Besides passages like these, there are others of which the wisdom is inextricably interwoven with the occasion. One would think that the wealth of such a mine would be daily passing from mouth to mouth as the current coin of speech; and yet of all Shakespeare's acknowledged plays, there are only two, "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Winter's Tale," which do not furnish more to our store of familiar quotations than this play does, rich though it is with Shakespeare's ripest thought and most splendid utterance. And yet by a strange compensating chance, it furnishes the most often quoted line; a line which not one in a million of those that use it ever saw where Shakespeare wrote it, or if they had any brains behind their eyes, they would not use it as they do. For by another strange chance it happens that this line is entirely perverted from the meaning which Shakespeare gave it. As it is constantly quoted, it is not Shakespeare's. The line is: One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. This has come to be always quoted with the meaning implied in the following indication of emphasis: "One touch of _nature_ makes the _whole world_ kin." Shakespeare wrote no such sentimental twaddle. Least of all did he write it in this play, in which his pen "pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." The line which has been thus perverted into an exposition of sentimental brotherhood among all mankind, is on the contrary one of the most cynical utterances of an undisputable moral truth, disparaging to the nature of all mankind, that ever came from Shakespeare's pen. Achilles keeps himself aloof from his fellow Greeks, and takes no part in the war, sure that his fame for valor will be untarnished. Ulysses contrives to provoke him into a discussion, and tells him that his great deeds will be forgotten and his fame fade into mere shadow, and that some new man will take his place, unless he does something from time to time to keep his glory bright. For men forget the great thing that was done, in favor of the less that is done now. For time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretched as he would fly, Grasps in the comer. Welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing. O let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was; For beauty, wit, High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. And then he immediately adds that there is one point on which all men are alike, one touch of human nature which shows the kindred of all mankind--that they slight familiar merit and prefer trivial novelty. The next lines to those quoted above are: