outstretch'd heroes, the beggars' shadows.” He reduces the sophistry of his false friends to an absurdity, and closes the argument by declining to carry it further: “By my fay, I cannot reason.” But Mr. Coleridge declares the passage to be unintelligible, and perhaps this interpretation may be too simple. So far from being able to examine and recover the wind of Hamlet, his old schoolfellows are put by him to a course of questioning as to the motives of their presence, as to whether it is a free visitation of their own inclining, or whether they have been sent for.
Their want of skill in dissemblance, and
their weaker natures, submit the secret that they had been sent for to him, and the old “rights of fellowship,” “the obligations of ever-preserved love,” are immediately clouded by distrust : “Nay, then, I'll have an eye of you,” he says. Yet notwithstanding he freely discloses to them the morbid state of his mind ; and, be it remarked, that in this ex
quisite picture of life-weariness, in which no image could be altered, no word omitted or changed, without obvious damage to its grand effect, he does not describe the maniacal state, the semblance of which he has put on before Ophelia and Polonius, but that morbid state of weakness and melancholy which he
really suffers, of which he is thoroughly self-conscious, and which he avows in his first speech, before he has seen the Ghost :
“I have of late (but wherefore, I know not), lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises: and, indeed, it goes
so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a steril promontory ; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason
how infinite in faculties
in form, and moving, how
express and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! in ap prehension, how like a god the beauty of the world ! the
