comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ, and the liberty, these are the only men,

HAM, O Jephthah, judge of Israel,—what a treasure hadst thou!

POL. What treasure had he, my lord?

HAM. Why

One fair daughter and no more,

The which he loved passing well.

POL. Still on my daughter.

HAM. Am I not i' the right, old Jephthah?

POL. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter, that I love passing well.

HAM. Nay, that follows not.

POL. What follows, then, my lord?

HAM. Why,

and then, you know,

"As by lot, God wot,"

"It came to pass, as most like it was.'

The first row of the pious chanson will show you more for look, where my abridgments come.

It would seem that in thus jesting with Polonius, Hamlet meant to give his friends a specimen of his feigning the madman, as he wished them to be impressed with the belief that he was only mad when he wished to be thought so. There is, however,

little of madness, real or feigned, in this short conversation, little but a sort of impertinent gibing, which evidently made no impression on the minds of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, except that he talked foolishly; for in their subsequent conversation with the king and queen, who are anxious to know the result of this interview, they give no hint of the strangeness of Hamlet being merely put on.

The abridgments of which Hamlet speaks, abridgments of his discourse we presume, are the players, He receives them very kindly, and asks the chief of them to give him a passionate speech, from a play never acted, yet an excellent play in his judgment, the speech being part of one addressed by Eneas to Dido, where he speaks of Priam's slaughter; and, being charged with vehement expressions and images, grateful to Hamlet's distempered mood. Then, dismissing them, he utters one of the very few kind sentiments that ever escape his lips: for when Polonius, whom he requests to see the players well bestowed, dutifully answers that he will use them according to their desert, he instantly rejoins

HAM. Odd's bodikin, man, better: Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve the more merit there is in your bounty. Take them in.

[Exit POLONIUS with some of the Players.

He addresses himself afterward to one of the players, who remains; arranges that they shall play the "Murther of Gonzago," the next night, and engages the player to study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which he will insert in it; and then directs him to "follow that lord," Polonius, and to look that he mocks him not. And after this, he dismisses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and is at length left to himself. Then, freed from the restraint of observers, he breaks forth into one of those soliloquies in which, from time to time, he displays his whole dissected soul. It is long, and has starts of subdivision; being, indeed, a copy of broken thoughts and rapid transitions of painful reflection. Like the other speeches of Hamlet, it must be studied thoroughly by those who would justly estimate the character of the speaker. Up to this time, we have still to remember, Hamlet has done nothing.

He

has wiled away and wasted many weeks in inaction; lost them in a long dream of incoherent musings. His swift revenge has slept, and his fierce resolves have been ineffective and now, after some unwonted exertion, he is left alone. All at once, a sense of his inactivity, and of his incompetence to act boldly and promptly, exhibits itself in a passionate embodiment of the bitterest self-reproach. Even the mock energy of the player has stung him, by his contrast with his own real apathy. And thus he begins—

HAM. Ay, SO,
God be wi' you :-Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous, that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,
That from her working, all his visage wann'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? What would he do,

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;

Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,

H

Confound the ignorant; and amaze, indeed,
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property, and most dear life,
A damn'd defeat was made.

From these reproachful thoughts he passes to an attempt to explain his own passiveness.

In very

passionate language he accuses himself of cowardice, and with every degrading accompaniment :

Am I a coward?

Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

Ha!

Why, I should take it: for it cannot be,
But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or, ere this,

I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave's offal: Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, lecherous, treacherous, kindless villain!

O vengeance !

The very passion and extravagance of these expressions cause him to recollect that they are