is communicated, "How was this sealed?" But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever disposed to generalize, and meditative to excess (but which, with due abatement and reduction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodizing intellect), all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire.

-I sat me down;

Devis'd a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and laboured much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know
The effect of what I wrote ?

HOR. Aye, good my lord.

HAM. An earnest conjuration from the king,-
As England was his faithful tributary;

As love between them, like the palm, might flourish;
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear,
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,

And many such like ases of great charge-
That on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
No shriving time allowed.

HOR. How was this seal'd?

HAM. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.

I had my father's signet in my purse,

Which was the model of that Danish seal :

Folded the writ up in the form of the other;

Subscribed it; gave't the impression; placed it safely,
The changeling never known. Now, the next day

Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent,
Thou know'st already.

HOR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't?

HAM. Why, man, they did make love to this employment. They are not near my conscience: their defeat Doth by their own insinuation grow.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites.*

It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the preceding passage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration,

Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstance,

in Henry IV., that if, overlooking the different value of the matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find both immethodical,Hamlet from the excess, Mrs. Quickly from the want, of reflection and generalization; and that method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind's own re-action on the same. Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a primary act positively originating in the mind itself, and prior to the object in order of nature, though coinstantaneous with it in its manifestation, will be hereafter discussed. But I had a further purpose in thus contrasting these extracts from our myriad-minded bard, μvpiovous avηp. I wished to bring forward, each for itself, these two elements

*Act v. sc. 2.

of method, or, to adopt an arithmetical term, its two main factors.

Instances of the want of generalization are of no rare occurrence in real life and the narrations of Shakspeare's Hostess and the Tapster differ from those of the ignorant and unthinking in general by their superior humor, the poet's own gift and infusion, not by their want of method, which is not greater than we often meet with in that class, of which they are the dramatic representatives. Instances of the opposite fault, arising from the excess of generalization and reflection in minds of the opposite class, will, like the minds themselves, occur less frequently in the course of our own personal experience. Yet they will not have been wanting to our readers, nor will they have passed unobserved, though the great poet himself (ὁ τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχὴν ὥσει ὕλην τινα ἀσώματον μορφαῖς ποικιλαῖς μορφώσας *) has more conveniently supplied the illustrations. To complete, therefore, the purpose aforementioned, that of presenting each of the two components as separately as possible, I chose an instance in which, by the surplus of its own activity, Hamlet's mind disturbs the arrangement, of which that very activity had been the cause and impulse.†

* He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, into various forms.-THEMISTIUS.

+ See the criticism on the character of Hamlet in the Literary Remains, vol. ii. p. 202.-Ed.

Thus exuberance of mind, on the one hand, interferes with the forms of method; but sterility of mind, on the other, wanting the spring and impulse to mental action, is wholly destructive of method itself. For in attending too exclusively to the relations which the past or passing events and objects bear to general truth, and the moods of his own thought, the most intelligent man is sometimes in danger of overlooking that other relation, in which they are likewise to be placed to the apprehension and sympathies of his hearers. His discourse appears like soliloquy intermixed with dialogue. But the uneducated and unreflecting talker overlooks all mental relations, both logical and psychological; and consequently precludes all method which is not purely accidental. Hence the nearer the things and incidents in time and place, the more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each other, and to any common purpose, will they appear in his narration: and this from the want of a staple, or starting-post, in the narrator himself; from the absence of the leading thought, which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, I may not inaptly call the initiative. On the contrary, where the habit of method is present and effective, things the most remote and diverse in time, place, and utward circumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking as the less expected. But while I would impress

the necessity of this habit, the illustrations adduced give proof that in undue preponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is stretched into despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the grotesque or the fantastical.

With what a profound insight into the constitution of the human soul is this exhibited to us in the character of the Prince of Denmark, where flying from the sense of reality, and seeking a reprieve from the pressure of its duties in that ideal activity, the overbalance of which, with the consequent indisposition to action, is his disease, he compels the reluctant good sense of the high yet healthful-minded Horatio to follow him in his wayward meditation amid the graves!

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 to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam : And why of that loam whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel ?

Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away!*

But let it not escape our recollection, that when the objects thus connected are proportionate to the

*Act v. sc. 1.