utmost
wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say
that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows
no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the
nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust
returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He
learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the
woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains
relief in frenzied words and frenzied action,--action which must needs
intensify, if that were possible, the fury of the man whom he has,
however unwittingly, so cruelly injured. Yet he appears absolutely
unconscious that he has injured Laertes at all, and asks him:

What is the reason that you use me thus?

And as the sharpness of the first pang passes, the old weary misery
returns, and he might almost say to Ophelia, as he does to her brother:

I loved you ever: but it is no matter.

'It is no matter': _nothing_ matters.

The last scene opens. He narrates to Horatio the events of the voyage
and his uncle's attempt to murder him. But the conclusion of the story
is no plan of action, but the old fatal question, 'Ought I not to
act?'[66] And, while he asks it, his enemies have acted. Osric enters
with an invitation to him to take part in a fencing-match with Laertes.
This match--he is expressly told so--has been arranged by his deadly
enemy the King; and his antagonist is a man whose hands but a few hours
ago were at his throat, and whose voice he had heard shouting 'The devil
take thy soul!' But he does not think of that. To fence is to show a
courtesy, and to himself it is a relief,--action, and not the one
hateful action. There is something noble in his carelessness, and also
in his refusal to attend to the presentiment which he suddenly feels
(and of which he says, not only 'the readiness is all,' but also 'it is
no matter'). Something noble; and yet, when a sacred duty is still
undone, ought one to be so ready to die? With the same carelessness, and
with that trustfulness which makes us love him, but which is here so
fatally misplaced, he picks up the first foil that comes to his hand,
asks indifferently, 'These foils have all a length?' and begins. And
Fate descends upon his enemies, and his mother, and himself.

But he is not left in utter defeat. Not only is his task at last
accomplished, but Shakespeare seems to have de