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.
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, —Act iii. sc. 2.
[3] London and Westminster Review, July, 1838, p. 321.
[4] Article in Journal des Débats, 7 November, 1846, reprinted in L'Angleterre au Seizième Siècle, ed. 1879, p. 136.
[5] Montaigne (Série des Grands Ecrivains Français), 1895, p. 105.
[6] Molière et Shakspere.