injure Hamlet
in our opinion.

_Ib._ The king's speech:--

"O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven," &c.

This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit.
The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible
soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have
watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final--"all
may be well!" is remarkable;--the degree of merit attributed by the
self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the
indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties.
The solution is in the divine _medium_ of the Christian doctrine of
expiation:--not what you have done, but what you are, must determine.

_Ib._ Hamlet's speech:--

"Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying:
And now I'll do't:--And so he goes to heaven:
And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd," &c.

Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for
impetuous, horror-striking, fiendishness!--Of such importance is it to
understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's
speech is truly awful! And then--

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go."

O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and
willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self
remains!

_Ib._ sc. 4.--

"_Ham._ A bloody deed;--almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

_Queen._ As kill a king?"

I confess that Shakespeare has left the character of the Queen in an
unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the
fratricide?

Act iv. sc. 2.--

"_Ros._ Take you me for a spunge, my lord?

_Ham._ Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his
rewards, his authorities," &c.

Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the
thoughts that had passed through his mind before;--in fact, in telling
home-truths.

Act iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these
two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet,
and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her
pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not
too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers
to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, m