speech and manner that would be properly called forth by a charming neighbour, paying the first visit and reluctant to depart. We find this semi-serious farce, sustained as it is by the most innocent flirtation, by way of by-play, to answer its purpose very well. So gravely is it carried on, that I sometimes end by offering to see my wife home to the next terrace. I only wish a neighbour or two would drop in to witness the performance.

A neighbour or two! Absurd! In my paradise, as in Adam's, there are none. I have relatives, friends, acquaintances, brother-electors and fellow-parishioners, but I have no neighbours.

SYMPTOMS OF THE MIND DISEASED:

CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THE CHARACTERISTICS OF HAMLET.

Is it, as a warning voice has this minute suggested, a little too late in the day to discuss the question whether Hamlet's wits were or were not disordered? We are persuaded that it is not. Nay, we know most surely that Hamlet can never be an exhausted subject of speculation while human nature remains inexhaustible. The profound truths of the character are entwined with the roots of some of humanity's very deepest secrets. The springs of our interest and wonder can never be dry.

We shall revive not a syllable of the much that has been said of old about this most exquisite and perfect of characters; we shall glance not at any one of those later opinions which the various beautiful editions of the poet's works, now in a course of publication, may contain; for these we have not read. Nor do we, according to the practice of the general Shakspearian admirer, who fondly believes that he has something new and striking to offer in exposition of the poet's genius, profess to hold

all the poet's commentators in contempt. Far otherwise. Our reverence for their acuteness stops on this side idolatry, yet taken as a body they must be regarded as an ill-used race of men. They have said more than enough to be sure, and yet less. Still they have said

At a time when such a popular and fearful interest attaches to the question; not so much of absolute insanity, as of that partial estrangement of reason which exhibits many of its leading peculiarities (the condition of mind which it is the object of this paper to suggest as assignable to Hamlet), the reader may be at once invited to compare the principal traits in the character drawn by Shakspeare with the leading symptoms of a distemper described with singular exactness and particularity by Robert Burton in his "Anatomy of Melancholy." Burton's Anatomy, it may be remarked, was not published until 1621, five years after Shakspeare's death; the poet's genius has therefore anticipated in the working of a certain malady of the mind a theory which Burton has propounded with great explicitness and subtlety, with various and singular knowledge both of books and of mankind.

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We may premise that the mental distemper which Burton pictures to us, he calls "Melancholy." The word in the sense so attached to it is perhaps obsolete; monomania, estrangement of reason, sometimes eccentricity, are the terms generally substituted for it in these times; but that it was the designation of a malady, in Burton's view of the matter, not very distantly related

* This comparison has been made, and the view here taken elaborately and ingeniously worked out, in "The Nature and Extent of Poetic Licence, by N. A. Vigors, jun., Esq.," a volume published a quarter of a century ago. Those who may be acquainted with it will see how freely its suggestions and speculations are applied by the transcriber.

to lunacy, and constituting in truth a certain fitful and unsettled quality of mind, seems as clear, as that the symptoms of the disorder are identical with the chief peculiarities of Hamlet.

We shall enumerate the leading features of the distemper; they are sorrow, distaste of life, love of solitude, a mixture of mirth and grief, suspicion, bursts of passion, inconstancy and irresolution.

In the foreground of these symptoms is Sorrow, the principal characteristic of the malady, and the source in which all its other peculiarities originate.

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Sorrow," says Burton, "is that character and inseparable companion, a common symtome, a continual sorrow sticks by them still, continually gnawing, as the vulture did Tityus' bowels, and they cannot avoid it. Lugubris Ate frowns upon them, insomuch that Aretæus well calls it, 'a vexation of the mind, a perpetual agony'." Hamlet, who seems ever with his vailèd eyes to seek his noble father in the dust, is exhibited from his first introduction as one bowed down by this Sorrow; as one whom Melancholy has marked for her own. We discern at once that there's something in his soul o'er which his melancholy sits on brood. He has that within that passeth show. His disposition naturally pensive and retired, is operated upon, not merely by his father's death, but by the insult offered to his memory, and appears to yield to a deep and settled sadness. He is absorbed in his affections. Between him and enjoyment there is an insuperable and eternal bar. The world presents but a vacuity to his weary gaze. Along its barren paths he sees no object of relief or consolation. In him even love itself is blind indeed, and the very image of Ophelia fails to lighten up the deep shadow which is around him. In his first soliloquy, he declares with affecting solemnity that all the uses of the world seem

to him weary, stale, and unprofitable; and he afterwards tells his friends that he has lost all his mirth, neglected all exercises, that the earth is but as a barren promontory, and the firmament with its golden fires but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapour.

It is natural that another symptom should arise out of this-Weariness and Distaste of Life. The judgment is sickened and vitiated under this weight that oppresses the heart, and turns with disrelish and loathing from every object of existence..

"Hence," says Burton, "it proceeds many times that they are weary of their lives; and ferall thoughts, to offer violence to their persons, come into their mindes. Tædium vitæ is a common symtome, they are soon tyred of all things." Thus Hamlet the instant he is alone gives vent to his weariness and distate of life

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self slaughter.

His total disregard of life he expresses to Horatio and Marcellus

I do not set my life at a pin's fee.

And the point to which tends the only hope he has, to end all his griefs in the grave, is seen in his answers to Polonius, though intended to be light and unmeaning.

POLONIUS.-Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

HAMLET.-Into my grave.

POLONIUS. My honourable lord, I will most humbly take my leave

of you.

HAMLET.-Sir, you cannot take from me any thing I will more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except my life.

Nay, he afterwards debates the question, to be or not to be; and here it may be remarked, as something tending to show the state of mind under which Hamlet

labours while he thus meditates, that the whole debate is a superfluity, an anti-climax, and involves either a strange oversight on the part of the author (which is scarcely conceivable), or else a symptom of mental estrangement on the part of Hamlet. He goes on to reason himself into a belief that to die is to sleep, no more; that this sleep ends the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; that it is a consummation devoutly to be wished; when he had held a conference the night before with an expositor of the very mysteries of death, the shadowy discoverer of the marvels of the Aftertime.

"To sleep," he reiterates, "perchance to dream; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, must give us pause."

But the time for speculating and supposing thus had gone by. Purgatory was no longer problematical. He speaks as he would have spoken the year before, of "the dread something after death, the undiscovered country." But the something had been explained to him; the horrible secrets of the prison-house had been more than hinted at, though all was forbidden to be revealed; he had heard all that ears of flesh and blood might listen to; he had been apprised of the awful penalty; he had been warned of the "sulphurous and tormenting flames" that must burn and purge away the foul deeds done in the days of life. When he decides upon rather bearing the ills he has, than fly to others that he knows not of, he seems to forget the foreknowledge of them contained in the appalling revelation of the ghost. True, he has his doubts sometimes of the integrity of the spirit that he has seen, and admits that it "may be a devil," that "abuses him to damn him;" but this supposition is equally fatal to the propriety and fitness of his speculations upon death as a quiet sleep that is to end the heart-ache, and he never for an instant doubts that