ZLITT

Born in 1778, died in 1880; an early friend of Lamb,
Coleridge, Southey, Moore and Leigh Hunt, with whom he
afterward quarreled, owing to differing political views and
his own peculiar temper; his writings mainly essays and
criticisms; wrote also a notable "Life of Napoleon,"
published in 1828.

HAMLET[25]

It is the one of Shakespeare's plays that we think of the oftenest,
because it sounds most in striking reflections on human life, and
because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his
mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we
apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of
general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth
attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience.
He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the
greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the
ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character.
Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown
more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to
force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to
unfold. The attention is excited without effort; the incidents succeed
each other as matters of course; the characters think, and speak, and
act just as they might do if left entirely to themselves. There is no
set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested
by the passing scene--the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of
music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what
might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark at the
remote period of time fixt upon, before the modern refinements in
morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting
enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a
time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But
here we are more than spectators. We have not only "the outward
pageants and the signs of grief," but "we have that within which
passes show." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions
living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions
and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespeare, together with his own
comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves.
This is a very great advantage.

The character of Haml