immediately precedes his entry, when, supposing himself to be unobserved, he gives utterance to the musings of his mind. In the quarto of 1603 it is, "See where he comes poring upon a book." It is thus manifest that the Poet's intention was that these should be meditations of Hamlet on something which he found written in a book which he holds in his hand, bringing it much more nearly to the similar scene in the Cato of Addison. Addison has named the author whom he has put into the hands of his hero, but Shakespeare has left his author unnamed, unfortunately I think; but it is clear his intention was that Hamlet should be represented as reading in a book which spoke of the evils of life, of death their cure, of futurity, of the question of being or not being when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, and that what he says arises out of the argument in the book before him, and is not to be regarded as from the beginning thoughts springing up in his own mind. "To be, or not to be: aye, there's the point" as it is in the quarto, is equivalent to, "You, the author, are discussing the question of what shall be hereafter; you have a great and mighty subject in hand." And the words as we now have them, "To be or not to be, that is the question," are much the same, if we regard, as we may, question" as equivalent to theme, argument, or subject.

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To me it appears that something is lost by disjoining these meditations from the action of reading, and making them to arise wholly, as now they appear to do, from a well-spring of thought in his own mind.

The difference between the original and the present arrangement consists in this; that originally Hamlet entered reading, as he does now, immediately after Polonius had proposed that Ophelia should meet him as if by accident, and that he, the wily politician, should be concealed behind the arras, but that when he begins to speak, he delivers the soliloquy before

us, after which Ophelia meets him and the wild dialogue takes place. The King expresses his opinion that Hamlet is not distracted through love for Ophelia; and Polonius engages to search him deeper. Then follows the interview with Polonius, in the course of which Hamlet refers to the book he still held in his hand, talking wildly of its contents to Polonius. In the later editions, this dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius follows immediately on his entering with a book in his hand. The two arrangements then correspond till the King and Queen assent to see the Play; when next in the original quarto Polonius proposes that the Queen shall send for Hamlet to her closet and that he shall be again behind the arras. But in the later editions, between these two events are interposed the Soliloquy and the interview with Ophelia.

But though the first quarto presents us with this exceedingly interesting view of what was the Poet's first conception, and posibly even his last, yet it affords us little assistance in either settling the text of the Soliloquy itself, or in explaining difficult clauses in it; for nothing can be more corrupt than the state in which it is represented: e. g.

For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned.
The undiscover'd country at whose sight

The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.

I have several not wholly unimportant remarks to make upon particular clauses.

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come." Shakespeare seems to have been deeply impressed with a feeling of the misery of uneasy dreams; we see it in Clarence, and more awfully in Richard; we have also in his plays the effect of pleasant dreams.

"When we have shuffled off this mortal COIL." "Turmoil, bustle," says Warburton; rather perhaps, but I speak it

doubtfully, this coil of flesh which encompasseth the soul, what he elsewhere calls "this muddy vesture of decay." He was thinking of the coil of a rope. With this the expression "shuffled off" better coheres.

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of TIME." Whips is probably equivalent to quips. The meaning of which is, satirical remarks, idle censures. Warburton proposes to read th' time, not having observed how "time" is used by our early writers, as equivalent to the modern expression The Times. "The time has got a vein of making him ridiculous, and men laugh at him by tradition."-Bishop Earle's Microcosmography. But we have it as in Shakespeare, without the article, in the nervous English of Clarendon. "Yet he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of Time [the Times], the ambition, pride, and folly, of persons, and the sudden growth of wickedness, from want of care and circumspection in the first impressions, will find all their miseries to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us by the same natural causes, and means which have usually attended kingdoms swollen with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification and castigation of heaven." -History of the Rebellion, Prologue. Shakespeare himself seems to use time in another place in the same manner :

Then hath the course of justice wheel'd about
And left thee but a very prey to Time;
Having no more but thought of what thou wert
To torture thee the more, being what thou art.

KING RICHARD III. iv. 4.

One passage may be added from a writer who gives us, more than any of his contemporaries, the language of the less cultivated part of society in the time of Shakespeare, Taylor the water poet.

mock'd in rhyme,

And made the only scornful theme of Time.

"The Law's delay." This has been a very common topic of complaint in all countries, and probably in all ages. Of the writers in the time of Shakespeare, Guevara makes it in Spain, Primaudaye in France, and Barckley and Davis, and doubtless several others, in England. Shakespeare had probably some personal experience of it in his family's suit with the Lamberts.

"When he himself might his QUIETUS make." This is an Exchequer term. The mention of the law's delay had introduced the idea of proceedings in the courts of law, which led him to think of the Exchequer. It is the word which denotes that an accomptant is quit, and has been used from the original institution of these courts. It refers especially to "delay." Many an accomptant in that court has longed for his quietus. He might himself make it says the poet with so insignificant an instrument as a bodkin, the meanest kind of pointed weapon. I do not find that he uses quietus in any other play, but he has audit and other Exchequer terms. one of the Sonnets we have quietus, and, what is remarkable, four other words which may be considered exchequer terms within the compass of two lines.

Her audit, though delay'd answer'd, must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.

SONNET CXxvi.

Bodkin seems to me not rightly explained as meaning a little dagger. Any thing mean and insignificant, even a bodkin, may take away life. The passage quoted by Steevens seems to be when a dagger is spoken of with a kind of derision or contempt. Reginald Scot plainly distinguishes a dagger from a bodkin when describing the Juggler's trick in which he appeared to stab himself—" Then thrust or cause to be thrust into your breast a round bodkin, or the point of a dagger."-Discovery of Witchcraft, fol. 1665, p. 198, first

printed in the reign of Elizabeth. We have the bodkin figured at p. 200, where it is plainly nothing but the common semptress's instrument so called.

"Who Would FARDELS bear?" The folios read, "Who would these fardels bear?" a reading which ought not to bave been merely shewn in the margin but placed in the text," these fardels," these burdens just before spoken of, the whips and scorns, the oppressor's wrongs, and the other evils he had specified.

"And thus the native hue of Resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of THOUGHT;" thought is melancholy, whose hue was pale.

Turn melancholy forth to funerals;

The pale complexion is not for our pomp.

دو

A MIDS. N. D. i. 1.

"The native hue of Resolution was no doubt red. The following passage from Bishop Earle seems to throw some light on the use of Resolution in this peculiar manner. "To whom, that is the world's wise man, murders are but resolute acts, and treason a business of great consequence."

Having shewn that the Poet's original intention was that Hamlet should give utterance to the sentiments in this celebrated soliloquy immediately on having perused a certain book, it becomes a point of reasonable curiosity to inquire whether Shakespeare had more particularly in his mind any one book, and, if so, what book it was. The passage would lose something of its effect if we supposed that the whole was merely artificial, that there was no one book thought of, but the mind was thrown upon a confused heap of writers of all ages who may have touched upon these awful topics. This would lead to the conclusion that there was some one book more particularly in his mind, and it may I think be determined what particular book it was.