hich does mend nature--change it rather; but
The art itself is nature."[180]

It is an analysis, a criticism, a philosophic demonstration; and the
subtle poet smilingly lets us see immediately that he had tried the
argument on the fanatics of "nature," fair or other, and knew them
impervious to it. "I'll not put," says Puritan Perdita, after demurely
granting that "so it is"--

"I'll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."

The mind which could thus easily pierce below the inveterate fallacy of
three thousand years of conventional speech may well be presumed capable
of rounding Montaigne's philosophy wherever it collapses, and of setting
it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never
convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we
never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS
seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the
deep-striking intelligence that first stirred him to philosophise.

And yet, supposing this to be so, there is none the less a lasting
community of thought between the two spirits, a lasting debt from the
younger to the elder. Indeed, we cannot say that at all points
Shakspere outwent his guide. It is a curious reflection that they had
probably one foible in common; for we know Montaigne's little weakness
of desiring his family to be thought ancient, of suppressing the fact of
its recent establishment by commerce; and we have evidence which seems
to show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] despite rebuffs, the
formal constitution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On the other hand,
there is nothing in Shakspere's work--the nature of the case indeed
forbade it--to compare in democratic outspokenness with Montaigne's
essay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]
that "the souls of emperors and cobblers are all cast in one same mould"
could not well be echoed in Elizabethan drama; and indeed we cannot well
be sure that Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his fixed habit of
taking kings and princes and generals and rich ones for his personages.
But then, on the other hand, we cannot be sure that this was anything
more than a part of his deliberate life's work of producing for the
English multitude what that multitude cared to see, and catching London
with that bait of royalty which commonly attracted it. It remains a fine
question whether his ext