their
exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be,
contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of
movement, Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius; and
besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man as false to
his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown.

_Ib._ sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a
proof of Shakespeare's minute knowledge of human nature. It is a well
established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of
moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own
thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances:
thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of
the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected
hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as
to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from
the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing
on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to
the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns,
escapes, as it were, from himself in generalisations, and smothers the
impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning.
Besides this, another purpose is answered;--for by thus entangling the
attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical
sentences of this speech of Hamlet's, Shakespeare takes them completely by
surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the
suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have
dared, like Shakespeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two
distinct appearances,--or could have contrived that the third should rise
upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest.

But in addition to all the other excellences of Hamlet's speech concerning
the wassail-music--so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the
ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character--it has the advantage of
giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech
instantly directed to the Ghost. The _momentum_ had been given to his
mental activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in,
and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the
purpose for