France and Spain. And so in the field of literature we are amazed at the torrent-like flow of Lord Bacon's speeches, where image crowds on image, and thought on thought, with a rapidity beyond our conception; at the vigorous and unflagging optimism of Hooker; at the wellspring of independent speculation in Gilbert and Harvey; and at the creative power of the Elizabethan dramatists. But all this light and vigour had its reverse. It maintained itself only by battling unremittingly against the dark spirit of melancholy. We get glimpses of this fact in the bitter laments of Elizabeth's great statesmen at the failure of their best conceived projects through her wilfulness and vacillation, and in the sad end of the great queen herself. But in literature it is patent to view. As if conscious of the danger, Sir Henry Sidney writes to his son Sir Philip, expressly desiring him first to lift up his mind to Almighty God by hearty prayer, then to give himself to be merry; "for," says the great statesman, "you degenerate from your father, if you find not yourself most able in wit and body to do any thing when you are most merry." We see the same thing in the unbounded popularity of the tale of Faustus-the Doctor death-wearied with the unprofitableness of all study; and, in fact, in the general taste for dramatic subjects in which the tragedy was partly mental, partly material. Lastly, and above all, may the tendency be seen in the extraordinary " Anatomy of Melancholy," published by Robert Burton in 1620. In this strange work all the causes and symptoms of melancholy are traced; not indeed with the intuitive truthfulness of a genuine psychologist, but with an immensity of knowledge and learning: and an attempt is made in it to discover and classify the remedies for every type of this mental disease. It must be obvious to any one who reads this book, that attention to the phenomena of melancholy must have been widespread and long continued in Eng

land before any writer would have got together such a strangely combined mass of materials on the subject, and attract to his work, when published, the singular degree of esteem which Burton enjoyed.

Yet, as might be expected, Burton only dimly discerns what must have been the real pervading cause for widespread melancholy at the end of the sixteenth century. This was in reality the transition then in progress from an active out-of-door existence to a sedentary student-life. Those who studied did so without that physical support against mental exertion which is derived from the habit of literary effort in the generations immediately preceding. Just as at the present day it rarely happens that the child of a labourer's family, whatever be his natural abilities, can stand the physical exertion of much continued thought or study, so the men whose fathers and grandfathers had been eternally on horseback, and engaged in quite other than literary pursuits, could not, without suffering for it, give themselves up to study with the devotion which they constantly displayed. Their only chance was to preserve a due balance between the bodily exercises of their fathers and the studious habits of their own time. Those who, like Sir Philip Sidney, succeeded in thus tempering their occupations, found life a well-spring of happiness. To them pre-eminently belonged the “ mens sana in corpore sano." Hard study supplied their minds profusely with objects of thought, while their energetic mode of life still absolutely hindered them from losing practical ability and the force of action. But if this balance was once disturbed, and bodily exercise gave way entirely to study, then the aspect of life would alter to them at once. They would find, in George Herbert's words, that "an English body and a student's body are pregnant with humours." And as the body, so also the mind would become incapable of discharging its functions

rightly. It would lose itself in unpractical abstractions, in formulæ of the perfect, in aspirations for the impossible. When men had thus become incapable of action, they would feel how bitter a thing the divorce between action and thought really is; and the more so, as they would be affording almost the first instance in the world's history of such a separation. Not yet awakened by experience to the fact that thought produces its fruit only after many days, they must have imagined that on their thoughts and studies there was laid the prophet's curse of a "miscarrying womb and dry breasts." Hence must necessarily have come melancholy in the truest sense of the word; the constant dwelling on the irremediable, on action and duty undone and now become impossible to be done; which is, as the poet says, like the sighs of the spendthrift for his squandered estate.

If this melancholy was a tendency of the time, we might have assumed beforehand that it would find its place in Shakspere's thoughts; and if the best spirits of the time were battling against it, we might have ventured beforehand to assert that traces of the conflict would be found in him. That such is emphatically the case many of his works show above all others, As You Like It and Hamlet. As regards the former of these plays, we will simply refer to the proof given in its Introduction and Notes, that Shakspere, in imagining the character of Jaques, wished to bring out to view the absurdity of an affected melancholy, and to compare it with the genial light-heartedness of those whose soul is true and pure. This he does with a repeated yet light touch of reproof; as if he was certain of his own victory over the fault reprehended. In Hamlet the note sounded is far deeper; the melancholy is most entirely real, its effects most fully developed, both in the character of HAMLET and in the action of the play.

In fact, the character and the events act and react upon one another throughout; and the theme or ground-tone of the whole is the effect of melancholy upon the active energies, and the misery felt by a man of melancholy temper when a task is laid upon him which he can hardly bring himself to do from want of heart. If we could have conceived a later dramatist composing such a tragedy, he certainly would have called it the Unwilling Avenger," or some such name, so as thus to give the key to its method and order. Shakspere did not do this; and hence arose a wonderful quantity of misunderstanding as to the meaning of the piece, which is even now only partially dispelled, as far as the public is concerned.

HAMLET is introduced to us at the age of thirty years; the dispossessed heir to the throne of Denmark, on which his hated and despised uncle has been seated by the popular voice. He has stayed even up to this age at the great university of Wittenberg, devoted to severe study. To this he wishes to return, not only through love of it, but because he cannot bear to see his mother wedded anew, within two months, and by an incestuous marriage, to the present king. His grief is increased by his mental habit of seeing all that goes on around him under the form of reflection; no act appears to him incomplete, single, and unconnected. He would argue from the one evil act of his mother, first, that her motive must have been simple and unmixed evil; then, that her whole nature must be homogeneous with this motive; and, lastly, that all women must be as corrupt as she is. To this we ought probably to add that he feels youth passing away from him: he is no longer "the glass of fashion and the mould of form." Those youthful accomplishments, the vanishing of which would have seemed to him a trifle if he had been engaged in

ennobling and royal occupations, are sadly missed now that they are passing and have left nothing in their place. Finally, a cloud has come over his hopes of being loved as he deserves. For POLONIUS, the father of the sweet OPHELIA, has taken, as we may safely conjecture from several indications, a most prominent part in robbing HAMLET of his succession to the throne, and placing CLAUDIUS there instead of him. The result is that, while HAMLET loves the daughter with the most ardent passion, and has the kindest feelings to her brother LAERTES, the sight of her father fills him on every occasion with an angry contempt, which does not rise into positive hostility only because the man is too old to be an adversary worthy of him.

But he bears his injuries without a thought of struggling against them, and longs for nothing but his college cloister, until he is informed by the apparition of his father's spirit that the adulterous king has also obtained his crown by a brother's murder, who by this act has been thrown into purgatorial torment. Then he blazes up into the most violent wrath; embraces for a moment with all possible fervour of passion the law and duty of revenge; and is almost unable to endure the delay necessary to hear the narrative to the end. Yet hardly has this awful visitor disappeared than his high-strung nerves begin to fail within him; he loses all impulse and ardour; he protects himself by strange jesting from the thought of the horrors which he has witnessed, binds his friends to secrecy as to what they know, instead of calling on them to assist him, and makes arrangements for assuming a feigned madness, such as will disburthen him from the weight of silence and secrecy without any danger of revealing his real purpose, as what he says will be considered only the raving of a madman. He thus enables himself to escape from actions to mere words, as