unity of design as evolved in Thomas Warton,
Hurd, and Johnson was the intermediate step on the way to a full theory
of organic unity we see the importance of such passages in the forward
march of criticism.

There is in the _Remarks_ a closer examination of event and character
than is usual in the period, again in the light of what it reasonable
and natural. The includes some "psychologizing" of persons in the play,
specifically in partial analyses of Laertes, Polonious, and Hamlet,
enough to foreshadow the later vogue but none of it very remarkable.
More worthy of notice is the author's use of a psychological method that
is to reappear in developed form in Coleridge: that is, a study of
successive scenes leading to a climactic moment--in this case Hamlet's
meeting with the ghost--for evidence of a skillful working up through
right preparatory touches to a point where the audience, in the words of
Anonymous, "are forced ... entirely to suspend their most fixed Opinions
and believe ..." This may have been done before in criticism; but if so
I do not myself recall it.

I should like, also, to risk the suggestion that to the author of _Some
Remarks_ should go the honor of the earliest adumbration of the "Hamlet
problem." For here, before Francis Gentleman or Steevens or Richardson,
Anonymous has raised the tantalising question of the why of Hamlet's
conduct, the problem of his delay in effecting his revenge, and has
glanced at an answer. Anonymous in no wise approves of Hamlet's madness:
it was, he thinks, the best possible way to thwart his design of revenge
and it was carried on with unseemly lack of dignity. Shakespeare has
followed his sources too closely, with bad results. There appears "no
Reason at all in Nature, why the young prince did not put the Usurper to
Death as soon as possible." To be sure this would have ended the play;
the poet must therefore delay the hero's revenge. But, insists
Anonymous, "then he should have contrived some good Reason for it." This
is clearly recognition of the vexing problem that has since occupied the
attention of unnumbered critics--if not in full statement, at least in
its essentials.

Such examples suggest the seminal quality of the best of this little
book. The writer was obviously a man who read closely and reflected to
good effect on what he read, with the result that he saw new things and
helped open new problems and point the way to a generally more fruitful
study of hi