applies a more penetrating logic, and explicitly reverses the
essayist's verdicts. Montaigne, for instance, carried away by his master
doctrine that we should live "according to nature," is given to talking
of "art" and "nature" in the ordinary manner, carrying the primitive
commonplace indeed to the length of a paradox. Thus in the essay on the
Cannibals,[177] speaking of "savages," he protests that

"They are even savage, as we call those fruits wild which
nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath
produced, whereas indeed they are those which ourselves have
altered by our artificial devices, and diverted from their
common order, we should rather call savage. In those are the
true and more profitable virtues and natural properties most
lively and vigorous;"[178]

deciding with Plato that

"all things are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by
art; the greatest and fairest by one or other of the two
first; the least and imperfect by this last."

And in the APOLOGY,[179] after citing some as arguing that

"Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and guides" the
lower animals, "as if by the hand, to all the actions and
commodities of their life," while, "as for us, she abandons
us to hazard and fortune, and to seek by art the things
necessary to our conservation,"

though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that "nature has
universally embraced all her creatures," man as well as the rest, and to
argue that man is as much a creature of nature as the rest--since even
speech, "if not natural, is necessary"--he never seems to come within
sight of the solution that art, on his own showing, is just nature in a
new phase. But to that point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the
WINTER'S TALE, one of the latest plays (? 1611), written about the time
when we know him to have been reading or re-reading the essay on the
Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant gillyflowers in her garden,

"For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature,"

the old king answers:

"Say there be:
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: This is an art
W