the claim he neglects are increased by disappointment. Thus the motives which he resists out-tongue those which he obeys, so that he hears nothing but the voice of the duty he omits. We are of course in sensible of the current with which we move; but we are made sensible of the current against which we move by the very struggle it costs. In this way Hamlet comes to mistake his scruples of conscience for want of conscience, and from his very sensitiveness of principle, tries to reason himself into a conviction of guilt. If, however, he were really guilty of what he accuses himself, he would be trying to find or make excuses wherewith to opiate his conscience. For the bad naturally try to hide their badness, the good their goodness, from themselves; for which cause the former seek narcotics, the latter stimulants, for their consciences. The good man is apt to think he has not conscience enough, because it does not trouble him; the bad man naturally thinks he has more conscience than he needs, because it troubles him all the while; which accounts for the well-known readiness of bad men to supply their neighbors with conscience. Of this sort were those men we read of, whose tenderness of conscience was such that they could not bear to take civil oaths, though they did not scruple to break those they had already taken. And yet Hamlet "thinks meet to put an antic disposition on." This, if, indeed, it be not rather the anticipation of a real than the pre-announcement of a feigned insanity, seems to us a profound artifice of honesty. Hamlet cannot kill his uncle, and disdains to conciliate him; and apparent madness is the only practicable outlet of thoughts and feelings which he scorns to hide. Towards the king as a fratricide, a regicide, and a usurper, as the thief of his father's life, and crown, and queen, he feels the deepest abhorrence. The Lord Chamberlain, as a skillful but unprincipled tool of sovereignty, reckless whom, and caring only for what, he serves, Hamlet regards with the contempt which a man of noble qualities naturally feels for a man of merely useful qualities. To express his sentiments to these in his real character, would be but to defeat his purpose and endanger his life. Since, therefore, in his true character he can only express false feelings, he assumes a false character to express his true feelings. Thus his apparent mental insanity becomes the triumph of his moral sanity. Such, then, appears the true moral aspect and explanation of Hamlet's madness. It is the spontaneous effort of his mind to be true to itself. He resorts to formal hypocrisy as the only available refuge from essential hypocrisy. Moreover, Hamlet sees that in this way he can tent the king's conscience to the quick with impunity. Accordingly it is not till pierced by the shaft, that the king discovers Hamlet's aim; and this discovery is a perfect demonstration of his own guilt. Thus Hamlet turns the very disturbance with which his soul is struggling into a means at once of safety to himself and of punishment to the king. In the uneasy suspicions and remorses which his antics awaken in the king, Hamlet has at the same time proof of his guilt and revenge for his crime; and the setting a wicked man's conscience to biting and stinging him, is always a lawful and even a laudable kind of revenge. Herein Hamlet shows his profound cunning, when he will stoop to cunning. He so lays his plan, that the king cannot possibly detect him, without betraying himself. From the nature of the case, the moment the king shows that he suspects what Hamlet is about, that moment Hamlet knows infallibly what the king has been about. Of all the perplexities, however, involved in this play, the question of Hamlet's madness is perhaps the hardest of solution. Whether his insanity be real or feigned, or whether it be a species of intermittent insanity, or whether it be sometimes real, sometimes feigned, are questions which, like many that arise on similar points in actual life, can never be fully and finally settled one way or the other. Aside from the ordinary impossibility of deciding precisely where sanity ends and insanity begins, there are, as there naturally must be, peculiarities in Hamlet's character and conduct, resulting from the minglings of the preternatural in his situation, which, as they lie beyond the compass of our common experience, so they can never be reduced to anything more than probable conjecture. If sanity consists in a certain harmony and sympathy between a man's actions and his circumstances, it must be difficult indeed to say what would be insanity in a man so circumstanced as Hamlet. Of course our own view in this matter will pass for just what it is worth. bendings and swayings of his faculties beneath an overload of thought, to keep them from breaking. Amid overpowering excitements of his reason and his blood, his intellect is neither crippled by disease nor enthralled by illusion, but distracted with conflicting duties, and hurried away into antics and eccentricities. His mind being deeply disturbed, agitated to its centre, but not disorganized, those irregularities are rather a throwing off of that disturbance than a giving way to it. Goethe's celebrated illustration, therefore, though almost too beautiful not to be true, seems entirely irrelevant and inadmissible. "Here," says he, " is an oak planted in a