which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from
benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,--a sudden
stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst
it altered the direction. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and
Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of
Hamlet, and his impetuous eloquence, perfectly intelligible. The
knowledge,--the unthought of consciousness,--the sensation of human
auditors--of flesh and blood sympathists--acts as a support and a
stimulation _a tergo_, while the front of the mind, the whole
consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition.
Add too, that the apparition itself has, by its previous appearances, been
brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity
in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful
subjectivity, is truly wonderful.

_Ib._ sc. 5. Hamlet's speech:--

"O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell?"

I remember nothing equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of
Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two
Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to
make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that
"observation had copied there,"--followed immediately by the speaker noting
down the generalised fact,--

"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!"

_Ib._--

"_Mar._ Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!

_Ham._ Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come," &c.

This part of the scene, after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost, has been
charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the
mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either
sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus
well known, that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty contrive to escape
from conscience by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by
inventing grotesque terms, and a certain technical phraseology, to
disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may
appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the
verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of
the common order of things--something, in fact, out of its place; and if
from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and
the sense of th