l the wholesome flowers were
choked up, and nothing but weeds could thrive. Not that the prospect of
exclusion from the throne, his lawful inheritance, weighed so much upon
his spirits, though that to a young and high-minded prince was a bitter
wound and a sore indignity; but what so galled him, and took away all
his cheerful spirits, was, that his mother had shown herself so
forgetful to his father's memory: and such a father! who had been to her
so loving and so gentle a husband! and then she always appeared as
loving and obedient a wife to him, and would hang upon him as if her
affection grew to him: and now within two months, or as it seemed to
young Hamlet, less than two months, she had married again, married his
uncle, her dear husband's brother, in itself a highly improper and
unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made much more
so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded, and the unkingly
character of the man whom she had chosen to be the partner of her throne
and bed. This it was, which more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed
the spirits and brought a cloud over the mind of this honourable young
prince.

In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do to
contrive to divert him; he still appeared in court in a suit of deep
black, as mourning for the king his father's death, which mode of dress
he had never laid aside, not even in compliment to his mother upon the
day she was married, nor could he be brought to join in any of the
festivities or rejoicings of that (as appeared to him) disgraceful day.

What mostly troubled him was an uncertainty about the manner of his
father's death. It was given out by Claudius that a serpent had stung
him; but young Hamlet had shrewd suspicions that Claudius himself was
the serpent; in plain English, that he had murdered him for his crown,
and that the serpent who stung his father did now sit on the throne.

How far he was right in this conjecture, and what he ought to think of
his mother, how far she was privy to this murder, and whether by her
consent or knowledge, or without, it came to pass, were the doubts which
continually harassed and distracted him.

A rumour had reached the ear of young Hamlet, that an apparition,
exactly resembling the dead king his father, had been seen by the
soldiers upon watch, on the platform before the palace at midnight, for
two or three nights successively. The figure came constantly clad in the