china vase, proper to receive only the most delicate flowers; the roots strike out, and the vessel flies to pieces." If Hamlet's mind were really disorganized, broken in fragments, as this expression implies, we do not see how it could alternate, as it unquestionably does, between integrity and unsoundness; between the most exquisite harmony and the most jarring dissonance. Many of us, no doubt, have experienced in ourselves or observed in others an almost irrepressible tendency, in times of great depression, to fly off into extravagant humors and eccentricities. We have our selves known people, in hours of extreme despondency, to throw their most intimate friends into consternation by their prodigious extravagances; their minds being in a very paroxysm of frolic, when they almost felt like hanging themselves. Such symptoms of wildness and insanity are often but the natural, though perhaps spasmodic, reaction of the mind against the weight that oppresses it. The mind thus spontaneously becomes eccentric, in order to recover or preserve its centre; voluntarily departs from its orbit, to escape what might else throw it from its orbit. This is especially apt to be the case with minds which, like Hamlet's, unite great intellectual power with exceeding fineness and fullness of sensibility. The truth is, almost Now the expressions of mirth which all extreme emotions naturally express come from extreme depression, are obvithemselves by their opposites: extreme ously neither the reality nor the affectation sorrow often utters itself in laughter; ex- of mirth. People, when overwhelmed by treme joy, in tears; utter despair sometimes despair, certainly are not in a condition to breaks out in a voice of mirth; a wounded feel merry, and they are as little in a conspirit, in gushes of humor. Hence Shak-dition to feign mirth; yet, though neither speare, with a depth of nature which has often puzzled both readers and critics, has heightened the effect of some of his awfullest catastrophes by making the persons indulge in flashes of merriment: for there is nothing so appalling as a person laughing in distress; it shows that the spirit is loaded to the utmost extent of its endurance. And the same thing often occurs in actual life. Sir Thomas More's wit upon the scaffold, "than the bare axe more luminous and keen," is an instance of this kind, familiar perhaps to us all. It is not to be presumed, we take it, that More's playfulness on this awful occasion sprung from merry feelings; on the contrary, it must have sprung, one would think, from the other extreme of feeling-a man smiling and playing from excess of anguish and terror. In like manner Hamlet's mental aberrations seem to spring, not from deficiency, but from excess of intellectual strength; the conscious, half-voluntary feeling nor feigning it, they do, nevertheless, a contingency, than from an intention to deceive. He foresees, apparently, that such eccentricities and aberrations will be the natural result of his condition; that, though he can avoid them if he will, it will require an effort to do so; that though repressible, it will not be easy, perhaps not safe, to repress them. Foreseeing, moreover, that by giving nature free course and indulging these aberrations as they rise, he can turn them to a useful purpose, he therefore determines neither to seek nor shun them, but to let them come when they will, and use them when they come. The character of Hamlet seems designed to exemplify, among other things, the rare but not unnatural contradiction between the inward and the outward, the real and the apparent, whereby men come to seem precisely the reverse of what they are. For, as bad men are generally compelled to appear good, notwithstanding and even because they are bad, so good men are sometimes compelled to appear bad, even because they are good. Thus in Hamlet we have apparent weakness springing from real strength; apparent badness, from real goodness; apparent insanity, from real sanity. In like manner, his unkind treatment of Ophelia, in the famous eaves-dropping scene, appears to spring from his exceeding tenderness of feeling. An arrangement has been made whereby Hamlet and Ophelia are to have an interview, the king and Polonius being behind the curtains meanwhile to overhear what passes between them, with a view to ascertain, if possible, the cause of his supposed insanity; which cause Polonius thinks, and the king hopes, to be disappointed love. Hamlet encounters her there: "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered;" perfectly kind and gentle towards her. Presently, however, his deportment changes, and becomes exceedingly harsh and rude. The question is, why this so sudden and violent change? Now Ophelia is here thrown into a position where she is forced to tell, or act, a falsehood. In her perfect innocence and artlessness, having probably never told, much less acted, a lie in her life, she is of course unable to go smoothly through the part assigned her; she falters, hesitates, becomes embarrassed, and thus betrays by her manner the very secret she is trying to hide. From this involuntary embarrassment Hamlet doubtless instantaneously perceives that something is wrong, and suspects himself to be watched; and his subsequent remarks, though addressed to Ophelia, are rather intended for those who are watching him. To clear up this