ble and frail, and
therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth
himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world
... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the
circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is
through the vanity of the same imagination that he dare
equal himself to God."

The passage in brackets is left here in its place, not as suggesting
anything in Hamlet's speech, but as paralleling a line in MEASURE FOR
MEASURE, to be dealt with immediately. But it will be seen that
the rest of the passage, though turned to quite another purpose than
Hamlet's, brings together in the same way a set of contrasted ideas of
human greatness and smallness, and of the splendour of the midnight
firmament.[39]

IX. The nervous protest of Hamlet to Horatio on the point of the
national vice of drunkenness,[40] of which all save the beginning is
added in the Second Quarto just before the entrance of the Ghost, has
several curious points of coincidence with Montaigne's essay[41] on THE
HISTORY OF SPURINA, which discusses at great length a matter of special
interest to Shakspere--the character of Julius Caesar. In the course of
the examination Montaigne takes trouble to show that Cato's use of the
epithet "drunkard" to Caesar could not have been meant literally; that
the same Cato admitted Caesar's sobriety in the matter of drinking. It is
after making light of Caesar's faults in other matters of personal
conduct that the essayist comes to this decision:

"But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy
qualities, were altered, smothered, and eclipsed by this
furious passion of ambition.... To conclude, this only vice
(in mine opinion) lost and overthrew in him the fairest
natural and richest ingenuity that ever was, and hath made
his memory abominable to all honest minds."

Compare the exquisitely high-strung lines, so congruous in their excited
rapidity with Hamlet's intensity of expectation, which follow on his
notable outburst on the subject of drunkenness:

"So oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mode of nature in them,
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose its origin),
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason;
Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens
The form of plausive manners; that these men,--
Carrying, I say, the s