as Hamlet calls it, did but prolong his "sickly days." Polonius falls by an accident, instead of his "betters." The " wretched, rash, intruding fool," was sacrificed to a sudden impulse, which stood in the place of a determinate exercise of the will. Hamlet scarcely regrets the accident :-" take thy fortune." His mind is eased by his colloquy with his mother. The vision again appears to whet his "almost blunted purpose; " but nothing is done. His intellect is again at its subtleties :

"There's letters seal'd; and my two school-fellows,

Whom I will trust, as I will adders fang'd,-
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery: Let it work;

For 't is the sport, to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar: and 't shall go hard,

But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon."

He casts himself like a feather upon the great wave of fate;—he embraces the events that marshalled him "to knavery." Dangerous as they be, they are better than doubt. He believes that he pierces through the darkness of his fate :-"I see a cherub, that sees him." He leaves for England; not forgetting him whose

"Form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones, Would make them capable;"

but still meditating instead of acting. It would be a curious problem to be solved, but it will never be solved, whether Shakspere himself obliterated the scene which only appears in the second quarto, in which the workings of Hamlet's mind at this juncture are so distinctly revealed to us. That he meant the character to be mysterious, though not inexplicable, there can be no doubt. Does it become too plain when Hamlet's meeting with the Norwegian captain leads him into a train of thought, at first made up of generalizations, but in the end most conclusive as to the causes of his indecision ?— "Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

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."-O 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 egg-shell. 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 almirably 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 generalise. 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 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.

174

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-stricken 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 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 ɛtill feels with regard to the usurper as he always felt :

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

"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 how. Some one has suggested a polite ceremonial on the part of Hamlet, by which the foils might be exchanged with perfect consistency. We would rather not know how they were exchanged. "The catastrophe," says Johnson, "is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger, and Laertes with the bowl." No doubt. A tragedy terminated by chance appears to be a capital thing for the rule-and-line men to lay hold of. But they forget the poet's purpose. Had Hamlet been otherwise, his will would have been the predominant agent in the catastrophe. The empire of chance would have been over-ruled; the guilty would have been punished; the innocent perhaps would have been spared. Have we lost any thing? Then we should not have had the Hamlet who is " the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered;"* then we should not have had the Hamlet who is a concentration of all the interests that belong to humanity; in whom there is a more intense conception of individual human life than perhaps in any other human composition; that is, a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search;"+ then we should not have had the Hamlet, of whom it has been said, "Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet."+