V. When we compare part of the speech of Rosencrantz on sedition[30] with a passage in Montaigne's essay, Of Custom,[31] we find a somewhat close coincidence. In the play Rosencrantz says:
"The cease of Majesty, Dies not alone; but like a gulf doth draw What's near with it: it is a massy wheel Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin."
Florio has:
"Those who attempt to shake an Estate are commonly the first overthrown by the fall of it.... The contexture and combining of this monarchy and great building having been dismissed and dissolved by it, namely, in her old years, giveth as much overture and entrance as a man will to like injuries. Royal majesty doth more hardly fall from the top to the middle, than it tumbleth down from the middle to the bottom."
The verbal correspondence here is only less decisive—as regards the use of the word "majesty"—than in the passages collated by Mr. Morley; while the thought corresponds as closely.
VI. The speech of Hamlet,[32] "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"; and Iago's "'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus,"[33] are expressions of a favourite thesis of Montaigne's, to which he devotes an entire essay.[34] The Shaksperean phrases echo closely such sentences as:—
"If that which we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil, but that our fancy only gives it that quality, it is in us to change it.... That which we term evil is not so of itself."... "Every man is either well or ill according as he finds himself."
And in the essay[35] Of Democritus and Heraclitus there is another close parallel:—
"Therefore let us take no more excuses from external qualities of things. To us it belongeth to give ourselves account of it. Our good and our evil hath no dependency but from ourselves."