insult, on the subject, not of his father's murder, but of her second marriage. The terms of hatred which he employs show that morbid exaggeration on this subject which has so much to do with the explanation of his whole conduct. His personal abhorrence of his uncle is dwelt upon with revolting particularity, and as if his mother's acceptance of him for her husband was all that tortured his mind. His reproaches dwell most on her affections having been weaned from her late dignified lord, and even transferred, during his lifetime, to his more sensual brother. Some consciousness of this, which, and not participation in or knowledge of the murder, seems to have been her crime, may have caused her, in reply to her son's reproaches for that second and o'er hasty marriage, to exclaim,—

O Hamlet, speak no more :

Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots,
As will not leave their tinct.

But there is still no reason to think that the infatuated queen knew aught of the real manner of her first husband's death. This want of complicity is to be assumed

from the words of the ghost's relation to Hamlet in the first act, where the allusion to the queen is not as to a participator in the crime of murder, but as having cast disgrace upon the royal bed. In the Quarto of 1603, there is even a curious variation in this appeal of the queen to Hamlet. She is made to say,—

But, as I have a soul, I swear to heaven

I never knew of this most horrid murder.

but these lines can scarcely be quoted as authoritative: they are omitted in the Quarto of 1604. Certainly, no suspicion of his mother having been privy to the crime is expressed in Hamlet's soliloquies, nor in connection with the test of the play-scene, nor even in this outrageous conversation. It is her second marriage, hasty and indelicate, which inflames Hamlet's thoughts and tongue. In answer to his mother's question, as to what she has done, his reply is,

Such an act,

That blurs the grace and blush of modesty ;

Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,

And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows

L

As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul; and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words.

The queen's insensibility on this subject makes her incapable of fully comprehending these reproaches; and then follows the remarkable speech which Hamlet addresses to her, in the first part of which he compares the grace and dignity of her first husband with the absence of both in her second; and, abandoning that higher strain, revels in coarser reproach, not unmixed with the grossness that underlays the finer qualities of his mind; and more and more tinged, as he proceeds, with the kind of brutality previously displayed in his expressions to Ophelia. His own expressions re-act on his violence, and increase it. The figures he draws of his hated uncle still provoke him more: he forgets his mother as much as he has forgotten his father and his promise to his father's ghost; abandons himself to mere abuse of his uncle, and almost riots in a foul vocabulary; until the poor queen, still loving him, can but exclaim

O, speak to me no more;

These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears ;-
No more, sweet Hamlet!

But her son cannot be stayed; he heeds her not, but simply raves against his uncle

HAM.

A murtherer, and a villain;

A slave, that is not twentieth part the tythe
Of your precedent lord :—a vice of kings :
A cutpurse of the empire and the rule;
That from a shelf the precious diadem stole,
And put it in his pocket.

At this moment, and whilst thus storming, his father's ghost appears to him again.

This second appearance to Hamlet of the ghost of his father, and now to him alone, and not to the queen who is present, one would be inclined to class with the apparition of Banquo to Macbeth in the banquet scene, or with the air-drawn dagger that led him to Duncan's chamber, but that the ghost is made again to address Hamlet in words. The queen finds her son's outrageous epithets of contempt for her husband suddenly suspended. His frenzy has given place to an expression of alarm as solemn as that which seized him

on the platform; he gazes strangely on what to his mother is but vacancy. To him there is presented the figure of his father, come from the grave. He starts in the middle of his breathless speech, and the words he utters seem to her to be but distracted interjections, spoken to the empty air :—

Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,

Ye heavenly guards !-What would you, gracious figure?

This sudden transition, this frantic adjuration, may well occasion the queen to cry out "Alas! he's mad."

We must remember that this second visit of the ghost to Hamlet is made when, after several soliloquies, after much agitation and delay, Hamlet has at length roused himself to a course of action which is apparently considered by him to be a part of the great task he has promised to perform. But the course of action taken has very little relation to the wrongs declared or the injunctions given by his father's spirit when encountered on the platform. The murder of his father, by his uncle, and his own intention or implied promise to kill the murderer, have given place in his mind to his