an eternal dream is unendurable. His fancy is too active to permit him to rush into an eternity of unknown consciousness. Like Prince Henry, in the Spanish Student, he feels, “Rest rest O give me rest and peace The thought of life, that ne'er shall cease,
Has something in it like despair— A weight I am too weak to bear.” To return to his mother earth an unconscious clod seems his
most earnest hope; yet when the offensive debris of mortality meets his eyes, such an ignoble termination of mental activity revolts both his sensibility and his reason. “Here's a fine revolution, if one had the trick to see’t.” His bones ache to think on't. When he sees the skull of his old friend the jester,
from whose companionship he may have derived much of his own skill in fence and play of words and poignancy of wit, his imagination is absolutely disgusted. “Alas, poor Yorick —I knew him, Horatio ; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on
his back a thousand times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now 2 your gambols : your songs 2 your flashes of merriment, that were wont to keep the table on a roar 7 Not one now,
to mock your own grinning 2 quite chap-fallen 7
Now, get
you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch
thick, to this favour she must come ; make her laugh at that.”
The grave-digger's jest that Hamlet's madness will not matter in England, since “’twill not be seen in him : there the men s
are as mad as he,” is legitimate enough in the mouth of a foreigner, since for ages have the continentals jested upon the mad English, who hang themselves by scores every day, and who, in November especially, immolate themselves in hecatombs to the dun goddess of spleen. By this time the jest has somewhat lost its point. At least, it may be said that if the English furnish as many madmen as their neighbours,
