adjustment in the dark future. The intricacy of the action, and the unexpected nature of the events, are copied from life as closely as that marvellous delineation of motive and feeling which brings Hamlet so intimately home to the consciousness of reflective men. Those dramas in which we accurately foresee the event in the first act are as little like the reality of human
life as a geometric problem is like a landscape. Granted that there is nothing like accident in human affairs, that if a special providence in the fall of a sparrow may be doubted, the subjection of the most trivial circumstances to general laws is beyond question. Still, in human affairs, the multiplicity and mutual interference of these laws is such, that it is utterly
beyond human foresight to trace forward the thread of events with any certainty. In Hamlet this uncertainty is peculiarly manifested. Everything is traceable to causes, which operate, however, in a manner which the most astute forecaster of
events could never have anticipated; though, after their occur rence, it is easy enough to trace and name them, as Horatio promised to do. “So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' heads; all this can I
Truly deliver.” Although we arrive at the conviction that Hamlet is morbidly melancholic, and that the degree to which he puts on a part is very small ; that, by eliminating a few hurling words, and the description which Ophelia gives of the state of his stockings, there is very little, either in his speech or conduct, which is truly feigned ; let us guard ourselves from conveying the erroneous impression that he is a veritable lunatic. He is a reasoning melancholiac, morbidly changed from his former state of thought, feeling, and conduct. He has “foregone all
