righteously, and most natural was it that the duty was entangled in inextricable perplexity.

The tenderness of Hamlet's conscience is shown in his repenting of the chance-killing of Polonius; and afterwards when, eluding the treachery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he sends them to the death they had plotted for him, he makes some little excusing of himself to Horatio:

"Why, man, they did make love to this employment;

They are not near my conscience."

And then the thought of putting the king to death comes to his mind with a sense of justice-an act of dutiful vengeance :

"Is't not perfect conscience

To quit him with this arm?"

It is his moral doubts which have blunted his purposepostponing

"The important acting of the dread command."

These caused his misgivings that the spectre might be an evil spirit, seeking out his weakness and his melancholy to abuse him to his perdition. He sought, therefore, further assurance of his conscience by means of the play before the king, saying that if his occulted guilt did not there unkennel itself—

"It is a damned ghost that we have seen,

And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan's stithy."

When once Hamlet has actually drawn his sword to take

the forfeit life of the usurper, he sheathes it again for an expressed reason that sounds almost like a fiendish vengeance the thought that if the king were killed while praying, his soul, purged and seasoned for the passage, would go to heaven. But surely no one can misapprehend this for the true reason:-it is only a piece of self-deception—an excuse for delay-a palliation for his shrinking from a deed of blood. The soliloquy of the king is the portraiture of a wretched man clinging to his guilt, and therefore helpless in his strivings after contrition. Touching the subjects of mercy and expiation and prayer, it contains one of those vailed and profoundly reverential allusions to Scripture truths and language, which Shakspeare occasionally shadows forth with such a pious reserve:

"What, if this cursed hand

Were thicker than itself with brother's blood?
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens,

To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy,

But to confront the visage of offence?

And what's in prayer, but this twofold force,

To be forestalled, ere we come to fall,

Or pardon'd, being down?"

As the play draws to a close, Hamlet seems rather to recede from his purpose than to approach it. It has been truly said of him that he is always perfectly equal to any call of the moment, let it only not be for the future. *He is sent from the kingdom, nothing yet accomplished. Perhaps his absence was to spare him the sad

* Coleridge's Literary Remains, (Notes on Hamlet,) vol. ii. p. 229. (Ed. 1836.)

catastrophe of Ophelia's insanity, of which he was the innocent cause. The love he had been forced by higher duties to relinquish, would have come back to her forlorn estate it did come back at her grave:

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers

Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.'

A most attractive grace continues to be thrown round every movement of Hamlet-spiritual, intellectual, and bodily, in the closing scenes of the tragedy-the thoughtful, playful conversation with the grave-digger, and the gentle moralizing over the relics of mortality-the gentlemanly sporting with the fop-the more than gentlemanly apology to Laertes:

"Give me your pardon, sir: I have done you wrong:

But pardon it, as you are a gentleman.

This presence knows, and you must needs have heard,
How I am punish'd with a sore distraction.

What I have done,

That might your nature, honour, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.

*

Sir, in this audience,

Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot my arrow o'er the house,
And hurt my brother."

One of the latest expressions of Hamlet's habitual thoughtfulness is the beautiful presentiment of his approaching death, when, speaking to Horatio with some confidence of success in the fencing-match, he adds"But thou would'st not think how ill all's here about

my heart: but it's no matter."* This gloominess alarms his friend, and Hamlet tries to shake it off:-"It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gain-giving as would, perhaps, trouble a woman." Horatio still urges

him to postpone the trial at arms, because he is not fit; but Hamlet speaks in a better mood of faith :-“ Not a whit, we defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.'

He whose mind had been so active in its purposes― whose heart had beat so quickly to all true impulses -achieves the duty, vaguely commanded by a supernatural voice, only by co-operating with the tumult of an accident, and in the heat of passion. Heretofore, always equal to the present moment, his meditations -meditations of the heart as well as of the intellecthad perpetually carried him into the distant future. Now, the certainty of the poison crowds all the future of his mortal life into a few, short, present instants. Death is in Denmark's palace. The majestic phantom of him who once tenanted the throne, is avenged by the bloody perishing of the guilty. The innocent one is implicated too deeply in the destiny of the tragedy to escape, and Horatio's words are his fitting requiem: "Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”†

*Coleridge's Literary Remains, (Notes on Hamlet,) vol. ii. p. 234. † On my brother's manuscript, I find a reference to what he describes as some excellent criticism on Hamlet in the Christian Remembrancer for January, 1849, in an article on the book of Job; and in a private letter written just as he was fresh from the composition of this lecture, he says:-"I have never felt myself so deeply in the heart of Hamlet-my insight into the character clearer than ever before had oeen given to me." W. B. R.

LECTURE IV.*

Othello.

IN closing my last lecture, I spoke of the subject of this evening's lecture as the deepest of Shakspeare's tragedies. The first impression might be different; for, through the scenes of Othello, there are scattered things which seem to belong to comedy-the pliability of that poor dupe, Roderigo-the sarcastic jests of Iago and his drinking songs, and the tipsiness of Cassio. These are matters which might befit the comic drama, but they are subordinate to what is, I repeat, the deepest of Shakspeare's tragedies. Perhaps, therefore, it is the most remarkable illustration of the power of our great dramatic poet's imagination in blending together, in apt proportions, the tragic and the comic elements-just as in real life you may often find, near each other, things to weep for, and things to smile, or it may be even to laugh, at. The tragedy of Othello. is the deepest, because in it the darkest and lowest region of human wickedness is brought to light, because the victim of that wickedness is a most heroic heart, and because, most of all, a being the purest,

* December 27th, 1842.