tion was sure to secure a proverbial vogue, and in THE TWO
NOBLE KINSMEN (in which Shakspere indeed seems to have had a hand), we
have the doctor protesting: "I think she has a perturbed mind, which I
cannot minister to."[125]

And so, again, with the notable resemblance between Hercules' cry:

"Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius,
Morerque, nihil est. Cuncta jam amisi bona,
Mentem, arma, famem, conjugam, natos, manus,
Etiam furorem."[126]

and Macbeth's:

"I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have."[127]

Here there is indeed every appearance of imitation; but, though the
versification in Macbeth's speech is certainly Shakspere's, such a
lament had doubtless been made in other English plays, in direct
reproduction of Seneca; and Shakspere, in all probability, was again
only perfecting some previous declamation.

There is a quite proverbial quality, finally, in such phrases as:

"Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To that they were before;"[128]

and

"We but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor."[129]

--which might be traced to other sources nearer Shakspere's hand than
Seneca. And beyond such sentences and such tropes as those above
considered, there was really little or nothing in the tragedies of
Seneca to catch Shakspere's eye or ear; nothing to generate in him a
deep philosophy of life or to move him to the manifold play of
reflection which gives his later tragedies their commanding
intellectuality. Some such stimulus, as we have seen, he might indeed
have drawn from one or two of Seneca's treatises, which do, in their
desperately industrious manner, cover a good deal of intellectual
ground, making some tolerable discoveries by the way. But by the tests
alike of quantity and quality of reproduced matter, it is clear that the
indirect influence of the Senecan tragedies and treatises on Shakspere
was slight compared with the direct influence of Montaigne's essays. Nor
is it hard to see why; even supposing Shakspere to have had Seneca at
hand in translation. Despite Montaigne's own leaning to Seneca, as
compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne
says of the latter, that "his manner of writing seemeth very tedious."
Over the DE BENE