"I'll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle."

and closing with

"The play 's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

Our Shakespearean scholar found fault with an emphasis, after the act was done. "Booth emphasized 'catch,'" said he; "he should have emphasized 'conscience."" Not so. The actor's spontaneous method gave life to the whole passage. He really emphasized both words, and all in due relation. The Third Act opened. The play went on. The atmosphere of Hamlet, with whose very being Booth was for the time consubstantiated, enveloped also the listening scholar, and gradually nourished him out of his meagre mood of verbal criticism. And to that degree did the influence work, that we heard him uttering unconscious groans for sympathy, as the catastrophe drew near and that foreboding illness, "here about the heart," found expression in tones of mournful, tender trust:

"If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Let be."

Hamlet repeatedly revolves the problem of suicide. We have seen that he does not "set his life at a pin's fee;" but his conscience, the very strength of his moral nature, which withholds his hand from attempting his own life, also makes him fear to take that of the king. The beginning of the meditation "To be, or not to be " was uttered in a voice like the mystic murmur of a river running under ground, and required an attentive ear: That undiscovered country" (in a manner unimaginably remote) "from whose bourn no traveller returns - given with accelerated and vibrating intensity, the stroke of emphasis coming suprisingly on the last word. It shocked the elocutionist, but delighted the Shakespearean scholar.

The soliloquy was marked by a curious reading, thus:

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

When he himself might his quietus make.”

Here he made a full stop. Then, as if beginning a new sentence, and without pause in the delivery of it, he went on

"With a bare bodkin who would fardels bear, etc.

On being called to account for this odd read

ing, he affirmed, that "bodkin" was a local term, in some parts of England, for a padded yoke, worn over the shoulders for the support of burdens on either side; and that a "bare bodkin" was a yoke without the pad, and therefore galling. The meaning assigned, has, we believe, escaped the notice of all lexicographers.

On suddenly discovering Ophelia his meditation done with what tremulous ten

derness did he say

Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered."

In the acting play, Hamlet is made to catch a glimpse of the king and his minister at espial: the discovery being intended to account for his harshness towards Ophelia. We find no warrant for this in Shakespeare. The intuitive Hamlet knows, it is true, by Ophelia's manner, that she is acting a part under instructions. But we think every one of his speeches to her is justified by his own nature; by his assumed madness; or by his endeavor to wipe away both from his own mind and hers, "all trivial fond records," so that the commandment of the Spirit "all

"Within the book and volume of his brain "

and all without supposing him to be aware of other listeners.

In spite of the set purpose, his deep love bursts forth in jets of passionate tenderness. It did so in Mr. Booth's rendering. He spoke with wildness rather than severity. He was in constant action; striding across the stage; passing out, still speaking, and beginning the next speech before he reëntered. We seem now to hear his voice ringing, out of view, the phrase

“I have heard of your paintings too, well enough.” Only when imploring her to go to a nunnery did he pause in action; then, approaching her tenderly, he threw into those oft-repeated words "to a nunnery, go," the whole force of his fervent affection.

Mr. Macready played Hamlet in Boston, and Cambridge crowded the boxes- yes, and applauded too, as that sensible but unimaginative actor gave his studied version of Hamlet's idleness.

Hamlet (to Horatio). "They are coming to the play; I must be idle:

Get you a place.”

Macready seemed unaccountably to have

changed natures with Osric the "waterfly; for he danced before the foot-lights, flirting a white handkerchief above his head! This was that "famed performer" to whom Emerson refers, when he says: "All I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost

'What may this mean,

He re

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel. Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon? Booth's idleness was Hamlet's. tires up the stage, passes from view, and reappears like a shadow; is lost in the company that enters to witness the play. We find him next at Ophelia's feet, at once Mercury and Nemesis, the lover's wit playing airily above the avenging purpose.

(We may here mention that in the year 1831, Mr. Booth became the temporary manager of a theatre in Baltimore. Mr. Charles Kean enacted Hamlet. Mr. Booth, on this occasion, assumed the part of Lucianus, called in the play-bills, "the second actor," whose whole office it is to say

"Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing; Confederate season, else no creature seeing;