Hamlet's right to the throne has been violated, and his darkest suspicions, roused by the marriage of his mother with his uncle so speedily succeeding his father's death. His love is first trammelled by conflicting pride of his birth and station operating upon his ambition, and although he has 'made many tenders of his affection' to Ophelia, and 'hath importun 'd her with love in honorable fashion, 'yet he has made no proposal of marriage to her--he has promised her nothing but love and, cautioned both by her brother and her father, she meets the advances of Hamlet with repulsion. Instead of attributing this to its true cause, he thinks she spurns his tenderness. In his enumeration of the sufferings which stimulate to suicide he names 'the pangs of despised Love' and his first experiment of assumed madness, is made upon her. He treats her with a revolting mixture of ardent passion of gross indelicacy and of rudeness, little short of brutality-sat one moment, he is worshiping at her feet, at the next insulting her with coarse indecency—at the third, taunting her with sneering and sarcastic advice /0 go 10 a nunnery. And is this the language of splendid intellect, in alliance with acute feeling? Aye, under the insupportable pressure of despised love; combined with a throne lost by by usurpation, a father murdered by a mother and an uncle; an incestuous marriage between the criminals, and the apparition from the eternal world, of his father's Spirit, commanding him to avenge the dead. The revelation from the ghost caps the climax of calamity. It unsettles that ardent and meditative mind-you see it in the tone of levity instantly assumed upon the departure of the 'perturbed Spirit.' You see it in the very determination to 'put on an antic disposition;. It is the expedient of a deadly, but irresolute purpose. He will execute the command of his father, but he will premeditate the lime, the place, the occasion, and to fore-arrange the most convenient opportunity, will feign occasional madness with intervals of clear and steady rational conversation. And thus it is that 'the native hue of resolution is sicklied 0 'er with the pale cast of thought. ' This perpetual action and reaction between the mind and the heart; the feeling 'purring him on, and the reflection holding him back, constitute that most admirable portrait of human nature in its highest estate, little lower than the angels, little above the Hottentots of the African cape, which pervades every part of the character and conduct of Hamlet. The habitual turn of his mind is to profound meditation. He reflects upon life, upon death, upon the nature of man, upon the physical composition of the Universe. He indulges in minute criticism upon the performance of the players; he reads and comments upon a satire of Juvenal; he quibbles with a quibbling grave-digger, commemorates the convivial attractions of an old jovial table companion, whose bones the good man Delver turns up in digging the grave for Ophelia, and philosophizes upon the dust of imperial Caesar, metamorphosed into the bung of a beer barrel. During all this time he is charged with the command of his father, risen from the dead, /0 take the life of his murderer to execute divine justice in the punishment of his crime. He is firmly resolved to execute this command, has frequent opportunities for the execution of it which he suffers to escape him; and is constantly reproaching himself for his delays. He shrewdly detects and ingeniously disconcerts the practices of the murderers against his life, discloses to his mother his knowledge of her guilt. Kills Polonius most rashly pretending to kill a rat and in/ending /0 kill the king, whom he supposes to be the person behind the arras, and 10 have been there listening and overhearing his terrible expostulations with his mother. When he discovers that the person he has killed was, not the king but Polonius, instead of compunction and remorse, he begins by a cruel joke upon the dead body and finishes by an apologetic burst of indignation at the wretched, rash, intruding fool, who had hidden himself behind the arras, to overhear his interview with his mother. Yet the man whom he has killed is the (father of Ophelia, whom he loves 10 distraction; and whose madness and death are immediate consequences of this murdering of her father. Shakespeare has taken care not 10 bring Hamlet and Ophelia into the presence of each other after this event. He lakes no notice at the grave-digging scene, that the grave over which he so pathetically and humorously disserts upon the bones of Yorick, the kings jester, was about to receive the corpse of Ophelia. Afterwards, at the funeral scene, he treats Laertes as roughly, but finally apologizes to him and desires him to attribute his violence and unkind treatments to his madness. The reasoning faculty of Hamlet is 01 once sportive, sorrowful, indignant and melancholy. His reflections always lake the tinge of the passion under which he is labouring, but his conduct is always governed by the impulse at the moment. Hence, his madness as you have remarked, is sometimes feigned, |