ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience, and that men
who do not feel up to such deeds must leave their commission to the
stronger ones. This French nobleman naively avows that he has resolved
upon withdrawing into private life, not because he is averse to
public life--for the latter, he says, would 'perhaps equally suit
him'--but because, by doing so, he hopes to serve his Prince all the
more joyfully and all the more sincerely, thus following the free
choice of his own judgment and reason, and not submitting to any
restraint (_obligation particuliere_), which he hates in every
shape. And he adds the following curious moral doctrine:--'This is
the way of the world. We let the laws and precepts follow their way,
but we keep another course.' [40]

Who could mistake Shakspere's satire against this sentimental nobleman,
who fights shy of action, in making Hamlet recite a little ditty at a
moment when he has become convinced of the King's guilt:--

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
Thus runs the world away.

This gifted Frenchman, Montaigne, was a new, a strange, phenomenon
in the eyes of Shakspere and his active and energetic countrymen.
A man, a nobleman too, who lives for no higher aim; who allows himself
to be driven about, rudderless, by his feelings and inclinations;
who even boasts of this mental disposition of his, and sends a vain
book about it into the world! What is it to teach? What good is it
to do? It gives mere words, behind which there is no manly character.
Are there yet more _beaux esprits_ to arise who, in Epicurean