difficulty on the stage, the king and Polonius are sometimes made to come forward where Hamlet can see them. This, we beg leave to say with all due deference, precludes the chief beauty of the scene, which is, that Ophelia should be so innocent as to betray by her manner, and Hamlet so quick-sighted as to detect, precisely what is going on. But, though Hamlet's uncivil speeches on this occasion be rather intended for the eaves-droppers than for Ophelia, still he cannot but know she will take them as meant for herself, and accordingly be hurt by them; so that, without other grounds than this, we cannot reconcile his conduct with the assurance, that "Forty thousand brothers Could not, with all this quantity of love, Make up his sum." The discovery of the trick attempted upon him may be a sufficient reason for resuming his antic disposition, but not for using unkind and uncourteous expressions to her. What, then, can be Hamlet's motive in using them? Few circumstances in the play have been so perplexing to critics as this. It seems never to have occurred to them, to seek for the motives of Hamlet's conduct in the result. Now Ophelia comes out of the interview fully convinced that his mind is hopelessly wrecked. Is it not fair to presume, then, that this result is precisely what he intended? Knowing that her heart is entirely his own, and fearing the effects of his unexplainable desertion of her, he therefore wishes to detach and alienate her feelings gradually, and so prevent the danger of a too sudden and violent rupture. word, he treats her rudely and unkindly in order to save her. Thus we have apparent harshness springing from real tenderness; and Hamlet's conduct becomes reconcilable with his professions, on the ground of its being, in the words of Lamb, "an ingenious device of love, gradually to prepare her mind, by affected discour In a tesies under the guise of insanity, for the breaking up of an attachment which he knows can never be consummated." After all, however, it must be confessed, as was intimated in the outset, that there is a mystery about Hamlet, which baffles the utmost efforts of criticism. The deepest and subtilest analysis has hitherto proved unable to clear up the apparent inconsistencies of his character. The central principle, from which these inconsistencies radiate, and in which they are reconciled, lies perhaps beyond any insight less piercing than Shakspeare's. We cannot see, Hamlet himself cannot see, the why and wherefore of his being and doing thus and so. He is subject to impulses below our penetration, and even below his own consciousness. We feel the truth and consist ency of the character, but the grounds of this feeling reach beyond our depth; for in such matters the heart always feels much deeper than the head sees. In the words of another, "Hamlet is a being with springs of thought, and feeling, and action, deeper than we can search. These springs rise up from an unknown depth; a depth in which we feel and know there is a unity of being, though we cannot distinctly perceive it; so that the superficial contradictions of his character have no power to make us doubt its perfect truth." And the character undoubtedly cleaves to us the closer for that, while it includes much of our own consciousness, it also reflects the mystery of our own being. We can | neither see through Hamlet nor yet away from him, and the same is the case with ourselves; indeed, this is about all that we know of ourselves. without, and his faculties were genially occupied with external objects; but amid his later trials and perplexities, he is forced to seek within himself resources which the world cannot furnish, and his faculties are thrown back upon themselves. Thus his great genius becomes intensely self-conscious, and introspection settles into a sort of chronic disease. "By abstruse research to steal This was his sole resource, his only plan; It is in this morbid consciousness of his own powers, that he exclaims: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties ! in form and motion how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!" Haunted with a sense of the supernatural in his experience; persecuted with duties which he can neither forget nor perform; with all the natural issues of his being closed up, so that he can neither act nor let it alone; and mistaking his outward difficulties for inward deficiency; his mind of course becomes abstracted from surrounding objects, and absorbed in itself; he can do nothing but think, and think, and "eat his own heart;" his self-contemplation causing him to marvel the more at his inactivity, and his inactivity plunging him still deeper in self-contemplation. And perhaps his consciousness of "genius given and knowledge won in vain," is one source of his overwrought distress. Educated with the noble prospect, and inspired The idea of Hamlet, which we have been with the noble ambition of blessing others, trying to unfold, is, conscious plenitude of everything he now meets but stings him intellect, united with exceeding fineness with remembrance of the precious opporand fullness of sensibility, and guided by a tunity whereof another's crimes have depredominant sentiment of moral rectitude. prived him. In his calmer moments, when In spite of himself his mind is a perennial his energies are not engrossed in controlspring of "thoughts that