th that expressed by Hamlet. But the elements he combines are there;
and again, in the essay OF SOLITARINESS[48] we have the picture of the
soldier fighting furiously for the quarrel of his careless king, with
the question: "Who doth not willingly chop and counter-change his
health, his ease, yea his life, for glory and reputation, the most
unprofitable, vain, and counterfeit coin that is in use with us."

And yet again the thought crops up in the APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE:

"This horror-causing array of so many thousands of armed
men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted courage,
it would make one laugh to see on how many vain occasions it
is raised and set on fire.... The hatred of one man, a
spite, a pleasure ... causes which ought not to move two
scolding fishwives to catch one another, is the soul and
motive of all this hurly-burly."

XII. Yet one more of Hamlet's sayings peculiar to the revised form of
the play seems to be an echo of a thought of Montaigne's. At the outset
of the soliloquy last quoted from, Hamlet says:--

"What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time,
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more.
Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused."

The bearing of the thought in the soliloquy, where Hamlet spasmodically
applies it to the stimulation of his vengeance, is certainly never given
to it by Montaigne, who has left on record[49] his small approbation of
revenge; but the thought itself is there, in the essay[50] ON GOODS AND
EVILS.

"Shall we employ the intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon
us for our greatest good, to our ruin, repugning nature's
design and the universal order and vicissitude of things,
which implieth that every man should use his instrument and
means for his own commodity?"

Again, there is a passage in the essay OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO
THEIR CHILDREN,[51] where there occurs a specific coincidence of phrase,
the special use of the term "discourse," which we have already traced
from Shakspere to Montaigne; and where at the same time the contrast
between man and beast is drawn, though not to the same purpose as in the
speech of Hamlet:--

"Since it hath pleased God to endow us with some capacity of
discourse, that as beasts we should not servilely be
subjected to common laws, but ra