that "there have been men
with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance
of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to
make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they
bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at
Shakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the
incomparable old-new French of the original, was in itself a revelation.

I have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to
Shakspere a vibration of style as well as of thought; and it would be
difficult to overstate the importance of such an influence. A writer
affects us often more by the pulse and pressure of his speech than by
his matter. Such an action is indeed the secret of all great literary
reputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and
the beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They
must have affected Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in
point of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous
tension and pith, fairly attributable to the stirring impact of the
style of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of
colour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging
stride. Seek in any of Shakspere's plays for such a strenuous rush of
idea and rhythm as pulses through the soliloquy:

"How all occasions do inform against me,"

and you will gather that there has been a technical change wrought, no
less than a moral and an intellectual. The poet's nerves have caught a
new vibration.

But it was not merely a congenial felicity and energy of utterance that
Montaigne brought to bear on his English reader, though the more we
consider this quality of spontaneity in the essayist the more we shall
realise its perennial fascination. The culture-content of Montaigne's
book is more than even the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and
reflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin
criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh
and pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality.
For Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the
Renaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of
his contact with Latin literature. Other men must have come to know
Latin as well as he; and hundreds could write it with an accuracy and
facility which,