every individual, placed under the protection of a government, and the consequent restraint of laws imposed by that government, is bound to regard. But though we might reasonably condemn the means, as a breach of law, if our reasons were challenged, yet our feelings do not hesitate to justify the end. Nay, we are absolutely impelled by the arousing incidents of the scenes before us to demand this issue as the prompt and inflexible fiat of equitable retaliation. Besides this, in those times the laws were laxly dispensed, and their violation was often winked at by the governing authorities, where there was anything like the semblance of moral justification. In the then free state of society that was frequently admitted to be just in a moral sense which was precisely the reverse in a legal. Thus murder was not uncommonly committed without there following any judicial investigation.

Of the character of Hamlet more perhaps has been written than of that of any dramatic personage ever represented upon the stage. Many writers of credit, and Hazlitt among the number, agree that Hamlet is an unrepresentable character-at least, that it is impossible to do justice to it upon the stage. To me this appears absurd, unless it can be shown that this character is something out of the world of nature, and has, therefore, something in it not to be realized by dramatic representation, where the actor is confined to the world of humanity. I cannot see in what this difficulty consists, unless it be that there is less vehement passion, by which the attention of an audience is readily roused, and more of the subtler diagnostics of moral temperament. Actors are apt to create difficulties by their vain ambition to be original. Every new candidate for fame in this way tries to distort the simplicity of Shakspere into something startling and uncommon, in order to show his own penetration and professional skill, and this is much the cause of that want of success which has been generally ascribed to stage representation of Hamlet. This dramatic portrait is no doubt beyond the true appreciation of ordinary minds, but not, therefore, an impossible representation. It is not distinguished by a few broad masses of light and shadow which strike out a strong though forced contrast, but by a variety of the most delicate tintings harmonized into a masterly whole from a number of minute yet elementary parts, all necessary in their combination to its complete unity. We behold in it nothing of the sublime virtue or appalling vice of the ordinary tragic drama, but a mere shred of humanity-a being made up of infirmities, blended, in an exquisitely-wrought moral tissue, with the nobler qualities of our nature, that lift it out of the degradation into which the lapse in Paradise has plunged it, and show that the immaculate image in which it was created is not utterly effaced. Of this, indeed, that noble burst of admiration from the lips of the young Dane himself is a most true and eloquent attestation. "What a piece of work is

man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God! the beauty of the world, and the paragon of animals!" Hamlet is not an uncommon being, but an uncommon stage-hero. He is an individual standing out of the crowd of human agents, and recognized by the peculiar features of his own individual mind, which throws off no ordinary reflections from the characters by which he is surrounded. He is made up of so many qualities common to our infirm existence, and these are so gently touched, so skilfully amalgamated, so lightly brought upon the surface of his spiritual organization, as to escape the penetration of an ordinary actor-nay, of any but of the most discriminating and masterly. It is the exquisite complication of the moral fabric, woven, nevertheless, with consummate harmony of distribution, not in broad lights and shadows, or in prominent masses of gorgeous colouring, that the dramatie supremacy of this character consists. It is not a thing of parts, in which the actor may astound, and the audience be electrified; but a well-sustained whole, which, however, requires to be worked out in all its variety of minute yet consequential details, or the development will be not only defective but positively untrue. A man must be deeply read in the great volume of nature to be a just representative of this unhappy prince. He must have taken his knowledge from the deep yet clear spring of wisdom, guided thither by active and scrutinizing experience, else he will not possess the sagacity necessary to penetrate the secret springs of action by which the character of Hamlet is moved and governed.

Hamlet has been called by some modern critics a metaphysical abstraction. This certainly sounds very philosophical and very mysterious; but to me it appears the mere idle bombast of overrefined speculation. This may do very well in Germany, where nothing is too tough for their literary digestion, but among us who like to deal more with the concrete than the abstract, such a painted monster is not so likely to go down. The Germans might swallow it, horns and all, but if the attempt is made by us on this side of the channel, it will stick in our stomachs. Then for the nurse's remedy, a thump between the shoulders to get rid of the huge absurdity, and likewise as a gentle chastisement for having attempted to swallow it. It is a mighty easy matter to say a fine thing, often much easier than to say a true one, and always easier still to cover an effete idea under expressions that have an imposing sound, but in which sense is completely smothered; just as in the case when an ambitious declaimer, who would fain pass for an orator, bawls in order to stifle, in noise and the confusion thus necessarily produced, words or sentiments which he suspects would fail to make a due impression if so distinctly heard that they might be entirely secured, and thus justly appreciated. Why,

I would ask, in the name of common sense, is the young prince of Denmark more a metaphysical abstraction than Prospero, or, in fact, than any other of Shakspere's heroes? In what consists his nonentity? Why should he be called the unsubstantial thing of elements so subtle as not to be comprehended within the span of a simple idea? Why should he be stunted into a mere term of gaudy rhetoric, by which all his grand qualities as a living agent are brought into a focal point so minute as to baffle the power of the Polytechnic microscope? Away with such folly! If those Kantean critics, who seem to fancy that they have pulled up from the bottomless well of metaphysics her philosopher's stone, which has always been confined hitherto to the custody of the German universities, had predicated of him that he was the man in the moon, we should have entertained a much more accurate apprehension of him than under the extremely vague, though sublimely scholastic designation of a metaphysical abstraction. Why should he be thus swelled, by the cunning machinations of logic, into a philosophical enigma, who is nothing more than a piece of dexterouslywrought tissue from the almost infinitely varied web of humanity? Do those profound inquirers, who much prefer approaching a speculation than grappling with a conclusion, imagine that Shakspere, in his delineation of the young Dane, really meant to propose a problem in animal physics, and to exhibit its solution under the similitude of a prince of Denmark, as a diagram is employed in military tactics to illustrate a practical evolution? In truth, such persons are evidently metaphysical in their feelings, as well as in their philosophy, for instead of feeling substances with their fingers ends, which is the plain order of nature, they touch them with the intangible point of a speculation, which is the confused order of absurdity.

