And with them words of so sweet breath composed;
As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

At this point, just as Ophelia is going to force back on Hamlet the sweet remembrances of his love, the fussy old Polonius, who has been fidgeting behind the arras, anxious to see the result of his most notable device, pops his head out, and in so doing drops his chamberlain's staff: Hamlet hears the noise, and instantly suspects the truth, that he is being made the object of an artfully devised scheme to entrap him into some confession of his secret. His suspicions had been already aroused by the manifest constraint of Ophelia's manner; at the same time his heart had been deeply touched at the equally manifest emotion under which she laboured. True, she was acting a part; but she was speaking from her own heart when she alluded to the sweet words of love which had accompanied Hamlet's presents, when she recalled the happy hours she had spent with him before this mysterious shadow had fallen on his life. We may imagine that, but for his worst suspicions being aroused by the evidence that he was being watched, he would have spoken to Ophelia with the greatest affection; now, however, it is with a rude revulsion of feeling that he treats her as a party to, indeed as the chief agent of, the deception contrived against him: all that follows is couched in half enigmatical satire, the sting of which is fully to be comprehended only by the guilty Claudius. Hamlet, who guesses he is one of the parties concealed, speaks at the King, as it were, the threats he dare not utter to his face at the same time there is a wild incoherence about Hamlet's words which can only serve to bewilder the hearers as to the real cause of his condition.

After warning Ophelia against believing any man, thereby conveying a delicate rebuke of her deceitfulness, Hamlet is about to leave her with the words

Go thy ways to a nunnery.

He is crossing the stage, when his eye falls on that part of the arras whence the noise had proceeded, and he is instantly struck by some such thoughts as these:

Have I been right in suspecting this innocent maiden of being, knowingly, a party to such a contemptible trick? Can she, whose pure and open nature I so loved, be capable of such paltry disingenuous conduct? No! before I condemn her I will put her to the plain proof."

He turns round and holds out his hands towards her; she, forgetting her part, thinking, poor girl, he is going to take her to his breast and forgive her, flies across to him; he checks her with his outstretched hand, and holding hers, he looks straight into her eyes, as only one who loves her has a right to look into a maiden's eyes, ard he solemnly asks her the question, "Where is your father?" What can she

answer? Once committed to deceit there is no escape from it. She would fain tell the truth, but she dares not; she thinks it would be disobedience to her father, and unkindness to her poor distracted lover, were she to do so. With downcast eyes and blushing cheek, with hands relaxing their grasp, escaping from the touch of him she loves so well, she falters out her first lie, "At home, my lord." There is a little pause; then with a sigh, as his last hope in the truthfulness of one woman at least dies in him, he drops her hand, saying with solemn sternness

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house. Farewell.

Ophelia, who sees in this strange answer nothing but the sign of a noble mind o'erthrown, utters the simple prayer

O, help him, you sweet heavens !

But now indignation has taken the place of sorrow with. Hamlet, and he bursts into a bitter denunciation of the follies and petty deceits of women; lashing those very faults from which Ophelia seemed, and was indeed, freest; so that she can feel no pain and anger on her own account, all that she can feel is the agony of grief at seeing her sweetest hope for ever ended, her worst fears too fully confirmed.

Whether the view of this scene which I have ventured to put forward is, or is not, the correct one, it is at any rate a more consistent one than that which would see in these speeches of Hamlet nothing but brutal outrages on the feelings of her whom, as he afterwards tells us, "he loved," so that

PART II.

THE consideration of Hamlet's relations to Ophelia caused me, at the end of my last lecture, to diverge from the regular course of the play, which up to that point we had followed pretty closely. Having endeavoured to discover by the simplest inductions what, or rather some of what, had taken place in the interval between the first and second acts, I must now revert almost to the very commencement of the second act, when we first hear of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's conduct towards these two plastic noblemen has furnished some of the commentators with a sufficiently plausible text for their denunciations of his moral character. We shall see how far these denunciations are justified. The King, in welcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, addresses them as if they were the two most intimate friends that Hamlet possessed; his words are

-I entreat you both,
That, being of so young days brought up with him
And sith so neighbour'd to his youth and haviður,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time: so by your companies

To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather

So much as from occasion you may glean,

Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus,
That open'd lies within our remedy.

The Queen adds

Good gentlemen, he hath much talk'd of you,
And sure I am two men there are not living
To whom he more adheres.

I will only remark here that it is evident that Hamlet had taken both his mother and his uncle very incompletely into his confidence, and that neither of them suspected the depth

of the friendship, and the completeness of the intimacy, that existed between him and Horatio.

The request of both King and Queen is couched in language to which no person of an unsuspicious and courteous disposition could take exception; an eccentric nature, like Hamlet's, might have found some ground for suspicion, both in the confidence with which the request to watch their friend is preferred, and the readiness with which it is granted. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave the royal presence in search of Hamlet: they find Polonius just coming away from him, after a rather unsatisfactory interview, in which Hamlet has relieved the depression of his spirits by several humorous sallies at the expense of the Lord Chamberlain. It would seem, by the way, that this functionary, in virtue of his office, inherits the privilege of being the cause of wit in others, especially in playwrights: the respectable successor* to the dignities of Polonius has, in our own day, contrived to earn the splendid distinction of infusing into the ghastly corpse of burlesque some faint spark of life; having accomplished thus much, he can hardly look back upon his career without some pardonable pride; for my own part, I wish that worthy nobleman a future of unblemished tranquillity. This little discursion is not quite so irrelevant as it may seem; for we know that in the character of Polonius, Shakespeare laid the irreverent cudgel of his satire on the sacred back of no less a personage than Lord Burleigh. I must guard myself, however, from the suspicion of any intention to infer that the ridicule, of which Lord Sydney has been made the object by the facetious writers of our day, is of equal gravity with the satire levelled by Shakespeare against Lord Burleigh; any more than the office of Lord High Treasurer, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, can be held to be of equal importance with that of Lord High Chamberlain in the reign of Queen Victoria.

The tedium which Polonius has inflicted upon Hamlet renders more natural the gleeful satisfaction with which he receives his young friends; after some pleasantries which were better omitted, Hamlet inquires

What's the news?

He follows up this question with another, in which he strikes the key-note of his own misery; he talks of Denmark as a prison, and pursuing the same train of thought, finds but little sympathy from the two courtiers; this awakens his suspicion. It is generally the case, when the mind of any

*This was written when Lord Sydney was in office.