3. The character of Hamlet is a very difficult study; but some suitable estimate of it may be deduced from the following details and comments.

The sable-suited prince of Denmark first comes before us in company with the king, queen, and lords, in a state room of Elsinore Castle, where everyone and everything but himself has ceased to wear any token of 'obsequious sorrow' for the recently-deceased sovereign. Hamlet is not only dejected by his father's death, but disgusted also with the 'o'erhasty marriage' of his mother and uncle. The latter is personally an object of his intense dislike, as having 'popped in between the election and his hopes,' and as presenting a despicable contrast to the virtues and endowments of the late king. The young prince is impatient of his uncle's smiling professions of love towards him, discerning him to be a hypocrite unworthy of any courteous acknowledgments-a secret enemy from whom confidence must keep aloof. Not that Hamlet now sees anything to be gained either by caution or opposition, for he is in a settled, hopeless melancholy; 'all the uses of this world seem to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,' and when the king and the courtiers withdraw, he sighs to b delivered from the burden of the flesh, and even wishes 'that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.' But after some passionate utterances of dissatisfaction with the world, and of amazement and indignation at his mother's conduct, he feels that, all the evil he laments being beyond his power to remedy, the existing state of things must be endured; and the end of his soliloquy is, Break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.'

It is to be presumed that, in his general loss of interest in surrounding things, he has come to anticipate little good

from his affection for Polonius' daughter, and that his reflection-'Frailty, thy name is woman,' implies a persuasion that Ophelia, in all probability, will live happier without him; but that his love for her is an ardent reality cannot be questioned. An event, however, is now oncoming which will raise up in his soul a master-passion to which all others will have to be subordinate. He unwittingly foreshadows this in saying to Horatio, 'Methinks I see my father,' which calls forth from his friend the startling speech: 'My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.' A new emotion now mingles with and agitates the prince's previously-settled melancholy

'My father's spirit in arms! all is not well;

I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come ! Till then sit still, my soul.'

When he arrives on the platform with the officers of the watch, he seems not to have 'let belief take hold of him' so strongly, 'touching the dreaded sight,' as to prevent him from talking on some other subject, and the noise of trumpets and ordnance, announcing the king's rouse, brings up a topic of conversation with which he tries to beguile his anxiety.

When he is charged by his father's spirit to revenge the murder, a remarkable element in Hamlet's character is indicated in the exclamation

'Haste me to know it, that I with wings as swift

As meditation, or the thoughts of love,

May sweep to my revenge.'

To this the spirit answers: 'I find thee apt,' and Hamlet is, in truth, most earnestly and sternly resolved to revenge the murder; but he is so far from sweeping with swift

wings to his revenge, that doubt, hesitation, and delay, as long as can be conceived possible, precede the execution of his purpose.

When the ghost has left him with the farewell injunc tion, Remember me! he says—

'Yea, from the table of my memory

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain.'

He must now, therefore, in seeking to wipe away all pressures past, try to obliterate the impression which Ophelia had made upon his mind, and with the needful co-operation of one bosom friend, Horatio, whose adoption he has tried,' devote his whole soul to the working out of the retribution he has sworn to inflict. He purposes to feign madness,' to put an antic disposition on,' and Ophelia appears to be the first person to whom he presents himself thus transformed. But her report to her father of the prince's visit to her chamber, and of his mysterious silent demeanour towards her, indicates something more than his assumption of the 'antic disposition '-indicates, not madness, but yet a real distraction; it leads us to suppose an intensely painful struggle undergone by him in what he believes to be an absolutely necessary sacrifice—the extinguishing of all hope of his reciprocating Ophelia's affection any more.

In his conversation, shortly afterwards, with Polonius, whom he knows to have been mainly instrumental in securing the accession of Claudius to the throne, and whom he pretends to take for a fishmonger, he designs to convey

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the impression that he is mad; but when the old man has taken his leave, the prince's sanity immediately asserts itself in the impatient utterance: 'These tedious old fools!' Rosencrantz and Guildenstern then come to visit him, and though his talk with them at first puts on some eccentricity, it soon assumes much of an ordinary character. He shows them that he knows they were sent for by the king, and with what intent; but while 'he does confess he feels himself distracted,' he cannot tell them why he should be so, though he well knows why he is. 'I have of late,' he says, ' but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.' Their announcement, however, that the players are coming to offer him service,' leads to a conversation about dramatic business, in which he manifests a lively interest, as if already he has begun to think of what service a dramatic representation may be made by him as a means of testing the truth of the ghost's relation; for in the welcome he gives to the players he knows he ensures for them the patronage of the king, who will, of course, be glad 'to hear him so inclined.'

But, in marking the peculiarities of Hamlet's conduct, we have seen needful to inquire how it is that, after the visitation from the grave, and his utterance of the resolution that the ghost's 'commandment all alone shall live within his brain,' he is found lingering so long from the accomplishment of the enjoined revenge. The truth seems to be that his philosophical spirit, while supporting with its full sanction the purpose of revenge, begets in him what he calls the craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event,' and induces him to wait for some further proof of the king's guilt. Yet against this restraint imposed on him by his philosophy there is ever, when he is left alone to commune with himself, a rebellion on the part of that resolute courage

which he really possesses. When he has ended his instructions to the players, the 'passionate speech' he has heard excites him to think with shame that he is 'unpregnant of his cause,' and makes him denounce his unreadiness in a series of reproachful terms, which, when done, remind him how weak and worthless it is thus to 'unpack his heart with words,' instead of proceeding at once to seek means of punishing the assassin. He sets his brains to work, and comes to this conclusion :

'I'll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil; and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps -
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play's the thing
In which I'll catch the conscience of the king.'

Hamlet has thus found a reason for procrastination, in which he is fain to take refuge that he may find some ease. For, when we regard him in relation to the dread business he has undertaken, we should remember that he never has 'made love to the employment,' and that even in the full fervour of his excitement, immediately after the ghost's first visitation, he exclaims—

'The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!'

In the speech in which he debates with himself the question 'To be, or not to be,' and considers how conscience, by inspiring the dread of something after death,' deters from suicide, he comes to regard himself in the light of a coward deterred by conscience from hazarding the consequence of