To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire : proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,

And reason panders will.-Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham. A king of shreds and patches.—Act 3, Sc. 4.

Queen. This is the very coinage of your brain :

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:

Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham.

Confess yourself to heaven;

Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;

Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham.

Forgive me this my virtue;

For in the fatness of these pursy times

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,

Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good. Queen. O Hamlet! thou hast cleft my heart in twain. Ham. O, throw away the worser part of it,

And live the purer with the other half.—Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham. Assume a virtue, if you have it not.-Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham. Use can almost change the stamp of nature.

Act 3, Sc. 4.

Ham. For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar: and 't shall go hard

King.

But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon.-Act 3, Sc. 4.

Diseases, desperate grown,

By desperate appliance are reliev'd,

Or not at all.-Act 4, Sc. 3.

Oph. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.-Act 4, Sc. 5.

King. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.*-Act 4, Sc. 5

King. There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will.-Act 4, Sc. 5.

King. A very riband in the cap of youth,
Vet needful too; for youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Than settled age his sables and his weeds,

Importing health and graveness.—Act 4, Sc. 7.

First Clo. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?

Sec. Clo. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.、

First Clo. I like thy wit well, in good faith: the gallows does well; but how does it well? it does well to those that do ill now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church: argal, the gallows may do well to thee. To 't again, come.

Sec. Clo. 'Who builds stronger than a mason, a shipwright, or a carpenter?'

* Compare this with the Quotation from "Pericles," Act 1, Sc. 4.

First Clo. Ay, tell me that, and unyoke.

Sec. Clo. Marry, now I can tell.

First Clo. To 't.

Sec. Clo. Mass, I cannot tell.

First Clo. Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating; and, when you are asked this question next, say 'a grave-maker :' the houses that he makes last till doomsday.-Act 5, Sc. I.

First Clo. [Sings.]

A pick-axe, and a spade, a spade,

For and a shrouding sheet :

O, a pit of clay for to be made

For such a guest is meet.

[Throws up another skull.]

Ham. There's another: why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries : is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box. -Act 5, Sc. 1.

Ham. We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.-Act 5, Sc. I.

Ham. The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.

Act 5, Sc. I.

Ham. Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio : a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on

how abhorred in my Here hung those lips Where be your gibes

his back a thousand times; and now, imagination it is ! my gorge rises at it. that I have kissed I know not how oft. now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come ; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

Hor. What's that, my lord?

Ham. Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the earth?

Hor. E'en so.

Ham. And smelt so? pah!

Hor. E'en so, my lord.

Ham. To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Hor. 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

Ham. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beerbarrel?

Laer.

Imperious Cæsar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away :
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!
Act 5, Sc. I.

I tell thee, churlish priest,

A minist'ring angel* shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.-Act 5, Sc. I.

* In Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion," canto vi. stanza 30, we read :"When pain and anguish wring the brow,

A ministering angel thou !-"

Queen. Sweets to the sweet ;* farewell.-Act 5, Sc. 1.
Ilam. Let Hercules himself do what he may,

The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

Ham. There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Act 5, Sc. I.

Rough-hew them how we will.-Act 5, Sc. 2.

Ham. We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.-Act 5, Sc. 2.

Ham. I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,

And hurt my brother.—Act 5, Si. 2.

Osr. A hit, a very palpable hit.—Act 5, Sc. 2.

KING LEAR.

Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour, -we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on :-Act 1, Sc. 2.

* Tickell has expressed the same idea in his poem, "To a Lady, with a Present of Flowers,".

"The sweetest garland to the sweetest maid."