Security seems now within his eager grasp; security from one who, he suspects, knows all his villany, and during whose life he can never more feel safe. But he still dreads the possibility of failure, so that if the substitution of a sword for a foil, and even of a poisoned sword, should miss, no criminality should be shrunk from to make Hamlet's murder sure:

And that our drift look through our bad performance,
'Twere better not assay'd; therefore this project
Should have a back, or second, that might hold
If this should blast in proof. Soft ;-let me see;
We'll make a solemn wager on your cunnings,-
I ha't.

When in your motion you are hot and dry,

(As make your bouts more violent to that end,)
And that he calls for drink, I'll have preferr'd him
A chalice for the nonce; whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venomed stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.

This conversation is broken in upon by the queen announcing to Laertes that his sister is drowned. The maiden's death has been as beautiful and poetical as her life; for this was the manner of it, as related by the queen :

QUEEN. There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There, with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
(That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them ):
There, on the pendant boughs, her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down the weedy trophies, and herself,

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide ;
And, mermaid-like, a while they bore her up;
Which time, she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indued

Unto that element: but long it could not be,
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

LAER.

Alas, then, she is drown'd

QUEEN. Drown'd, drown'd.

ACT FIFTH.

FROM the ghost scene, the concluding scene of the first act of the play, Hamlet has now been occupied, at least from time to time, and in all his various moods, with the dreadful idea of murdering his uncle ; of assassinating a man unlikely to be prepared to defend himself. Whatever proofs he may have given of intelligence, of consciousness, this horrid thought has still possessed him by night and by day: but it has led to no clear plan for effecting his intent. If the thought itself be considered as arising from a supernatural injunction, the inaction thence ensuing has apparently been the offspring of an infirm nature bordering at least on unsoundness of mind. Each incident has added confirmation to this view. He has fallen into numerous eccentricities, with various results, all of them more or less deplorable. He

has mocked those about him, treated Ophelia with insolent cruelty, outrageously reproached his mother, and rashly murdered an innocent old man instead of the king. For these things, even for the last, he has scarcely expressed concern; only an indifferent and contemptuous regret. Still his intention to kill the king remains: he has professed to feign madness to facilitate that end, but his intention remains unfulfilled. He has sought for proofs to justify his designs, and having gained convincing proofs, has seemed wholly to disregard them.

We are now to see Hamlet again; after his voyage, after his success in baffling the plot against his life, and after his return to Elsinore. Change of scene, the strong interest of new circumstances, and even the lapse of time, have calmed him. In the churchyard, he talks acutely and pleasantly with the gravedigger, oblivious, as it would seem, of all his past agitations and resolves. He has been walking tranquilly with Horatio, and his mind appears to be calm, and his thoughts are not irrational. The conversation of the "clowns," and especially the

quaint humour of the principal of the two (gathered, perhaps, from some original villager in that churchyard on the bank of the Avon where stands the ancient church wherein the bones of Shakspeare now lie interred), relieves the mind of the reader, whose imagination has been bent to the story from the tension which a long succession of passionate scenes has produced. For a time, we are amused and pleased by a combination of wit and humour.

Tragedy may be acting in high places, and gnawing care prevailing in king's houses, and still the sequestered life of vassals and villagers may proceed serenely; and common thoughts will still make up the daily sum of their existence. The pangs of conscience of the king, and his deep meditations of revenge, the fierce dishonour of Laertes, the anxieties that corrode the queen's heart, are all unknown to the grave-digger, who sings stanzas learnt by ear, and perhaps written by those whom the axe had cut off years before Shakspeare enlisted them in his happier service, to be sung by a clown preparing a grave for youth and beauty prematurely withered; for a young and lovely