corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood,
treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and
passion, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant
would he find his imaginary commonwealth from this
perfection?"

Compare the speech in which the kind old Gonzalo seeks to divert the
troubled mind of the shipwrecked King Alonso:

"I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things: for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; no use of service,
Of riches, or of poverty; no contracts,
Succession; bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:
No occupation, all men idle, all;
And women too: but innocent and pure:
No sovereignty...."

There can be no dispute as to the direct transcription here, where the
dramatist is but incidentally playing with Montaigne's idea, proceeding
to put some gibes at it in the mouths of Gonzalo's rascally comrades;
and it follows that Gonzalo's further phrase, "to excel the golden age,"
proceeds from Montaigne's previous words: "exceed all the pictures
wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the golden age." The
play was in all probability written in or before 1610. It remains to
show that on his first reading of Florio's Montaigne, in 1603-4,
Shakspere was more deeply and widely influenced, though the specific
proofs are in the nature of the case less palpable.

II. Let us take first the more decisive coincidences of phrase.
Correspondences of thought which in themselves do not establish their
direct connection, have a new significance when it is seen that other
coincidences amount to manifest reproduction. And such a coincidence we
have, to begin with, in the familiar lines:

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."[9]

I pointed out in 1885 that this expression, which does not occur in the
First Quarto HAMLET, corresponds very closely with the theme of
Montaigne's essay, THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES MET WITHALL IN PURSUIT OF
REASON,[10] in which occurs the phrase, "Fortune has more judgment[11]
than we," a translation from Menander. But Professor Morley, having had
his attention called to the subject by the work of Mr. Feis, who had
suggested another passage as the source of Shakspere's, made a more
perfect identification. Reading the proofs of the Florio translation for
his reprint, he found