As usual-a religious sanction put into the mouths of evil doers. Having prepared to execute the murder of Hamlet, more piety is put into the mouth of this king. He retires and kneels, in which attitude Hamlet comes suddenly upon him. Hamlet says now he might kill him, but is prevented by his revenge and religion. The prince The prince is made to believe that by this act of devotion the murderer of his father would go to heaven. Shakspere takes this opportunity of giving Hamlet some horrid reflections, if taken literally. Hamlet says, that sending the king to heaven would not be revenge, but rewarding his crimes.

Hamlet. Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven.
And so am I reveng'd? that would be scann'd:

A villain kills my father, and for that

I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.

O this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows, save heav'n?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
"Tis heavy with him. Am I then reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage ?
No.

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent;
When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heav'n;
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays;
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

This, however, if supposed to be delivered in a jocose style, (a style, by the way, most incompatible with the occasion) takes away from the diabolical coolness with which this horrible resolution is clothed. Johnson says: "This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation

for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered.' He said the same of the same idea delivered by Iden on the body of Jack Cade. Johnson was

tender on the subject, because he sincerely believed in the doctrine of hell. Shakspere, on the other hand, had no delicacy about it, because he believed it not. That what the one does, the other would not have read or uttered, clearly indicates the different states of mind-the reverential and the irreverential, the believer and the infidel.

Hamlet, on seeing the ghost the second time, says :

His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,

Would make them capable.

This seems an allusion to the sacred words, referring to Christ, that had not the people, the stones would have become capable and acknowledged him. In his recommendation to his mother to abstain from the king's bed, he says:

For use can almost change the stamp of Nature,
And master even the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.

:

This idea is evidently taken from the miraculous power of casting out devils-a power which Shakspere here ascribes to habit. Hamlet says of Polonius :

:-

For this same lord,

I do repent: but heaven have pleas'd it so,
To punish this with me, and me with this,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him.

Hamlet had at first ascribed Polonius's fate to fortune; he now considers it religiously, and ascribes the act to Providence, which is making Hamlet acknowledge a divine power in things, where there is no credit attached to the dispensation. Had Hamlet killed the king, instead of deferring his death to a moment more fit for hell, the lives of the innocent-Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes-had been spared: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had not become worthy of death, and would have spared Hamlet the contrivance of their execu

tion, which he treats as a skilful and agreeable manœuvre, in which Providence assists him. This is not giving a moral to religion-the making its interference unbecoming. This lays Shakspere open to the imputation of Johnson, that he has not attended to that moral justice and fitness attributed to the ways of Providence.

Hamlet ends the scene by telling the spectators that he knows the purport of the letters entrusted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: they show him the way to what he admits is knavery-not open counteraction, but secret undermining. He says, sweet is such a method of retaliation; and Shakpere, after having once made it the sport of fortune, will, on second thoughts, ascribe it to Providence. After having lamented that he should be the occasion of the death of Polonius, and accommodated it to the sentiments of religion, which were satirical of those of Shakspere's days, he jocularly takes a material farewell of the dead body.

Had Shakspere been inclined to religion, he might, as the author of Atala and Rena, have introduced there consolations of religion, which elicit the sympathy of spectators and readers, for the doers as well as the victims of misfortune. Instead of which, he treats the possession of an immortal soul according to his own rule, with cynical levity. He contemplates the death of others as a sweet satisfaction, while he makes a joke of one already dead, as being all over with him.'

6

When inquiry is made after the body to bring it to the consecrated chapel, and give it the rites of burial and hopes of resurrection, he says, he has compounded it with dust whereto 'tis kin.' As if the thoughts of an hereafter was unnecessary. Giving a body Christian burial, Shakspere makes the thought of many of his characters: they will do all they can for those whom they have intentionally killed. Hamlet shows no disposition of the kind. Shakspere, by the reflections and the conduct of Hamlet, makes a prospective mockery of religion, and continues his material jests from the scene of death to another of the grave.

When the king asks Hamlet where is Polonius? he says at supper

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten; a certain con

vocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes but to one table. That's the end.

King. Alas, alas!

Ham. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

King. What dost thou mean by this?

Ham. Nothing, but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

He would show, like a modern philosopher, the circular and material courses of nature, animate and inanimate. The end of us is the beginning of others; so we go round the circle—and as the beggar does not differ from the king, the worm and the man are one. He mentions a future state only in jest. On being asked again by the king where is Polonius, he answers in one of Richard's jokes:

In heaven, send thither to see if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But, indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.

When the king says his purposes are good, Hamlet says— 'I see a cherub that sees them,' meaning, if it means anything, that I see them about as much as I see the guardian angel said to watch over each of us. He seeks in the army of Fortinbras, as an occasion to spur himself on to revenge :

How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th' event,

A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward-I do not know

Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do;'

Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. Examples, gross as earth, exhort me:

M

Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event;
Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Ev'n for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great,
Is not to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,

When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and a trick of fame

Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot,
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent

To hide the slain?-O, then, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

Man, 'in feeding and sleeping,' is no more than the beast; and this faculty in looking before and after, is to be used in the execution of vengeance. But the ability to look before and after, which, he says, gives us precedence over the beast, makes him return to the idea of his speech, 'To be or not to be,' that the looking before us prevents the leap into action. Therefore, he says not to have satisfied his revenge, is a bestial oblivion of the past, or arises from the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event. He thinks this thought of death, if it has one part wisdom, in the conjecture of an hereafter, has at least three parts coward. He encourages himself not to have the apprehension of death, by thinking of the spirit of the army before him, making mouths at the invisible event, and the imminent death of twenty thousand men, who, for a fantasy, go to their graves as to their beds.

No hope of heaven or an hereafter strikes the loving and filial Ophelia; nor the consolation that there, father and daughter would meet again. The contrary of these ideas only occurs to her, and that her brother will revenge her father's death. The sudden and violent end of her father evokes no more religious sentiments in her, than did the sight of his corpse produce in Hamlet. The sane Hamlet made