ea as
Shakspere here gives it; indeed, we have seen him putting forth a
contrary teaching; and looking to the context, where Ulysses admits the
thesis to be "familiar," we are bound to infer a direct source for it.
In all probability it derives from Seneca, who in his treatise DE
BENEFICIIS[97] throws out the germ of the ideas as to Nature demanding
back her gifts, and as to virtue being nothing if not reflected; and
even suggests the principle of "thanks and use."[98] This treatise, too,
lay to Shakspere's hand in the translation of 1578, where the passages:
"Rerum natura nihil dicitur perdere, quia quidquid illi avellitur, ad
illam redit; nec perire quidquam potest, quod quo excidat non habet, sed
eodem evolvitur unde discedit"; and "quaedam quum sint honesta,
pulcherrima summae virtutis, nisi cum altero non habent locum," are
translated:

"The nature of a thing cannot be said to have foregone
aught, because that whatsoever is plucked from it returneth
to it again; neither can anything be lost which hath not
whereout of to pass, but windeth back again unto whence it
came;"

and

"Some things though they be honest, very goodly and right
excellently vertuous, yet have they not their effect but in
a co-partner."

Whether it was Shakspere's reading of Montaigne that sent him to Seneca,
to whom Montaigne[99] avows so much indebtedness, we of course cannot
tell; but it is enough for the purpose of our argument to say that we
have here another point or stage in a line of analytical thought on
which Shakspere was embarked about 1603, and of which the starting point
or initial stimulus was the perusal of Florio's Montaigne. We have the
point of contact with Montaigne in HAMLET, where the saying that reason
is implanted in us to be used, is seen to be one of the many
correspondences of thought between the play and the Essays. The idea is
more subtly and deeply developed in MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and still more
subtly and philosophically in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. The fact of the
process of development is all that is here affirmed, over and above the
actual phenomena of reproduction before set forth.

As to these, the proposition is that in sum they constitute such an
amount of reproduction of Montaigne as explains Jonson's phrase about
habitual "stealings." There is no justification for applying that to the
passage in the TEMPEST, since not only is that play not known to have
existed in its present form in 1