be a new glory in the garland round the forehead of Maga, who will then be a very Minerva. I agree with you in thinking that beautiful as she has hitherto been in her budding growth, winning all hearts and charming all eyes, she is becoming monthly more irresistible in the full-blown bloom of her matured magnificence. Not one dissentient voice is now heard from the decision of the world, that she is, out of all comparison, the finest woman of her age, uniting in her own single self, Harmonious Discord, Contradiction, all the mental and bodily attractions of an Eve, a Judith, a Cassandra, a Lucretia, a Cleopatra, a Zenobia, and a Semiramis. She is quite wild about your article on Shakspeare. It is, my dear H., indeed an article to win any female heart-and poor Emily Callender, after reading your beautiful explanation of Hamlet's behaviour to Ophelia, walked with tears in her fair eyes away into the Virgin's Bower, where she sat pity-andlove-sick till sunset. Knowing by experience that strong emotion, when long sustained, becomes almost unsustainable, I have divided your fine Essay into two parts-and lo! here I am standing on the “Landing-place,” to use the language of one whom I honour and you reverence-and that I may soon see you in the body coming dreamily down the avenue, is the warm wish, my dear H., of your affectionate friend, CHRISTOPHER NORTH.

BUCHANAN LODGE,

Oct. 14, 1828.

ON THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET.

MAY not that critical problem, the character of Hamlet, be partly elucidated upon this principle? No fictitious, and few historical personages, have given rise to more controversy. Some commentators hold him up as the pattern of all that is virtuous, noble, wise, and amiable; others condemn him as a mass of unfeeling inconsistency. It is doubted whether his madness be real or assumed. Stevens declares that he must be madman or villain. Boswell, the younger, makes him out to be a quiet, good sort of man, unfit for perilous times and arduous enterprises, and, in fine, parallels him with Charles I. and George III.

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Goethe (in his Wilhelm Meister) burns, as the children say at hide-and-seek, but when about, as it were, to lay hands on the truth, he is blown " diverse innumerable leagues." "It is clear to me," he says, that Shakspeare's intention was to exhibit the effects of a great action imposed as a duty upon a mind too feeble for its accomplishment. Here is an oak-tree, planted in a china vase, proper only to receive the most delicate flowers. The roots strike out, and the vessel flies to pieces. A pure, noble,

highly moral disposition, but without that energy of soul which constitutes the hero, sinks under a load, which it can neither support nor resolve to abandon. All his obligations are sacred to him, but this alone is above his powers. An impossibility is required at his hands-not an impossibility in itself, but that which is so to him. Observe how he turns, shifts, advances, and recedes-how he is constantly reminding himself of his great commission, which he nevertheless in the end seems almost entirely to lose sight of, and this without recovering his former tranquillity."

Now, surely, feebleness of mind, the fragility of a china vase, lack of power and energy, are not the characteristics of Hamlet. So far from it, he is represented as fearless, almost above the strength of humanity. He does not "set his life at a pin's fee.” He converses, unshaken, with what the stoutest warriors have trembled to think upon, jests with a visitant from darkness, and gathers unwonted vigour from the pangs of death. Nor, in all his musings, all the many-coloured mazes of his thoughts, is there anything of female softness-anything of amiable weakness. His anguish is stern and masculine, stubbornly self-possessed, above the kind relief of sighs, and tears, and soothing pity. The very style of his more serious discourse is more austere, philosophic,I had almost said prosaic,—than that of any other character in Shakspeare. It is not the weight and magnitude, the danger and difficulty of the deed imposed as a duty, that weighs upon his soul, and

enervates the sinews of his moral being, but the preternatural contradiction involved in the duty itself, the irregular means through which the duty is promulgated and known.

Presumptuous as it may appear to offer a new theory on a subject that has exercised so many wits before, or to pretend to know what Shakspeare intended, where his intentions have been so variously conjectured, I will venture to take a cursory view of this most Shakspearean of all Shakspeare's dramas, and endeavour to explain, not justify, the most questionable points in the character of the hero.

Let us, for a moment, put Shakspeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance. In real life, it is no unusual thing to meet with characters every whit as obscure as that of the Prince of Denmark; men seemingly accomplished for the greatest actions, clear in thought, and dauntless in deed, still meditating mighty works, and urged by all motives and occasions to the performance,-whose existence is nevertheless an unperforming dream; men of noblest, warmest affections, who are perpetually wringing the hearts of those whom they love best; whose sense of rectitude is strong and wise enough to inform and govern a world, while their acts are the hapless issues of casualty and passion, and scarce to themselves appear their own. We cannot conclude that all such have seen ghosts; though the existence of ghost-seers is as certain, as that of ghosts is problematical. But they will generally be found, either by a course of study

and meditation too remote from the art and practice of life,―by designs too pure and perfect to be executed in earthly materials, or from imperfect glimpses of an intuition beyond the defined limits of communicable knowledge, to have severed themselves from the common society of human feelings and opinions, and become as it were ghosts in the body. Such a man is Hamlet; an habitual dweller with his own thoughts, -preferring the possible to the real,-refining on the ideal forms of things, till the things themselves become dim in his sight, and all the common doings and sufferings, the obligations and engagements of the world, a weary task, stale and unprofitable. By natural temperament he is more a thinker than a doer. His abstract intellect is an overbalance for his active impulses. The death of his father, his mother's marriage, and his own exclusion from the succession, -sorrow for one parent, shame for another, and resentment for himself,-tend still further to confirm and darken a disposition, which the light heart of happy youth had hitherto counteracted. Sorrow contracts around his soul, and shuts it out from cheerful light, and wholesome air. It may be observed in general, that men of thought succumb more helplessly beneath affliction than the men of action. How many dear friends may a soldier lose in a single campaign, and yet find his heart whole in his winter quarters; the natural decease of one whereof in peace and security, would have robbed his days to come of half their joy! In this state of mind is Hamlet first introduced; not distinctly conscious of more than his