him, and his language becomes wild and frantic, when describing to his mother the atrocities of her "king of shreds and patches," "a murderer and a villain,” “a slave," "a vice of kings," "a cutpurse of the empire and the rule." A distracted impulse occasions the death of Polonius, and a similar frenzy begets the outrage at Ophelia's grave, where he puts himself into the "towering passion" of which he afterwards repents. That Wit and Judgment are not inconsistent with the melancholy which is Hamlet's malady is seen in another observation of Burton. "Men infected with this disease are of a deep reach, excellent apprehension, judicious, wise, and witty. They are of profound judgment in some things, although in others non recte judicant inquieti." How Hamlet answers to this description all can judge; and as the writer whose views we have adopted notices, how admirably has Cervantes supported this mixture of judgment and eccentricity in his "Don Quixote." Numberless indications, judging by the principle laid down by Burton, of Hamlet's disordered state of mind might be adduced, but enough perhaps has been said to exhibit a conformity between the anatomist and the dramatist. Grant that the one has truly described a disease of the mind, and it may be granted perhaps that the other has accurately delineated a martyr to it. Little more was wanting to the wonderful truth of the poet's conception than to make the victim confess his own weakness. The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps As he is very potent with such spirits, For Burton says, 1 "Agrippa and Lavater are persuaded that this humour invites the divil to it wheresoever it is in extremity; and of all others these persons are most subject to diabolical temptations and illusions, and the divil best able to work upon them." A symptom, moreover, of this species of insanity may be detected even in the feigning of madness; as a consciousness of a little weakness may suggest the assumption of a greater, to hide its inconsistencies in a show of eccentricity. The suddenness of Hamlet's resolve favours this argument; as upon the vanishing of the ghost he takes out his tables and writes, and rails at the "smiling villain," with "so, uncle, there you are;" then calling to his friends, " Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come bird, come!" he intimates that he may hereafter see fit "to put an antic disposition on." The uselessness of the artifice, for the feigned madness furthers no purpose of Hamlet's, pushes the argument further. Above all, perhaps, when we consider the delicate texture of Hamlet's mind, his extreme refinement and overwrought sensibility, is it wonderful that its fabric should be warped and disordered under the pressure of the painful news of his father's sudden death, the shame of his mother's infamous marriage, followed by an awful revelation from the grave, of its ghostly secrets and the mysteries of the Hereafter? Rather, would it not be wonderful, unnatural even, if the sweet bells were not jangled and out of tune, if the noble mind of Hamlet were not rendered a prey to that pitiable distemper, of which Burton has so distinctly recorded the curious anatomy! VOL. III. 338 MY DREAM AT HOP-LODGE. WHEN I was in Kent, last spring, on a visit to the friendly owner of Hop-lodge, in that county, I remarked that all the ladies of the family devoted their leisure hours to the same occupation. In a spirit of unanimity never before seen, except on the stage, all entered with enthusiasm into the same amusement; it was not scandal. My friend's lively, warm-hearted wife; her sister and his sister; together with the little bright-eyed daughter not sixteen; and an ancient dame, distantly related to all the rest; nay, even the governess, at intervals; seemed to take a placid delight, hour by hour, in tearing up old letters, notes, envelopes, and other remnants of manuscript into small pieces, not much larger than a silver penny, and dropping them, by little handfuls, into little baskets beside them. Every dull morning after breakfast, and every danceless evening after tea, the conversation was carried on to the monotonous accompaniment of a sharp, quick, rustling sound, produced by the continual tearing up of writing paper, of many qualities and sizes; some so crisp and so substantial that simply unfolding it would elicit a crackling noise, while reducing it to fragments caused a sound equal to that of a fine saw. So loud was it, at times, that the very postman's knock, announcing the arrival of a fresh supply of epistles, to be condemned, in due season, could hardly have been heard. Enter the ordinary sitting-room when one would, there sate the lady of the house, emulating upon sheets of paper the experiments of M'Adam upon blocks of granite; the M'Eve, we may designate her, of foolscap and demy. With hands almost as white as the material they demolished, she pleasantly pursued her task of destruction, letting fall into the basket a tiny handful of little pieces every minute. She looked, in her gaiety and beauty, like a laughing Juno, who had resolved to possess herself of a silver shower to match Jove's golden one. Chariest of the chary in all matters which relate to ladies, married or single, I should as soon have thought of asking them to let me read one of the letters they were tearing up, as of questioning them as to the intended appropriation of those epistolary particles. So I watched the white hands plying their trade, I listened to the crumpling and crushing of paper day by day, but uttered not a word of inquiry. "It was," as Mr. Pepys remarks, "pretty to see." One cannot interrogate a lady as to the destination of that thirty-second bead bag, which she is slowly manufacturing; nor ask the name of the gentleman for whom she is, with heroic fortitude, knitting that extremely protracted purse; nor wonder to her face why on earth she gives herself the trouble of spoiling that velvet by covering it with such crowds of coloured disfigurements. As little could one ask her, when intently and constantly occupied, what she meant to do with those multitudinous scraps of paper. I could, with equal delicacy, have inquired whom the letters came from! It was enough that the occupation or the amusement seemed intellectually analogous to the more current performances with garnets and gold thread, in satinstitch and water-colours, or upon lace-collars and fancybags; idle labours often, and most forlorn recreations, which make so many ladies' lives like unto a gay, light, loosely-knitted silken purse, without any money in it! Of course I had my private speculations concerning the ends for which those myriads of minute fragments were provided. I conjectured that some wise man, justly abhorring long epistles, might have devised a plan of administering homœopathic letters, inditing notes infinitesimally. Again, I had a notion that the drama of the "Exiles of Siberia" was about to be revived, and that the young ladies, great admirers of Mr. Macready, were anxious to make that gentleman a present of a severe snow-storm on the occasion. On taking my departure, the most elderly of the ladies pleaded for the rest: "Had I any waste sheets of writing-paper, outside scraps, useless business-letters, lithographed circulars, fly-leaves of notes, or old envelopes? their stock was running low, and before the fine weather had quite set in, they should be left with nothing in the world to do." Nothing in the world to do but to tear up writing-paper into fragments no larger than silver pennies! Still it remained a question whether the fancy for destroying letters in that way might not be both wiser and pleasanter than a passion for writing them; and as I had recently contributed a large packet of old postage-stamps in aid of the funds for building a new church,* so I resolved to let a huge pile of the letters themselves follow; for which I received a profusion of thanks, and another invitation to Hop-lodge. It was in the autumn that I paid my second visit; and arriving at night, after riding some miles, jaded and sleepy, I was truly glad to retire at the earliest moment to rest. Had my pillow been a pillow of flints, * Vide newspapers. |