He then heartily sends off Cornelius and Voltimand to "old Norway," to suppress the further gait of young Fortinbras, who has pestered him with messages and demands for surrendering lands; "so much for him." To Laertes, who has some suit, he is very gracious; allows him leave to return to France; and he now proffers smiles and graciousness to Hamlet, who is not so easily contented, and who remembers his smiles long afterward.

But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son,

His cousin and son seems to awake from some troubled reverie, and whispers to himself, and in reply to more direct questions as to the clouds that hang upon him, says that he is "too much i' the sun;" a play upon the word, and, although a triviality, yet illustrative of Hamlet's mocking disposition, as well as expressive of the contempt mingled with his hatred of his uncle. The king's intention to say more falters, and his poor queen tries to help him; remonstrating with Hamlet, and setting forth that death is common,

and all that lives must die; to which her son does but

answer,

Ay, madam, it is common.

To further question from her, he rather vaguely asserts the depth of his grief, in terms denoting a mind not only occupied, but disturbed with it. The king, recovering from the first rebuff, becomes fluent, reminds the mourner that his father lost a father; and that father lost, lost his; and that to mourn too long is irreligious. Finally, he urges him not to go back to school in Wittenberg; for which, indeed, as Hamlet was thirty years of age, there could be no particular reason, save that of avoiding his uncle's court. The queen seconds the entreaty, and Hamlet dutifully consents: whereupon the king, much disposed to dismiss matters of uneasy character, declares that this unforced accord sits smiling to his heart; and that every jocund health he drinks that day shall be told to the clouds by the great cannon which they will echo. In this pleasant mood he departs, with the queen and the company, leaving Hamlet alone.

And now, all at once, we learn the actual mental state of this unhappy prince. Even now, unconscious of what he is soon to know, we perceive that his mind is a very whirlpool of violent and miserable thoughts; that suggestions of self-destruction already lie and heave among them; that he feels the sum of his misery even now too much for him; and that the chief part is his mother's marriage to his hated uncle. And thus he bemoans himself

HAM. O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fye on't! O fye! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature,
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead!-nay, not so much, not two;
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr: so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,

Let me not think on't ;-Frailty, thy name is woman
A little month; or ere those shoes were old,
With which she followed my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears ;-why she, even she,-

O heaven! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer,-married with mine uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father,
Than I to Hercules: Within a month;

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

Had left the flushing of her gallèd eyes,

She married :-O most wicked speed,

But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

This soliloquy, the first full expression we have of Hamlet's actual feelings, deserves particular consideration from those who feel any interest in the question of his real state of mind throughout the play. It seems distinctly to reveal both his mental constitution and the already existing disturbance in his feelings, amounting to a predisposition to actual unsoundness. His mind is morbidly and constantly occupied with one set of thoughts the indecorous marriage of his uncle with his mother had usurped all his attention. He is even

at this time far advanced into that miserable con

dition which he describes much later he has lost all

:

his mirth; he is weary of all the uses of the world; he is weary of life. It must be remembered that he is a prince, in the very prime of years, accomplished, and universally admired; for this we learn from Ophelia's pathetic lamentation later in the play. He has lost a father whom he loved and honoured; his widowed mother, as forgetful of delicacy as of constancy, has hastily married her late husband's brother, who has also usurped the These are indeed circumstances to grieve and

crown.

to disgust him; to move him to indignation, to rouse him even to resistance, perhaps to revenge; such would be their natural effects on a healthy mind. They are not such as would at once turn a healthy mind to the contemplation of suicide, the last resource of those whose reason has been overwhelmed by calamity and despair. Of his father's ghost he has at this time heard nothing; of his father's murder no suspicion has ever been dreamed of by him. No thought of feigning melancholy can have entered his mind; but he is even now most heavily shaken and discomposed, indeed so violently, that his reason, although not dethroned, is certainly well nigh deranged. The explanation would