ness of his soul might be relieved by the utterance of "wild and hurling words." But even in this disguise his intellectual supremacy is constantly manifested. "He is far gone, far gone," says Polonius; but, "how pregnant his replies are," very quickly follows. In the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the natural Hamlet instantly comes back. They were his school-fellows; they ought to have been his friends. To them, therefore, he is the Hamlet they once knew; the gentleman - the scholar. He even discloses to them a glimpse of the deep melancholy with which his soul laboured: "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams." But he goes no further :—he secs through their purpose; "nay, then I have an eye of you." They were to be spies upon him; and from that moment he hates them. They stood, or they appeared to stand, between him and the great purpose of his life. But he suppresses his feelings, and bursts out in that majestic piece of rhetoric which could only have been conceived by a being of the highest intellectual power, in the full possession of that power: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!" The writer in Blackwood truly says, that this is "spoken in the high and overwrought consciousness of intellect." Hamlet has described his melancholy to his old school-fellows, the indifference with which he views "this visible world." again, unquestionably, he is not feigning. He knows that the admission of his melancholy will put the spies upon a false scent. Burton's 'Anatomy' was not published when Shakspere wrote this play; and yet how consonant is the following passage of that book with Shakspere's conception of the melancholy Hamlet: "Albertus Durer paints Melancholy like a sad woman, leaning on her arm with fixed looks, neglected habit, &c., held therefore by some proud, soft, sottish, or half-mad, as the Abderites esteemed of Democritus: and yet of a deep reach,

Here

excellent apprehension, judicious, wise, and witty." In the scene with the players Hamlet is perfectly at ease, "judicious, wise, and witty." He has escaped for a moment, out of the dense clouds of the one o'er-mastering thought, into the sunny region of taste and fancy in which he once dwelt. But even here the one thought follows him :"Dost thou hear me, old friend; can you play the murder of Gonzago ?" Then comes, "Now I am alone;" and, as Charles Lamb has beautifully expressed it, "the silent meditations with which his bosom is bursting are reduced to words, for the sake of the reader." But, in the midst of his paroxysm, his intellectual activity predominates : "About, my brains;" and he escapes from the thought

"I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal,"

into

"I'll have grounds More relative than this: The play's the thing." The indecision of Hamlet is thus described by Goethe: "A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away." The writer in 'Blackwood's Magazine' takes another view of this indecision, which, to our minds, is more philosophic: "He sees no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding." Hamlet, be it observed, Let us recollect-"I is not without nerve. will watch to-night,"—and,

"My fate cries out, And makes cach petty artery in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve." He is not without nerve. But his will is subject to higher faculties. He would have been greater had he been less great.

We are scarcely yet cognizant of the depths of Hamlet's meditations. Under the first pressure of his wounded sensibilities we have heard him exclaim—

"Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt;' but he has since communed with unearthly things, and he now fearlessly approaches the great questions that have reference to the

"something after death," as if the mystery could be pierced by the eye of reason. Of the soliloquy, "To be, or not to be," Coleridge remarks, "This speech is of absolutely universal interest, and yet to which of all Shakspere's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet?" But we must mark the period of its introduction. It immediately precedes the scene of Hamlet's abrupt behaviour to Ophelia. It does so in the original sketch. She comes upon him with

"My lord, I have remembrances of yours,"

at a moment when his mind had surrendered itself to a train of the most solemn thought, induced by following out all the mysterious and fearful circumstances connected with his own being, and the awful responsibilities that were imposed upon him. It appears to us, that his rude denial of having given Ophelia "remembrances," and his "Ha, ha! are you honest?" with all the bitter words that follow, are meant to indicate the disturbance which is produced in his mind by the clashing of his love for her with the predominant thought that now makes all that belongs to his personal happiness worthless. His invective against women is not more bitter than his invective against himself:— "What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth!" His bitterness

escapes in generalizations: it is not against Ophelia, but against her sex, that he exclaims. To that gentle creature, the harshest thing he says is, “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." Coleridge thinks that the "certain harshness" in Hamlet's manner is produced by his perceiving that Ophelia was acting a part towards him and that they were watched. We doubt whether Shakspere intended Hamlet to be here feigning. The passionate words are merely the exponents of the contest within, the contest between his love and the purpose which appeared to him to exclude all other thoughts. There was a real disturbance of his soul, which could only recover its balance by such an outbreak. The character of the disturbance is indicated by the contradiction of "I did love you once,"

