of
the stars--which very superstition he was later to support by his own
authority in the APOLOGY, as we have seen above, in the passage on the
"power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the
thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest
against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration
is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and
carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some
great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn
consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Caesar's sayings as
to his star, and the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning his death a
year.

"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to
be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests
disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least
actions. 'There is no such society between heaven and us
that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as
mortal as we are.'"

There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this passage in
Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we
are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own
behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the
moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity;
fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors
by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers
by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all
that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on...."

(d) Again, in MACBETH (1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff[105]:

"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"

--an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this perilous stuff, which
weighs upon the heart"--recalls the essay[106] OF SADNESS, in which
Montaigne remarks on the

"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when
accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us," and on the
way in which "the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears
and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself";
going on to tell how the German Lord Raisciac looked on his
dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having
suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark
dead to the ground."

The parallel here, such as it is,