found the king and queen of that country
elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The
whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble
boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer
with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,
and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white
silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted
townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished
that his curls and forehead had been more probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.
The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled
with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him
to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried
a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance
of occasionally referring, and that too, with an air of anxiety and a
tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state
of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's being
advised by the gallery to "turn over!"--a recommendation which it took
extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that
whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time
and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.
The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as "the kettle-drum." The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on
his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral
service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,
Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical