fashion, enjoy the beautiful thoughts of others, whilst they themselves
remain incapable for action, letting the time go out of joint?

Let us further study the character of Hamlet, and we shall find that
the satire against Montaigne becomes more and more striking--a veritable
hit.

The Queen asks for her son. Before he fulfils her wish and comes to her,
he utters a lullaby of superstition (these lines are new), wherewith to
tide over the excitement of his nature:--

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

Hamlet, always shrinking back from the impulses of his blood, fears
that the Devil might once more gain power over him:--

Soft! now to my mother!
O heart, lose not thy nature!

This nature of his, inclining to mildness and gentleness, he wishes
to preserve, and he resolves upon being 'cruel, not unnatural.' In
vain one seeks here for logic, and for the boundary between two words
which to ordinary common sense appear synonymous. In Montaigne,
however, we discover the clue of such a senseless argumentation.
In one of his Essays, [41] which contains a confusion of ideas that
might well make the humane Shakspere shudder, he writes:--