and "I loved you not;" and, perhaps, as Lamb expresses it, these "tokens of an unhinged mind" are mixed "with a profound artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse which can no longer find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do." At any rate, the gentle and tender Ophelia is not outraged. Her pity only is excited; and, if the apparent harshness of Hamlet requires a proper appreciation of his character to reconcile it with our admiration of him, Shakspere has at this moment most adroitly presented to us that description of him which Goethe anticipated

"The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state."

Hamlet recovers a temporary tranquillity. He has something to do; and that something is connected with his great business. It is more agreeable that it postpones that one duty, while it seems to lead onward to it. He has to prepare the players to speak his speech. Those who look upon the surface only may think these directions uncharacteristic of Hamlet; but nothing can really be more appropriate than that these rules of art, so just, so universal, and so complete, should be put by Shakspere into the mouth of him who had pre-eminently "the scholar's tongue." Hamlet revels in this lesson; and it has produced a calm in his spirits, which is displayed in that affectionate address to Horatio, in which he appears to repose upon

his friend as one

"Whose blood and judgment are so well comingled,"

to be, as it were, a prop to his own "weakness and melancholy." Be it observed that this is the first indication we have had that he has admitted Horatio into his confidence:"There is a play to-night before the king: One scene of it comes near the circumstance Which I have told thee of my father's death.” The satisfaction he takes in the device of the "one scene"-the hopes which he has that his doubts may be resolved-lend a real

Of thinking too precisely on the event,— (A thought, which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,

And ever, three parts coward),—I do not know Why yet I live to say, "This thing 's to do;' Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,

To do 't."

It was not "bestial oblivion."-Oh, no. The eternal presence of the thought "this thing's to do," made him incapable of doing it. It was the "thinking too precisely on the event" that destroyed his will. It was in the same spirit that his will had been "puzzled" by the "dread of something after death," that his conscience-(consciousness)" sicklied o'er" his "native hue of resolution." The "delicate and tender prince" exposed what was mortal and unsure to fortune, death, and danger, even for an eggshell. Twenty thousand men, for a fantasy and trick of fame, went to their graves like beds. But, then, the men and their leader made "mouths at the invisible event." The "large discourse" of Hamlet, "looking before, and after," absorbed the tangible and present. In actions that appear indirectly to advance the execution of the great "commandment" that was laid upon him, he has decision and alacrity enough. His relation to Horatio (we are somewhat anticipating) of his successful device against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would appear to come from a man who is all will. His intellectual activity revels in the telling of the story. Coleridge has admirably pointed out, in 'The Friend,' how "the circumstances of time and place are all stated with equal compression and rapidity;" but still, with the relater's general tendency to generalize. The event has happened, and Hamlet does not think too precisely of its consequences. The issue will be shortly known.

"It will be short: the interim is mine;

And a man's life's no more than to say-one."

This looks like decision, growing out of the narrative of the events in which Hamlet had exhibited his decision. But, even in his own account, the beginning of this action was his

"indiscretion," proceeding from sudden and indefinable impulses:

'Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep."

Wonderfully, indeed, has Shakspere managed to follow the old history-"How Fengon devised to send Hamlet to the king of England with secret letters to have him put to death, and how Hamlet, when his companions slept, read the letters, and, instead of them, counterfeited others, willing the king of England to put the two messengers to death," -without destroying the unity of his own conception of Hamlet.

