ing seems best. The perfume of his gifts was
the sweet words with which they were given; those words having lost
their savour, the mere gifts were worth nothing.]

[Footnote 8: Released from the commands her father had laid upon her,
and emboldened by the queen's approval of more than the old relation
between them, she would timidly draw Hamlet back to the past--to love
and a sound mind.]

[Footnote 9: I do not here suppose a noise or movement of the arras, or
think that the talk from this point bears the mark of the madness he
would have assumed on the least suspicion of espial. His distrust of
Ophelia comes from a far deeper source--suspicion of all women, grown
doubtful to him through his mother. Hopeless for her, he would give his
life to know that Ophelia was not like her. Hence the cruel things he
says to her here and elsewhere; they are the brood of a heart haunted
with horrible, alas! too excusable phantoms of distrust. A man wretched
as Hamlet must be forgiven for being rude; it is love suppressed, love
that can neither breathe nor burn, that makes him rude. His horrid
insinuations are a hungry challenge to indignant rejection. He would
sting Ophelia to defence of herself and her sex. But, either from her
love, or from gentleness to his supposed madness, as afterwards in the
play-scene, or from the poverty and weakness of a nature so fathered and
so brothered, she hears, and says nothing. 139.]

[Footnote 10: Honesty is here figured as a porter,--just after, as a
porter that may be corrupted.]

[Footnote 11: If the _Folio_ reading is right, _commerce_ means
_companionship_; if the _Quarto_ reading, then it means _intercourse_.
Note _then_ constantly for our _than_.]

[Footnote 12: I imagine Ophelia here giving Hamlet a loving look--which
hardens him. But I do not think she lays emphasis on _your_; the word is
here, I take it, used (as so often then) impersonally.]

[Footnote 13: '--proof in you and me: _I_ loved _you_ once, but my
honesty did not translate your beauty into its likeness.']

[Footnote 14: That the Great Judgement was here in Shakspere's thought,
will be plain to those who take light from the corresponding passage in
the _1st Quarto_. As it makes an excellent specimen of that issue in the
character I am most inclined to attribute to it--that of original sketch
and continuous line of notes, with more or less finished passages in
place among the notes--I will here quote it, recommending it to