wander through ling his emotions, he revels amid the very eternity;" he is perpetually losing the regalities of poetry and philosophy; his present in the eternal, the particular in the mind, rich with the spoils of nature and of universal, as genius is apt to do; for genius art, smiles forth its treasures with the genis, in some sort, intuition of universal truth. tleness of a child and the composure of a His mind, however, is by no means in a god; unbending itself in the labors of a healthy state; indeed, no healthy mind giant! In the happiness of youthful con. could well retain its health in his circum-fidence, his genius has plucked the flowers stances. When all was joyous and promis- | which carpet the fields of antiquity, to enine before him, he had sufficient resources wreath the brows of Truth, its modest and beautiful bride; and the melodies of Eden seem stealing upon us, when, escaping for a moment from the tempest which hath overtaken him, he unclasps to the ear of friendship the record of his intellectual triumph. Polonius is, in nearly all respects, the antithesis of Hamlet, though Hamlet doubtless includes him, as the heavens include the earth. He is a sort of political ossification or petrifaction, whose soul, if he ever had one, has got wholly absorbed in his understanding. A man of but one method, that of intrigue, and of but one motive, that of interest; wholly given up to the arts of management; with his fingers always itching to pull the wires of some intricate plot; and without any sense or perception of the fitness of times and occasions; he is called to act in a matter where such arts and methods are especially inappropriate and unavailing, and therefore he only succeeds, of course, in overreaching and circumventing himself. In this fanaticism of intrigue, surviving the powers from which it originally sprung, lies the explanation, not only of his character, but of a class of characters, which is as immortal as human folly. Thus in Polonius we have the type of a politician in his dotage; and all his follies and blunders arise from his undertaking to act the politician where he is especially required to be a man. This, we are aware, is making him out a caricature, rather than a character, for a man of but one motive or one feature is a caricature; but it is such a caricature as is occasionally to be met with in actual life. True to the principles and practices of his order, Polonius studies and deals with men, not to make them wiser or better, but only to make himself better off out of them; and has therefore acquired, in the greatest perfection and greatest abundance, just such a knowledge of human nature as degrades himself, and enables him to degrade others;—the same knowledge, for all the world, that politicians now-a-days seek -and get, and use too. His very trade, indeed, brings him to know men only in conditions where the springs and causes of their actions lie out of themselves. For there is a mechanical as well as a dynamical part in our nature, and few things are more common than for men to get so en grossed in one of these parts, as to lose sight of the other; as, on the one hand, certain physicians, absorbed in the study of our material frame, have come to the conclusion that we had no souls; and, on the other hand, certain metaphysicians, absorbed in studying our spiritual being, have concluded we had no bodies. In certain spheres of action, in the court, the cabinet, the counting-room, and the exchange, among the arts, the games, the interests and the ambitions of life, men are but a sort of machines, to be moved by certain outward, definite, tangible forces: dispose those forces after a certain manner, and you can pretty nearly calculate the results; but in certain other spheres of action, at the fireside and the altar, where the affections, the religions, the dynamics of our nature, are called into play-here men are something far better and nobler than machines; and as they are moved by certain inward, vital, self-determining powers, so we cannot possibly anticipate or control. their movements. Now, it is only in the former spheres of life that Polonius has any real acquaintance with men. Of those innate and original springs of action, which originate and shape the movements of men in spheres of disinterestedness, he has no insight, or even conception. Always looking through his politician's spectacles, he sees men only where, and when, and so far, as they are machines, capable of being played into a given set of motions by a given set of motives; and a long course of observation and experiment has taught him how to adjust and apply, with wonderful precision, the forces and influences which will set them agoing as he desires. From studying nothing but the mechanics of human nature, he has come to regard men as nothing but machines; for what is itself divine, is not to be discerned but by divine faculties; and he presumes men to be nothing but accountants, because, forsooth, he has none but counting-house faculties to view them with. In matters of calculation, therefore, Polonius is a sage; in matters of sentiment and imagination he is a dunce. He always succeeds in arts of policy, because he never tries to rise above them; like the demagogue who leads the people by first watching their course, and then adroitly rushing ahead of them; a thing that requires but |