has known ladies who would
rather lend their honour than their coach; and a dozen other
propositions, if possible still more amazing. But when, with no
foregone conclusion as to any polemic purpose on Shakspere's part, we
restrict ourselves to real parallels of thought and expression; when we
find that a certain number of these are actually textual; when we find
further that in a single soliloquy in the play there are several
reproductions of ideas in the essays, some of them frequently recurring
in Montaigne; and when finally it is found that, with only one
exception, all the passages in question have been added to the play in
the Second Quarto, after the publication of Florio's translation, it
seems hardly possible to doubt that the translation influenced the
dramatist in his work.

Needless to say, the influence is from the very start of that high sort
in which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives,
Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own
assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of
surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even
the vibration of the style passing from one intelligence to the other;
the nervous and copious speech of Montaigne awakening Shakspere to a
new sense of power over rhythm and poignant phrase, at the same time
that the stimulus of the thought gives him a new confidence in the
validity of his own reflection. Some cause there must have been for this
marked species of development in the dramatist at that particular time:
and if we find pervading signs of one remarkable new influence, with no
countervailing evidence of another adequate to the effect, the inference
is about as reasonable as many which pass for valid in astronomy. For it
will be found, on the one hand, that there is no sign worth considering
of a Montaigne influence on Shakspere before HAMLET; and, on the other
hand, that the influence to some extent continues beyond that play.
Indeed, there are still further minute signs of it there, which should
be noted before we pass on.

XIII. Among parallelisms of thought of a less direct kind, one may be
traced between an utterance of Hamlet's and a number of Montaigne's
sayings on the power of imagination and the possible equivalence of
dream life and waking life. In his first dialogue with Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, where we have already noted an echo of Montaigne, Hamlet
cries:

"O G