er the
purpose ("I am not drest for company"), and yet reconciling it with
neatness and perfect purity.

_Ib._ Hamlet's soliloquy:--

"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" &c.

This is Shakespeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet
which I have before put forth.

_Ib._--

"The spirit that I have seen,
May be a devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps
Out of my weakness, and my melancholy
(As he is very potent with such spirits),
Abuses me to damn me."

See Sir Thomas Brown:--

"I believe ... that those apparitions and ghosts of departed
persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks
of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood, and
villany, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed
spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of
the affairs of the world."--_Relig. Med._ part. i. sect. 37.

Act iii. sc. 1. Hamlet's soliloquy:--

"To be, or not to be, that is the question," &c.

This speech is of absolutely universal interest,--and yet to which of all
Shakespeare's characters could it have been appropriately given but to
Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual
a communion with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to
belong, to all mankind.

_Ib._--

"The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns."

Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the
apparition of the Ghost.

O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent
contradiction,--if it be not rather a great beauty,--surely, it were easy to
say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or
abiding-place.

_Ib._--

"_Ham._ Ha, ha! are you honest?

_Oph._ My lord?

_Ham._ Are you fair?"

Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange
and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of
her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed
to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so
anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;--and yet a
wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful
self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. "I did love
you once:"--"I lov'd you not:"--and particularly in his enumeration of the
faults of the sex from