Mrs. Jameson, in her delightful 'Characteristics of Women,' has sketched the character of Ophelia with all a woman's truth and tenderness. One passage only can we venture to take, for it is an image that to our minds is far better than many words: "Once at Murano, I saw a dove caught in a tempest; perhaps it was young, and either lacked strength of wing to reach its home, or the instinct which teaches to shun the brooding storm; but so it was-and I watched it, pitying, as it flitted, poor bird! hither and thither, with its silver pinions shining against the black thunder-cloud, till, after a few giddy whirls, it fell, blinded, affrighted, and bewildered, into the turbid wave beneath, and was swallowed up for ever. It reminded me then of the fate of Ophelia; and now, when I think of her, I see again before me that poor dove, beating with weary wing, bewildered amid the storm." And why is it, when we think upon the fate of the poor storm-striken Ophelia, that we never reproach Hamlet? We are certain that it was no "trifling of his favour" that broke her heart. We are assured that his seeming harshness did not sink deep into her spirit. We believe that he loved her more than "forty thousand brothers"-though a very ingenious question has been raised upon that point. And yet she certainly perished through Hamlet and his actions. But we blame him not; for her destiny was involved in his. We cannot avoid transcribing a passage from the article in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' which we have already mentioned: "Soon as we connect her destiny with Hamlet, we know that darkness

is to overshadow her, and that sadness and sorrow will step in between her and the ghost-haunted avenger of his father's murder. Soon as our pity is excited for her, it continues gradually to deepen; and, when she appears in her madness, we are not more prepared to weep over all its most pathetic movements than we afterwards are to hear of her death. Perhaps the description of that catastrophe by the Queen is poetical rather than dramatic; but its exquisite beauty prevails, and Ophelia, dying and dead, is still the same Ophelia that first won our love. Perhaps the very forgetfulness of her, throughout the remainder of the play, leaves the soul at full liberty to dream of the departed. She has passed away from the earth like a beautiful air—a delightful dream. There would have been no place for her in the agitation and tempest of the final catastrophe."

Garrick omitted the grave-diggers. He had the terror of Voltaire before his eyes. The English audience compelled their restoration. Was it that "the groundlings" could not endure the loss of the ten waistcoats which the clown had divested himself of, time out of mind?-or, was there in this scene something that brought Hamlet home to the humblest, in the large reach of his universal philosophy? M. Villemain, in his Essay on Shakspere, appears to us utterly to have mistaken this scene*: "Strike not out from the tragedy of 'Hamlet,' as Garrick had attempted to do, the labours and the pleasantries of the grave-diggers. Be present at this terrible buffoonery; and you will behold terror and gaiety rapidly moving an immense audience. . . . . Youth and beauty contemplate with insatiable curiosity images of decay, and minute details of death; and then the uncouth pleasantries which are blended with the action of the chief personages seem from time to time to relieve the spectators from the weight which oppresses them, and shouts of laughter burst from every seat. Attentive to this spectacle, the coldest countenances alternately manifest their gloom or their gaiety; and even the statesman

* We translate from the last edition of his Essay. Paris, 1839.

smiles at the sarcasm of the grave-digger who can distinguish between the skull of a courtier and a buffoon." This may be the Hamlet of the theatre; but M. Villemain should have looked at the Hamlet of the closet. The conversation of the clowns before Hamlet comes upon the scene is indeed pleasantry intermixed with sarcasm; but, the moment that Hamlet opens his lips, the meditative richness of his mind is poured out upon us, and he grapples with the most familiar and yet the deepest thoughts of human nature, in a style that is sublime from its very obviousness and simplicity. Where is the terror, unless it be terrible to think of "the house appointed for all living;" and what is to provoke the long peals of laughter, where the grotesque is altogether subordinate to the solemn and the philosophical? It is the entire absorption of the fellow who "has no feeling of his business," by him of "daintier sense " who considers it "too curiously," that makes this scene so impressive to the reader.

Of Hamlet's violence at the grave of Ophelia we think with the critic on Sir Henry Halford's Essay, that it was a real aberration, and not a simulated frenzy. His apparently cold expression, "What, the fair Ophelia !" appears to us to have been an effort of restraint, which for the moment overmastered his reason. In the interval between this "towering passion" and the final catastrophe, Hamlet is thoroughly himself-meditative to excess with Horatio-most acute, playful, but altogether gentlemanly, in the scene with the frivolous courtier. But observe that he forms no plans. He knows the danger which surrounds him; and he still feels with regard to the usurper as he always felt :

"Is 't not perfect conscience, To quit him with this arm?" But his will is still essentially powerless; and now he yields to the sense of predestination: "If it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." The catastrophe is perfectly in accordance with this prostration of Hamlet's mind. It is the result of an accident, produced we know not