of Shakespeare,
noticed. This happened first amongst my acquaintances, as Sir George
Beaumont will bear witness; and subsequently, long before Schlegel had
delivered at Vienna the lectures on Shakespeare, which he afterwards
published, I had given on the same subject eighteen lectures substantially
the same, proceeding from the very same point of view, and deducing the
same conclusions, so far as I either then agreed, or now agree, with him.
I gave these lectures at the Royal Institution, before six or seven
hundred auditors of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in
which Sir Humphrey Davy, a fellow-lecturer, made his great revolutionary
discoveries in chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with
my lectures was so extraordinary, that all who at a later period heard the
same words, taken by me from my notes of the lectures at the Royal
Institution, concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel. Mr. Hazlitt,
whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness
towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb--(who,
God bless him! besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old
friends, as long at least as they are at all down in the world, is linked
as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation)--only as "frantic;"--Mr. Hazlitt, I
say, himself replied to an assertion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in
these words;--"That is a lie; for I myself heard the very same character of
Hamlet from Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither
read nor could read a page of German!" Now Hazlitt was on a visit to me at
my cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of the year 1798, in
the September of which year I first was out of sight of the shores of
Great Britain.--Recorded by me, S. T. Coleridge, 7th January, 1819.

The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have
long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always
loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves,
the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of
setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon
into a misgrowth or _lusus_ of the capricious and irregular genius of
Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent
decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of
Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate