ing or less influential in a more advanced period, richer in immediate indulgences. The early days of most of the actresses who adorned the stage in the first half of the present century and in the latter part of the century preceding were passed in poverty, and their first efforts were put forth in small provincial theatres or in barns; their homes were obscure, their privations many, their recreations few possibly their studies were the more welcome to them and more intense, and their fancy was invigorated by more exercise. Certainly a forgetfulness of self, and a more careful observation of nature than seems usually to be thought important by the young actresses to whom the part of Ophelia is generally entrusted, are indispensable to its effective performance. It seems to be supposed that it is an easy task to play the part of a crazy girl, and that it is chiefly composed of singing and prettiness. The habitual courtesy, the partial rudeness of mental disorder, the diminished consciousness of what is present and real, and the glimpses of acute observation, the sudden transitions, the broken recollections mingled with painful and with lighter fancies, the vague purpose and the

ineffectual hurry, and all the nothings that are "more than matter," are things to be witnessed and reflected upon, things to be imagined only by few. Without such observation or such imaginative power, an actress must fail; her gestures, however graceful, will want true expression; her delivery of the words will have the fault of being too pointed and significant; and her singing, however finished and artistic, will want the affecting intonation of a lunatic's song.

Among the admirable papers relative to Hamlet scattered through the pages of Blackwood, one essay may be here referred to with especial propriety, both because it contains an interesting description of Young's performance of the character of the Danish prince, and a notice of Miss Kelly's well remembered charming articulation of Shakspeare's blank verse, and also of her peculiarly affecting manner of conveying the distracted snatches of melody which Ophelia pours forth in her madness,-in "soft, wild notes, sung in a minor key, and dying gently away into silence.” * A more painful illustration of the exalted tone of mind, at least

* Blackwood's Magazine, vol. xxiv., p. 560.

allied to a perfectly truth-like representation of Ophelia, is recorded in Campbell's Life of Mrs. Siddons, as related by Mrs. Bellamy, who had it from Colley Cibber. Mrs. Mountfort, an actress who had been withdrawn from her profession by the derangement of her mind, got away from her attendants one evening when Hamlet was the play performing, and went on the stage as Ophelia, before the actress could do so to whom the part was assigned; and she exhibited, it is said, "a representation of it that astonished the performers as well as the audience;" it is added, however, that "she exhausted her vital powers in this effort, was taken home, and died soon after."

Just after Ophelia has gone away, and when the king has almost succeeded in assuaging the anger of Laertes, or at least in turning it from himself towards Hamlet, an unexpected event occurs, in the arrival of certain sailors, with letters for Horatio, and for the king; letters, the sailors say, "from the ambassador that was bound for England," but really from Hamlet. That to Horatio tells him that the vessel in which

Hamlet was sailing for England, ere they were two days at sea, was chased by a pirate of very warlike appointment; that finding themselves slow of sail, they put on a compelled valour; that a grapple ensued, in the which Hamlet boarded the pirate vessel, and that the vessels just then parting, he alone became the pirate's prisoner; and that they, like thieves of mercy, have brought him where Horatio may find him. The letter to the king says,—

High and Mighty, you shall know, I am set naked on your kingdom. To-morrow, shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes; when I shall, first asking your pardon thereunto, recount the occasion of my sudden and more strange return.—HAMLET.

Both letters are rather flighty in expression. That to Horatio illustrates an important peculiarity in Hamlet's character; showing that although without some sudden incitement he was almost incapable of action, even with the strongest motives of reason and of blood, he was energetic and efficient when such incitement was urgent and immediate, and not to be evaded or escaped from. “In the grapple I boarded them." The same character

is exemplified in the whole action of the play. He thinks of murdering the king from the first act, and only does so on sudden impulse in the last. The letter to the king himself is full of his usual mockery of his uncle-father, scarcely consistent with the station of either; and perhaps less consistent with the certain knowledge he now has of the king's wickedness, which had devised even his own immediate execution on his landing in England. The distraction of Hamlet's mind still seems chiefly to seek and find relief in gibes and expressions of contempt. The king receives the letter when he is excusing himself to Laertes for not having proceeded against Hamlet, either for the murder of Polonius, or for having even conspired, as the king chooses to say, against his own royal life: the excuses being that the queen, Hamlet's mother, "lives almost by his looks ;" and that he, the king, could not move but by her so conjunctive was she to his life and soul: and next, that the people, dipping all Hamlet's faults in their affection, and converting thus his

66

gyves to graces," loved him to that extent as to make

meddling with him unsafe; so that the king's efforts