256 REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY AND 



order. His soliloquy, after the apparition of the Ghost, displays his 

 literary practises : — 



" Remember thee ! 

 Yea, from the table of my memory 

 I'll wipe away all trival fond records, 

 All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 

 That youth and observation copied tliere ; 

 And thy commandment all alone shall live 

 Within the book and volume of my brain, 

 Unmix'd with baser matter." 



Hamlet was an accomplished gentleman ; he would not bate a jot 

 of excellence : he went so far as to copy the extravagancies of 

 good breeding, and, like our modern gentleman — but here the com- 

 parison drops — to write unintelligibly : 



♦* I once did hold it, as our statists do, 



A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much 



How to forget that learning." 



Hamlet should ever be " the glass of fashion ;" but, in the compa- 

 rison, how odious we become !* 



Such is Hamlet in his physical, moral, and intellectual conjunc- 

 tion ; perhaps the most perfect character within possibility — acting 

 without any express and definite purpose of ambition to regulate and 

 direct his conduct. 



It is justly said that Hamlet is the most Shakspearean of all 

 Shakspeare's plays. It is, in fact, the embodying of the poet's ge- 

 nius ; exhibiting the most sublime historical picture. Like the 

 Orestes of jEschylus, Hamlet is impelled by a necessity to become 

 the avenger of blood, self-devoted by their own internal conscious- 

 ness to the perpetration of a penalty that suffers no palliation. 

 There is no arrangement, no decree, no customary process of con- 

 demnation; but, sitting on the judgment-seat of the secret soul, the 

 fate of Orestes or the genius of Hamlet holds the immutable decree. 

 But the position of Hamlet is infinitely the more dreadful. Ores- 

 tes was the minister of the gods : the maternal bond with the Gre- 

 cians was slavish ; hence there are few pauses in the purpose of 



* The learning of Shakspeare is so various, that he baffles all his commen- 

 tators : many suppose him, reasonably enough, to have been a student in 

 physic — or how could he have become so acute a physiologist ; while, in the 

 Legal Observer^ his studies in the law are seriously treated of and proved, 

 from the use of terms which, they say, none but a lawyer could have known. 



