s powerless." In the fifth section the idea is worded in
a fashion that could have suggested Shakspere's utterance of it; and he
might easily have met with some citation of the kind. But, on the other
hand, this note of passionate friendship is not only new in Shakspere
but new in HAMLET, in respect of the First Quarto, in which the main
part of the speech to Horatio does not occur, and in view of the
singular fact that in the first Act of the play as it stands Hamlet
greets Horatio as a mere acquaintance; and it is further to be noted
that the description of Horatio as "one in suffering all that suffers
nothing" is broadly suggested by the quotation from Horace in
Montaigne's nineteenth chapter (which, as we have already seen,
impressed Shakspere), and by various other sayings in the Essays. After
the quotation from Horace (_Non vultus instantis tyranni_), in the
Nineteenth Essay, Florio's translation runs:

"She (the soul) is made mistress of her passions and
concupiscences, lady of indigence, of shame, of poverty, and
of all fortune's injuries. Let him that can, attain to this
advantage. Herein consists the true and sovereign liberty,
that affords us means wherewith to jest and make a scorn of
force and injustice, and to deride imprisonment, gyves, or
fetters."

Again, in the essay OF THREE COMMERCES OR SOCIETIES,[62] we have this:

"We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and
dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to supply
ourselves to diverse fashions. It is a being, but not a
life, to be tied and bound by necessity to one only course.
The goodliest minds are those that have most variety and
pliableness in them.... Life is a motion unequal, irregular,
and multiform....

" ... My fortune having inured and allured me, even from my
infancy, to one sole, singular, and perfect amity, hath
verily in some sort distasted me from others.... So that it
is naturally a pain unto me to communicate myself by halves,
and with modification....

"I should commend a high-raised mind that could both bend
and discharge itself; that wherever her fortune might
transport her, she might continue constant.... I envy those
which can be familiar with the meanest of their followers,
and vouchsafe to contract friendship and frame discourse
with their own servants."

Again, la Boetie is panegyrised by Montaigne for his rare poise and
firmness of character;[63] and elsewhere in