over, all his insolent behaviour to the king and to Polonius, all his cruelty to Ophelia, all his conduct in the play scene, had merely been put on to deceive, whilst still the object of all this deception remained unaccomplished, and must be frustrated by the avowal. A man capable of feigning madness so long would scarcely have so far forgotten himself as to confess his deception so prematurely.

In all this conversation, which could not have had its peculiar character if Hamlet's mind had been calm enough to remember the respect due to his mother, and which no part of her conduct had forfeited since he so strongly expressed it in the first act of the play, he is anxious not to avail himself of the plea of madness, which is commonly supposed to have been assumed in his former discourse with Ophelia. The motives for desiring to be thought mad, if there were any defined motives, still exist; but he desires to deprive his mother of any such belief to support her under his insults. His ferocity seems to his disturbed judgment no more than just and natural anger. The same inconsistency leads him still to wish that the king may continue to think

him mad, although one of the consequences must be that he is to be banished under that supposition. With equal want of consistency, he seems to think no more of that solemn second visit of the ghost which shook his frame so severely; and, protesting that he is of sound mind, reverts to and dilates upon his mother's marriage with his uncle. All that he says and does is tinctured by the general disturbance of his understanding.

Towards the close of this scene with his mother, when, in her agitation, she exclaims, "What shall I do?" and he enjoins her not to let the king suppose him merely mad in craft, he starts wildly off to another subject, or rather to two subjects in rapid succession, certainly with no motive for affecting any mental disorder,

HAM. I must to England; you know that?

and finds matter of amusement in the arrangements making for setting him packing to England with his two schoolfellows, whom he says he will trust as he will adders fanged; and at the same time indulges a few

parting jests over poor dead Polonius, ascribing the

packing to "this man,"

this counsellor

most sweet and most grave

Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

And with this cold insensibility he bids his mother good night. Both his words and his conduct, long indicative of his not being in his perfect mind, seem now to mark the height of mental malady. As sequences true to nature, we shall find that intervals of calmness still from time to time recur, but interrupted in exciting circumstances by fresh gusts of malady, until all Hamlet's tragic history of wretchedness and madness is completed; and his unhappy destiny fulfilled.

ACT FOURTH.

THE impression made on the queen's mind by her late painful interview with her son, like that made on the mind of Ophelia, is that he is really mad; or, as she expresses herself to the king, in answer to his inquiries when he finds her discomposed and full of grief

Mad as the sea, and wind, when both contend
Which is the mightier :

To this impression it must be allowed that his sudden addresses to a figure invisible to herself have much contributed. Overlooking his cruel conduct to herself, and saying nothing of his abundant abuse of her second husband, she thinks only of his hasty killing, "in his brainish apprehension," of the unseen good old man Polonius. She makes no allusion to Hamlet's

coarser scoffing of the dead, but, in the gentle spirit which seems ever to animate her, remembers only that even in his madness he was not wholly insensible of the wrong he had done. When the king, with very reasonable anxiety, asks "Where is he gone?" she replies

To draw apart the body he hath killed :
O'er whom his very madness, like some ore,
Among a mineral of metals base,

Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.

The king has other impressions. Suspecting that the manner of the late king's death has in some unexplained way become known to Hamlet, and was not without design imitated in the play scene, although not interpreted by the queen who was not a participator in the crime, he has both doubts and fears as respects the entire conduct of Hamlet being the result of madness. Even before the play scene, after witnessing from his concealment the interview between Hamlet and Ophelia, his commentary was

There's something in his soul,

O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And, I do doubt, the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger.

M