"Julius Cæsar," Act V. Sc. 5. Brutus' body. (End of play) :— "Oct. Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie, Most like a soldier, order'd honourably.” "1 Sold. The hand of death hath raught him. Hark, the drums Demurely wake the sleepers. Let us bear him To the court of guard; he is of note: our hour Is fully out. 3 Sold. Come on then, He may recover yet. [Exeunt with body." 66 Antony and Cleopatra," Act IV. Sc. 12. The dying Antony : "Take me up, I have led you oft; carry me now, good friends, [Exeunt with ANTONY." These instances from Shakespeare alone, and they could easily be multiplied, will suffice to bring into view one of the inconveniences to which the elder dramatists were subject through the paucity of actors; and, at the same time, by exhibiting the mode in which they endeavoured to obviate the difficulty, may afford a key to many passages and incidents that before appeared anomalous. ACT IV. (1) SCENE V.-They say, the owl was a baker's daughter.] This alludes to a tradition still current in some parts of England: "Our Saviour went into a baker's shop where they were baking, and asked for some bread to eat. The mistress of the shop immediately put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size. The dough, however, immediately afterwards began to swell, and presently became of a most enormous size. Whereupon the baker's daughter cried out, Heugh, heugh, heugh,' which owl-like noise probably induced our Saviour, for her wickedness, to transform her into that bird." (2) SCENE V.-There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; and there is pansies, that's for thoughts. There's fennel for you, and columbines :—there's rue for you;-&c. &c.] There is method in poor Ophelia's distribution. She presents to each the herb popularly appropriate to his age or disposition. To Laertes, whom in her distraction she probably confounds with her lover, she gives "rosemary" as an emblem of his faithful remembrance : "Rosemarie is for remembrance Wishing that I might alwaies have You present in my sight." A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, &c. 1584. And "pansies," to denote love's "thoughts" or troubles :— For the King she has "fennel," signifying flattery and lust ; and "columbines," which marked ingratitude; while for the Queen and for herself she reserves the herb of sorrow, "rue," which she reminds her Majesty may be worn by her "with a difference," i.e. not as an emblem of grief alone, but to indicate contrition" some of them smil'd and said, Rue was called Herbe grace, which though they scorned in their youth, they might wear in their age, and that it was never too late to say Miserere.”—GREENE's "Quip for ar Upstart Courtier. (3) SCENE VI.-Enter HORATIO and a Servant.] In the quarto, 1603, at this period of the action there is a scene between the Queen and Horatio, not a vestige of which is retained in the after copies. Like every other part of that curious edition, it is grievously deformed by misprints and mal-arrangement of the verse; but, as exhibiting the poet's earliest conception of the Queen's character, is much too precious to be lost. "Enter HORATIO and the QUEENE. Hor. Madame, your sonne is safe arriv'de in Denmarke, Whereas he writes how he escap't the danger, Queene. Then I perceive there's treason in his lookes That seem'd to sugar o're his villanie: But I will soothe and please him for a time, For murderous mindes are alwayes jealous, But know not you Horatio where he is? Hor. Yes, Madame, and he hath appoynted me To meete him on the east side of the Cittie To morrow morning. Queene. O faile not, good Horatio, and withall, commend me Be wary of his presence, lest that he Faile in that he goes about. Hor. Madam, never make doubt of that: I thinke by this the news be come to court: He is arriv'de, observe the king, and you shall Quickely finde, Hamlet being here, Things fell not to his minde. Queene. But what became of Gilderstone and Rossencraft? Hor. He being set ashore, they went for England, And in the Packet there writ down that doome To be perform'd on them poynted for him: And by great chance he had his father's Seale, So all was done without discoverie. Queene. Thankes be to heaven for blessing of the prince, With thousand mothers blessings to my sonne. ACT V. (1) SCENE I.-Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.] Sir John Hawkins suggested that Shakespeare here designed a ridicule on the legal and logical subtleties enunciated in the case of Dame Hale, as reported in Plowden's Commentaries. The case was this: her husband, Sir James Hale, committed suicide by drowning himself in a river, and the point argued was whether by this act a lease which he died possessed of did not accrue to the Crown. It must be admitted that the clown's, "If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act; and an act hath three branches; " reads amazingly like a satire on the following:-Serjeant Walsh said that-"The act consists of three parts. The first is the imagination, which is a reflection or meditation of the mind, whether or no it is convenient for him to destroy himself, and what way it can be done. The second is the resolution, which is the determination of the mind to destroy himself, and to do it in this or that particular way. The third is the perfection, which is the execution of what the mind has resolved to do. And this perfection consists of two parts, viz. the beginning and the end. The beginning is the doing of the act which causes the death, and the end is the death, which is only a sequel to the act." &c. &c. Nor would it be easy to find a better parallel for,-"Here lies the water; good: here stands the man; good: if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes, mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself:" &c.