acting the part of a madman, and in that character heaping insults upon her, and mocking her with insolent advice, never enters into her true and trusting mind. She knows, her natural instinct dictates, the only explanation; her lover is mad. The conviction sinks deep into her heart, and contributes to overpower her own reason in its turn. She addresses no vain remonstrance to him, no reproach; she loves him truly and tenderly and faithfully still. Her short and sobbing supplications are made to heaven, and for his restoration to reason; for him who heeds not her distress, and seems not to hear her affectionate words or prayers, but who continues to talk with frenzied fluency until he leaves her. And he leaves her unkindly, unfeelingly; for it is thus that the insane lacerate the hearts of those who love them most. When he is gone, the heartbroken girl gives full expression to her despair, in words that well express his grievous state and her own.

OPH. O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observ'd of all observers! quite, quite, down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh ;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth,
Blasted with ecstacy: oh, woe is me !

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see !

Most sorrowful and true words. She has seen all the proofs of Hamlet's real and terrible malady; his altered look, changed speech, modified movements, withered beauty; all the work of a malady which, poisoning the very fountains of life, and mining in the intricacies of the brain, so strangely metamorphoses the body as well as the mind, and so utterly prostrates the most excellent of God's gifts to man. Hamlet who has just left her is not the Hamlet who, some months before, was the ornament and the hope of the courtly circle; he is a man worn and wasted by contending feelings, by alternations of raving and despondency, by doubts and apprehensions, by vigils and terrible thoughts. The accomplishments distinguishing the

courtier, the scholar, and the soldier have alike been dimmed and defaced. Such is the canker of the fairest flower of beauty, and of wisdom, and of wit, when the mind becomes diseased; and such are the changes which loving friends shudder to behold wrought by madness, often in brief spaces of time. And these are not things which a man might play.

The king has, we know, been an unseen listener, with Polonius, to the strange colloquy of Hamlet with Ophelia, and intent alone on gathering from it the cause of Hamlet's altered behaviour, and, if possible, some welcome explanation of his "turbulent and dangerous lunacy." It would have been soothing to him to find that the prince, as Polonius so hastily concluded, was really mad for love. But the king's conscience has whispered to him an echo of his wife's misgivings, that the real cause is his father's death, and their o'erhasty marriage. He gathers from Hamlet's wild talk that love has no concern with his malady; and the stray words of menace which the prince was not calm enough to restrain have alarmed

him, and led him to doubt Hamlet's being mad at

all:

KING. Love! his affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And, I do doubt, the hatch, and the disclose,

Will be some danger.

In truth he is not mad enough for the king's purpose, but merely so bewildered and unrestrained that inconvenient truths may be uttered by him, and the wild justice of revenge rouse him to dangerous actions. So the king determines on sending him to England, with the pretext of demanding some neglected tribute; hoping that,

Haply, the seas, and countries different,
With variable objects, shall expel

This something-settled matter in his heart;
Whereon his brains still beating, puts him thus
From fashion of himself.

Of which scheme Polonius approves; although he by no means relinquishes his own theory of the matter, and continues to believe that the origin and com

mencement of Hamlet's grief was neglected love. And still the old courtier has one more stratagem in store, namely that the queen-mother shall have a private interview with the prince, and all alone entreat him to show his griefs. He advises that in such interview she should be "round with him;" and further suggests that he, hapless man, should be so placed as to be an overhearer. Should that plan fail, he proposes that the king's plan of sending him to England should be adopted, or that Hamlet should be deprived of his liberty. Of all which the king thinks well.

On the day after his first interview with the players, and apparently on the day following that in which he uttered such wild and incoherent expressions in conversing with Ophelia, he gives advice to his oldest player friend as to the delivery of a speech he had set down for insertion in the play to be acted before the king; and this advice includes directions so judicious and admirable as to seem to add to the difficulty of comprehending the real condition of Hamlet's mind. Such variations of mood and manner of discourse