESAR to HAMLET as
corresponding to this movement in his mind, we may say that where the
first play exhibits the concrete perception of the fatality of things,
"the riddle of the painful earth"; in the second, in its final form, the
perception has emerged in philosophic consciousness as a pure
reflection. The poet has in the interim been revealed to himself; what
he had perceived he now conceives. A