Hazlitt says of this character-"Hamlet is a name, his speeches and sayings but the coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet." What a number of prototypes then must there be of this moody prince, when the tragedy under his name is represented on the night of a popular benefit, if every dirty Jack in the shilling gallery is his real personality? Such diluted criticism to a fine mind is worse than gruel to a hungry appetite, and is not the more piquant only because labelled with the name of Hazlitt, an acute and able man, though a fanciful, and often a very capricious one. Why are we, and upon Mr. Hazlitt's showing, more in reality Hamlet than we are Jacques, or Timon, or any other of the melancholy personages created by the genius of Shakspere? The fact is, we are neither, but so far only as we can trace anything identical with our own moral individuality, which awakens stronger sympathies in ourselves than in others whose bosoms feel no vibrating impulse at

the evolution of certain emotions, not kindred with their feelings, though closely kindred with our own. We have a relative sympathy, more or less, with every character we see represented upon the stage, and the entire amount of the resemblance between us and that character, lies in the similarity of sentiment and feeling which the dramatic agent is made to express. Those jejune efforts, therefore, of highly-gifted men to render the noble and beautifully natural conception of a master mind something quite out of the pale of mortality, as if the reputation of our immortal dramatist could be enhanced by making him the originator of such a specious but positive anomaly, is really as unphilosophical as it is silly and futile; for instead of thus exalting the genius of their declared idol, they rather cast a doubt upon his consistency and truth.

In my humble apprehension Hamlet is a character complex indeed, being made up of many adverse elements, still one fully within the scope of our common experience. He is not a creature placed beyond the extensive boundary-line of ordinary nature, which comprehends vast extent and variety upon the crowded surface within it, but a mere man of diseased sensibility and constitutional infirmity of purpose, giving way to the constant overflowings of a humane yet embittered temperament. His heart is full of tenderness, and his spirit of acrimony the natural amenity of the one petrified into morbid obduracy, and the native sweetness of the other stagnated into gall by events which work so entirely upon his over-acute sensitiveness as to disturb every moral feature into something little short of absolute deformity. The natural hue and complexion of his character are nevertheless to be distinctly traced through all the hallucinations of his excited sensibility. His nervous delicacy is so shocked at the marriage of his mother and his uncle, that a canker grows upon it which gnaws him to the very vitals, yet his affection is not, for an instant, swamped by the flood of turgid impulses by which his heart is continually overborne. Amid his greatest acerbity the sweetness of filial love, though occasionally embittered, is never neutralized.

In this production, certainly of the greatest dramatic genius of any age or country, a fact on which the most eminent modern critics of Europe unanimously concur, the peculiar character of the hero-peculiar, however, only in the aspects, not in the features, of humanity—aids or protracts the progress of the plot, according as the interest is to be heightened, anxiety awakened, or curiosity kept alive, in a manner as consummate as it is original. The lights and shadows of human emotion flit before us in an almost endless variety of intangible forms, so apparently palpable and identic with our common sympathies that we seem to behold our own hearts reflected as by a speculum in the object so exquisitely realized by the poet. In this respect, as Hazlitt says, we are

Hamlet, but we are so only when, under certain phases of his condition, our whole sympathies are drawn to him, as bearing a sort of kindred relation to our own; when through him we feel our own deep sensibilities aroused, and that we have, as it were, an intimate community of suffering but which, indeed, would identify us precisely in the same manner, and just as intimately with Othello or Romeo, if that inexpressible, yet profound, sympathy everywhere existing between man and man, in a greater or less degree, and now more directly operating upon us through the character in which we recognize such kindred moral affinities, were equally similar.

As the events of the play proceed, the irresolution of the hero, his shrinking sensibility, the almost convulsive struggles of a mind anxious to avenge its own and parents' wrong, but repelled by the strong compunctions of a most humane temper, and that dominant repugnance to blood-shedding, which casts an infrangible fetter upon the sanguinary arm of revenge; steeping his subtle intellect in that logic of social retaliation, which justifies to itself the extreme of physical chastisement, yet at the same time shrinking with shuddering repugnance from the manual infliction; philosophizing with temperate exactness upon a determination which he dares not execute; actually denouncing those very principles of right, by which his own heart is sternly disposed to be governed; unable to move the slumbering energy that waits but to be evoked; acting by impulse, but deliberating with cool and calculating precision; practically weak, but theoretically strong;-all these mingled contrarieties of character-nay, his minutest infirmities, so singularly evolved from the apparent contingent movements of the plot, give it at once an interest and reality which rivet our attention, whilst they enlist our deepest sympathies. Every thing goes on progressively to the end, without the link of consequences being once broken; and whenever the direct progress of the plot is arrested, it is only to strengthen the finely woven web of dexterous combinations which terminate in the catastrophe. How felicitously too is the disposition of the royal uncle brought out, though quite adventitiously, during the wild and capricious abstractions of Hamlet. It is only by inference that the qualities of the king's mind and heart are arrived at, and yet how strongly are these impressed upon us, not by any direct or designed implication, on the part of the injured nephew, not by any sinister influence, provoked by the outpouring of his exacerbated spirit, but exhibited in his repeated bursts of indignant reproach at his unmerited and unnatural wrong. We see, at one view, the murderer, the sot, the reveller, the sensualist, together with the accessories of temperament consequential to those vices; that is, though we do not actually see them in the royal assassin, they are, nevertheless, strongly reflected upon our minds through the rightful hero of