ENICE, and AS YOU LIKE IT, all of which exhibit a great
advance on the methods of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, with its rhymes and
sonnets and "concetti." The leap suggested by M. Chasles is exorbitant;
such a headlong development would be unintelligible. Shakspere had first
to come practically into touch with the realities of life and character
before he could receive from Montaigne the full stimulus he actually did
undergo. Plastic as he was, he none the less underwent a normal
evolution; and his early concreteness and verbalism and externality had
to be gradually transmuted into a more inward knowledge of life and art
before there could be superimposed on that the mood of the thinker,
reflectively aware of the totality of what he had passed through.

Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakspere's mind is not that
presented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their
intense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing
impressions than the play of his own criticism on the general problem of
life. For the full revelation of this we must look rather in the great
tragedies, notably in LEAR, and thereafter in the subsiding movement of
the later serious plays. There it is that we learn to give exactitude to
our conception of the influence exerted upon him by Montaigne, and to
see that, even as in the cases of Pascal and Montesquieu, Rousseau and
Emerson, what happened was not a mere transference or imposition of
opinions, but a living stimulus, a germination of fresh intellectual
life, which developed under new forms. It would be strange if the most
receptive and responsive of all the intelligences which Montaigne has
touched should not have gone on differentiating itself from his.

VI.

What then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakspere's
thought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and
assimilate the ideas of the elder, how far did he reject them, how far
modify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our
inquiry, were it only because Shakspere is firstly and lastly a dramatic
writer. But he is not only that: he is at once the most subjective, the
most sympathetic, and the most self-witholding of dramatic writers.
Conceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own psychology,
he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions
of his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral
log