-than what follows, in the argument of the judges, viz. Weston, Anthony Brown, and Lord Dyer, "Sir James Hale was dead, and how came he to his death? It may be answered By drowning. And who drowned him? Sir James Hale. And when did he drown him? In his lifetime. So that Sir James Hale being alive, caused Sir James Hale to die; and the act of the living man was the death of the dead man. And then for this offence it is reasonable to punish the living man who committed the offence, and not the dead man," &c (2) SCENE I.-In youth when, I did love, did love, &c.] The three stanzas sung by the grave-digger are a barbarous version of a sonnet said to have been written by Lord Vaux, one copy of which, with music, has been discovered by Dr. Rimbault, in MS. Sloane, No. 4900: another, unaccompanied by music, is in the Harleian MSS. No. 1703. The whole poem, too, may be seen in Tottel's Miscellany, 1557, and has been reprinted in Percy's Reliques, Vol. I. p. 190, Edition 1812, and in Bell's Edition, 1854, where the words are thus given : "THE AGED LOVER RENOUNCETH Love. "I loathe that I did love, In youth that I thought sweet, "My lusts they do me leave, "For Age with stealing steps Hath clawed me with his crutch, As there had been none such. 'My Muse doth not delight Me as she did before; My hand and pen are not in plight, "For Reason me denies This youthly idle rhyme; And day by day to me she cries, "The wrinkles in my brow, The furrows in my face Say, limping Age will lodge him now "The harbinger of Death To me I see him ride, The cough, the cold, the gasping breath "A pickaxe and a spade, And eke a shrouding sheet, "Methinks I hear the clerk, That knolls the careful knell, "My keepers knit the knot That Youth did laugh to scorn, "Thus must I Youth give up, "Lo, here the bared skull, By whose bald sign I know, "For Beauty with her band These crooked cares hath wrought, From whence I first was brought. "And ye that bide behind, Have ye none other trust, As ye of clay were cast by kind, (3) SCENE I.-And must the inheritor himself have no more, ha ?] We have something very like these reflections in Thomas Randolph's comedy of" The Jealous Lovers, played before Charles the Second at Cambridge, and published at Oxford, 1668 :--- "Sexton. [Shewing a skull.] This was a poetical noddle. O the sweet lines, choice language, eloquent figures, besides the jests, half jests, quarter jests, and quibbles that have come out of these chaps that yawn so! He has not so much as a new-coined complement to procure him a supper. The best friend he has may walk by him now, and yet have ne'er a jeer put upon him. His mistris had a little dog, deceased the other day, and all the wit in his noddle could not pump out an elegie to bewail it. He has been my tenant this seven years, and in all that while I never heard him rail against the times, or complain of the neglect of learning. Melpomene and the rest of the Muses have a good turn on 't that he's dead; for while he lived, he ne'er left calling upon 'em. He was buried (as most of the tribe) at the charge of the parish: and is happier dead than alive; for he has now as much money as the best in the company,-and yet has left off the poetical way of begging, called borrowing."-Act IV. Sc. 3. Again, in the next scene: "Sexton. Look here; this is a lawyer's skull. There was a tongue in't once, a damnable eloquent tongue, that would almost have perswaded any man to the gallows. This was a turbulent busie fellow, till Death gave him his Quietus est; and yet I ventured to rob him of his gown, and the rest of his habiliments, to the very buckram bag, not leaving him so much as a poor halfpeny to pay for his waftage, and yet the good man nere repin'd at it.-Now a man may clap you o' th' coxcomb with his spade, and never stand in fear of an action of battery." CRITICAL OPINIONS. "THE seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth, or lusus, of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions, I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connexion with the common fundamental laws of our nature, may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense; but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect ;-for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now, one of Shakspeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet, he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds,—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet, this balance is disturbed; his thoughts and the images of his fancy are far more vivid than his actual perceptions; and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspeare places in circumstances under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment. Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth;' the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without,-giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite ;-definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it;-not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment; it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in |