worldof which he seems to see the whole: and like them too he throws a satirical tone into his observations on men, who, however inferior to him in intellect, are always reminding him that he is dreaming while they are acting. Leaving to others to decide on the weight of Warburton's suggestion* that it is Juvenal's Satires which Hamlet now comes reading, I would call attention to the fact that he is reading, and, as he says, a satirist, and that this is his resource when he has lost all his mirth, and foregone all custom of exercises.' In this scene, and throughout the subsequent prose dialogues, Hamlet shows this satirical turn when there is fitting opportunity, and though he is of too generous a disposition to carry it to excess, it is always stinging from its general truth, though the particular application (as in his bitter speeches to Ophelia) may be purposely extravagant and misplaced. But still more striking than his satire, are his sound knowledge and weighty judgment upon every subject that comes before him. Men, manners, morals, poetry, philosophy, the drama and the stage, life, death, are handled by him in his several dialogues with the courtiers and the players, with Polonius and Ophelia, and with Horatio in the church-yard, in that easy yet masterly style, and illustrated with that rich exuberance, yet severe accuracy of imagery, thought, wit, and words, which ever mark the man of genius, properly so called. Let us take an instance, in which I would especially call the reader's attention to the exact propriety in the choice of every word. Each is the very word, for which it would be quite impossible to substitute any other.

I have of late, (but wherefore, I know not) lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my

The question of Shakspeare's scholarship has much light thrown upon it by Coleridge, in his observations on Love's Labours Lost; and not the less because he has not noticed how probably Biron's speech against study, in the first scene of the play, gives the arguments by which the youthful Shakspeare would console himself for not possessing, and satisfy himself not to try to acquire, the accurate classical learning of such men as Ben Jonson, now that he had passed the proper age and opportunity for such school-studies.

WHY HAMLET SPEAKS IN PROSE.

53

disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a steril promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,—this brave o'erhanging—this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me,—no, nor woman neither; though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

This speech, like all others of the same kind throughout the rest of the play, is in prose. That the inferior interlocutors in the dialogue speak in prose also, is of course sufficiently explained by the natural tendency of every man to carry on a conversation in the tone which the chief speaker gives it, as well as by the necessity of such a harmony being maintained in the construction of the scenes, considered as parts of a Poem, or work of Art. But why Hamlet himself speaks prose is explained by comparing his prose with his verse speeches. We then find that he always returns to verse as the language of his practical life, whether in relation to feeling or to action; whereas, while he speaks prose, he is uttering the thoughts of the bystander, and looker-on, contemplating, or aiming at contemplating, the world, with the cold passionless eye of the intellect. I say aiming at contemplating, for Hamlet is too young and ardent, and his griefs are too fresh, for his scepticism to become the real habit of his soul; and accordingly we see a bitter selfconsciousness working up through it at every moment. Still, in as far as it is the looking on of a spectator, and not the participation of an actor, it is passionless, at least in form, the reading out of a book, rather than the utterance of living speech. And the use of prose to mark this distinction may be illustrated further, by noticing the instinctive feeling we have of the propriety of the transition, when in this, or any other of Shakspeare's plays, in

the middle of a conversation in verse, a letter comes in, and is read, in prose.

Two observations of Coleridge may be given as equally applicable to this scene, and those that follow:-" It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius; and besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown."-"To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest;—but yet, to the thoughtful reader, it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest."

If there is something of wilfulness-notwithstanding the force of the above reasons-in Hamlet's disposition towards the father of the woman he loves, how admirable is his demeanor towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His pleasure at seeing his old schoolfellows again is unaffected, and his welcome hearty :

My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?

And the first tendency of his heart is to seek for their friendship and sympathy, in his griefs, which he begins to hint at by telling them that Denmark is a prison, and that he is harassed by bad dreams. But all this is speedily cut short by the discovery, which many a thoughtful and warmhearted man has to make, when he meets an old schoolfellow after the lapse of years,-which Cowper made when he came across his Westminster friend, Thurlow, in after life-that all old boyish sympathies and affections are dead, and that nothing of the boy survives in the man. He looked for two men whom he could love; he finds two heartless coxcombs, with as little head as heart, and it only remains to treat them as they

THE RUGGED PYRRHUS.

55

themselves afterwards report that he did, 'most like a gentleman.'

Let us turn to the Players, and to

The rugged Pyrrhus,-he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

When he lay couched in the ominous horse.

"This admirable substitution," says Coleridge, "of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspeare's own dialogue, and authorized too by the actual style of the tragedies before his time, (Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c.) is well worthy of notice. The fancy that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, this is its fault, that it is too poetical!—the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play in Hamlet!" In corroboration of this criticism, (in which perhaps we have an instance of that intuitive power, which Coleridge possessed so remarkably, of anticipating a priori the evidence of facts which he happened to be unaware of,) it is worth while to notice the Play by Marlowe and Nash, with the title of the Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage, published in 1594, which Steevens discovered, and has given an extract from. This extract is (in Hamlet's words) "Eneas' tale to Dido; and thereabout of it especially, where he speaks of Priam's slaughter;—" and though there is not a line, hardly a thought of it, the same as the passage which the player recites, and which is of course Shakspeare's own, still the style is so like, that the audience would probably have been reminded of Marlowe's play, and so have experienced the sen

sation of hearing real men quoting a real play; nay, if they retained only a general recollection of the original, might have supposed that the quotation was actually from Marlowe's "Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage." The first and last lines of Steevens's extract, give a sufficient notion of it:

At last came Pirrhus fell, and full of ire,

His harnesse dropping bloud; and on his speare,
The mangled head of Priam's yongest sonne;
And after him his band of Mirmidons,

With balles of wildfire in their murdering pawes,
Which made the funerall flame that burnt faire Troy;
All which hem'd me about, crying, this is he.

Jove's marble statue 'gan to bend the brow,
As lothing Pirrhus for this wicked act;
Yet he undaunted tooke his father's flagge,

And dipt it in the old king's chill cold bloud,

And then in triumph ran into the streetes,

Through which he could not pass for slaughtered men :
So leaning on his sword, he stood stone still,

Viewing the fire werewith rich Ilion burnt.

If we see here anything of "Marlowe's mighty line," we see still more that Shakspeare could truly "far outshine" it, as easily when he imitated Marlowe's style, as when he wrote in his own.

The soliloquy of Hamlet, which closes this Act, again brings before us the other-I can hardly call it the practical-side of his character, with its "everlasting broodings and superfluous activities," its "mistaking the seeing his chains for the breaking them," and its bitter and exaggerated self-reproaches. "The self-delusion common to this state of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself:

It cannot be,

But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter."