which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he
found didactically enough set down in the essay on Diversion:[197]

"Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great and natural
impression: I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial
of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him
not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had
struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed
I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that
passion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the
beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the
goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I
diverted him to ambition."

And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the
drama:--

"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance...."

The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's society; even the
cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] as a necessary member of
it:--

"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices
That profit us."

It is surely not unwarrantable to pronounce, then, finally, that the
poet who thus watchfully lit his action from the two sides of passion
and sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and
friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of
his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all
men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman,
subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too,
was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?

[1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of
Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.

[2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers,
I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly
Almost as much as from Montaignie;
He has so modern and facile a vein,
Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.

--Act iii. sc. 2.

[3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.

[4] Article in _Journal des Debats_, 7 November, 1846,
reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, ed. 1879, p.
136.

[5] _Montaigne_ (Serie des _Grands Ecrivains Francais_),