nes.
He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth,
Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted
After us, in the words of some strange tongue,
Rafel ma-ee amech zabee almee!--
'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn,
And so vent better whatsoever rage
Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat
And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!
Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'
Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl
Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he
Through whose ill thought it was that humankind
Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:
For as he speaketh language known of none,
So none can speak save jargon to himself.'

_Inferno_, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.

Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly
terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had
evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were
in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero,
Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare's men had, in fact, any thought
but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed
them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, 'in its habit
as it lived,' or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its
lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the
stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown.
No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of
healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he
might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know
not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him;
and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher,
more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he
should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks
on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but
over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the
imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a 'nervous
gentleman' compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams
as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as
Dante says _he_ did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of
nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he
was 'a man of this world' as well as