th the passage "We find nothing so sweet
in life as a quiet and gentle sleep," already cited in connection with
our fourth parallel.

XVIII. The theme, in fine, is one of Montaigne's favourites. And the
view that Shakspere had been impressed by it seems to be decisively
corroborated by the fact that the speech of Claudio to Isabella,
expressing those fears of death which the Duke seeks to calm, is
likewise an echo of a whole series of passages in Montaigne. Shakspere's
lines run:

"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot:
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!--'tis too horrible!..."

So far as I know, the only idea in this passage which belongs to the
current English superstition of Shakspere's day, apart from the natural
notion of death as a mere rotting of the body, is that of the
purgatorial fire; unless we assume that the common superstition as to
the souls of unbaptised children being blown about until the day of
judgment was extended in the popular imagination to the case of executed
criminals. He may have heard of the account given by Empedocles, as
cited in Plutarch,[88] of the punishment of the offending daemons, who
were whirled between earth and air and sun and sea; but there is no
suggestion in that passage that human souls were so treated. Dante's
INFERNO, with its pictures of carnal sinners tossed about by the winds
in the dark air of the second circle,[89] and of traitors punished by
freezing in the ninth,[90] was probably not known to the dramatist; nor
does Dante's vision coincide with Claudio's, in which the souls are
blown "about the pendent world." Shakspere may indeed have heard some of
the old tales of a hot and cold purgatory, such as that of Drithelm,
given by Bede,[91] whence (rather than from Dante) Milton drew his idea
of an alternate torture.[92] But there again, the correspondence is only
partial; whereas in Montaigne's APOLOGY OF RAIMOND SEBONDE we find,
poetry apart, nearly every notion that enters into Claudio's speech:

"The most universal and received fantasy, and which
endureth to this day, hath been that