is, and while his grief was green, his
mother had married with his uncle Claudius, whom Hamlet had never liked.

The indecorous haste of these nuptials--they took place within two
months after the king's death, the funeral-baked meats, as Hamlet
cursorily remarked, furnishing forth the marriage-tables--struck the
young prince aghast. He had loved the queen his mother, and had nearly
idolized the late king; but now he forgot to lament the death of the one
in contemplating the life of the other. The billing and cooing of the
newly-married couple filled him with horror. Anger, shame, pity, and
despair seized upon him by turns. He fell into a forlorn condition,
forsaking his books, eating little save of the chameleon's dish, the
air, drinking deep of Rhenish, letting his long, black locks go unkempt,
and neglecting his dress--he who had hitherto been "the glass of fashion
and the mould of form," as Ophelia had prettily said of him.

Often for half the night he would wander along the ramparts of the
castle, at the imminent risk of tumbling off, gazing seaward and
muttering strangely to himself, and evolving frightful spectres out
of the shadows cast by the turrets. Sometimes he lapsed into a gentle
melancholy; but not seldom his mood was ferocious, and at such times the
conversational Polonius, with a discretion that did him credit, steered
clear of my lord Hamlet.

He turned no more graceful compliments for Ophelia. The thought of
marrying her, if he had ever seriously thought of it, was gone now.
He rather ruthlessly advised her to go into a nunnery. His mother
had sickened him of women. It was of her he spoke the notable words,
"Frailty, thy name is woman!" which, some time afterwards, an amiable
French gentleman had neatly engraved on the head-stone of his wife, who
had long been an invalid. Even the king and queen did not escape Hamlet
in his distempered moments. Passing his mother in a corridor or on a
staircase of the palace, he would suddenly plant a verbal dagger in
her heart; and frequently, in full court, he would deal the king such
a cutting reply as caused him to blanch, and gnaw his lip. If the
spectacle of Gertrude and Claudius was hateful to Hamlet, the presence
of

Hamlet, on the other hand, was scarcely a comfort to the royal lovers.
At first his uncle had called him "our chiefest courtier, cousin, and
our son," trying to smooth over matters; but Hamlet would have none of
it. Therefore, one day, when th