maiden whom sorrow had led to madness, and madness conducted to death. Talking with a man so frank and merry, Hamlet's natural inclination to humorous reflection is fully indulged; and there arises, apparently, no thought of the painful past to trouble him. The grave-digger's wit stimulates as well as amuses him. His only companion, too, is Horatio, perhaps the only person in the world for whom he has much regard, and to him he talks without excitement or wildness of any kind; but still with a disposition to dwell and dilate on every trifle; and still, in the pursuit of curious trains of associated thought, seeming to forget realities however terrible, and action however needful. He exercises his wit on the first of the skulls thrown out of the disturbed mould, punning and moralising as usual. He conjectures that it might be the skull of a politician, or of a courtier. Another skull is thrown out of the earth, and he asks why it might not be the skull of a lawyer, and where his quiddits, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks are now in all which lies some philosophy, as in the allusion to "my lord Such

a-one, that praised my lord Such-a-one's horse," and that profounder allusion to the politician, "one that would circumvent God;" all showing Hamlet's habitual meditation on men and their vanities, with which cheering and animating views could scarcely have customary association.

And then ensues that diverting dialogue with the grave-digger which will be prized by English readers as long as any sympathy with the acute conceits and mother-wit of the rustic people of our cloudy island of the great and free remains. Another skull is disturbed, well known to the grave-digger, a skull which has lain in the earth, subject to these occasional disturbings, three-and-twenty years; and this same skull, says the grave-digger, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester. Hamlet remembers Yorick well, although he was but seven years old when the jester died; he alludes to his excellent fancy, and recals the good-nature that had made an impression on his boyish heart before it was acquainted with the grief that now wears him down. His meditations become less visibly connected, but are yet bound with

a fine but not invisible chain. The transient beauty of ladies, the degradations awaiting the bodily remains of conquerors, present themselves to his mind; and in these reveries are thoughts preserved in which at some period of life all mortal men indulge. The pictures of the past arise fitfully in every imagination, in various circumstances; in the crowd or in solitude. Some happy expression, some witty combination of ideas and words, some song so sweet and merry that for a time it charmed away trouble and pain, calls from the grave the memory of youthful companions with whom, in earlier days, no forethought of sorrow and death was ever associated; and yet, as to-morrows creep in their petty pace from day to day, lessons of the uncertainty of joy, and of fame, and of life, make up a fuller representation of our brief and incomprehensible existence.

Hamlet's reflections are suddenly stopped. The very churchyard seemed a place foreshadowing some evil; and what immediately follows is productive of anguish and desperation. All at once an unexpected procession appears, of priests and of mourners for the

dead.

Among the mourners are Laertes, and the king, and the queen, and their followers. For awhile no thought arises in Hamlet's mind that this pomp has any relation to the modest grave about which the sexton had been so equivocating. He looks on, wondering whose body it is, that the king and queen and courtiers follow. Wherefore with maimed rites! and one of some estate ! He observes that the funeral rites are such as betoken that

The corse they follow did with desperate hand
Fordo its own life.

He listens, standing apart, to the remonstrance of Laertes with the priest, who intimates that but for great command the body would have been lodged in ground unsanctified; and shards, flints, and pebbles thrown upon it, instead of charitable prayers: until Laertes can patiently bear no more, and exclaims

LAER.

Lay her i' the earth;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,

A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.

And thus Hamlet learns that the dead body is that of Ophelia; learns, indeed, for the first time, that she is dead. Absorbed and tossed as he has been, he has given no thought to her since his return, and has not, it would seem, heard anything of Ophelia until now, by the side of her new-made grave. The news drives him again from all composure, and all his madness returns, and even all the love for her which he once so cruelly or so madly disavowed. Pretence for feigning in such a situation, there can be none; there can be no reasonable suspicion that Hamlet would mock the grief of Laertes and the grave of the dead Ophelia so grossly and unnaturally. He hears the queen's

affectionate lament over the sweet maid who she once fondly hoped would be her Hamlet's wife. He hears the responsive curse of Laertes on the same Hamlet, as the cause of his sister's madness; sees the desperate brother leap into his lost sister's grave, once more to hold her in his arms. He