seriously occupied on another subject, and reflection returns, he expresses to Horatio his extreme regret, and, as is usual in such cases, assigns an unsatisfactory reason

But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself:

For by the image of my cause, I see

The portraiture of his. I'll court his favours.
But sure the bravery of his grief did put me

Into a towering passion.

The first symptons of Melancholia Attonita, and their progression to and ultimate determination in confirmed madness, are illustrated with singular exactness in the character of Hamlet; and it is a remarkable coincidence that every predisposing and exciting cause by which the author, consistently with the story of his play, could denote an intention of making his hero subject to paroxysms of insanity, has been clearly developed in the course of the five acts. Indeed the stages of the disease are distinctly marked, in regular progression, from the first scene of Hamlet's appearance, when he expresses a disrelish of life, until the violent explosion of his madness at the grave of Ophelia.

Mr. Stevens is certainly right in saying that "Those gleams of sunshine, which serve only to shew us the scattered fragments of a brilliant imagination crushed and broken by calamity, are much more affecting than a long uninterrupted

train of monotonous woe."

Shakespeare well knew how to exhibit these successions. He was fully aware that reason cannot blend or amalgamate with insanity; but he had observed from nature that they may constitute alternate strata; and that, at different seasons, the same intellect may shine forth in reason, blaze in madness, and sink in melancholic depression.

MANIA MITIS, OR CRAZINESS.

OPHELIA.

Crazy is borrowed from the French ECRASE, crushed, broken; as we say a person is cracked.

The mental distemper of Ophelia is that of sorrowing distraction. Confiding in the sincerity of Hamlet, she had listened to his addresses, and -Suck'd the honey of his music vows,

sufficiently to imbibe the contagion of love.

Laertes, aware of the state of her affection, cautions her against the attentions of the Prince. Her feelings, however, are on every occasion made subservient to the views of her father, who after commanding her to have no speech with the Lord Hamlet, now bids her walk alone that she may have an interview with him

-Read on this book,

That show of such an exercise may colour
Your loneliness.

I hear him coming-let's withdraw, my lord.

The conduct of Hamlet, during the remainder

of the scene, excites strong sympathy towards the fair Ophelia, who is made to feel that all her hopes of reciprocal affection are for ever blighted.

Her

The conflicts of duty and affection, hope and fear, which successively agitated Ophelia's gentle bosom, were of themselves sufficient to dissever the delicate coherence of a woman's reason. lover's ardent passion seemed to her to have subsided into cold indifference. Delicacy of sentiment had been succeeded by indecent scoffing and contemptuous insult, and when the hapless maiden saw her aged parent sink into the grave, not in the course of natural decay, but by the reckless infliction of that hand she had fondly hoped to unite with her own, her susceptible mind, unable to sustain such powerful pressures, sank beneath their accumulated weight:

Nature is fine in love: and where 'tis fine

It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.

In the madness of Ophelia there are no intervals of reason; she exhibits a state of continuous distraction, and though she is presented to observation in only two short scenes, the duration is sufficient for the effect; for the poet has contrived, with exquisite skill, to dart through the cloud that obscures her reason occasional gleams of recollection, to indicate that disappointed love and filial sorrow still agonise her tender bosom.

Ophelia, (Sings.)

White his shroud as the mountain snow,
Larded all with sweet flowers,
Which bewept, to the grave did go

With true-love showers.

To morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window

To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose and don'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more.

It is impossible to conceive any thing more perfect than the picture of disease given by Shakespeare in this scene of Ophelia's. Every medical professor who is familiar with cases of insanity, will freely acknowledge its truth. The snatches of songs she warbles contain allusions strongly indicative of feelings of an erotic tendency, ("pws-amor,) and are such as under the chaster guard of reason she would not have selected. This slight withdrawing of the veil, without disgusting by its entire removal, displays at once the pathalogical correctness and the exquisite delicacy of the Poet.

Throughout the short display of Ophelia's. derangement a mournful sympathy is kindled, and it is evidently heightened by our previous