It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose above it.
"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,
For , and a shrouding sheet:
Oh, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet."
Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludi-*
- [Footnote: and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated
by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the Arabic Makbar, pl. Makabir, place of interment.]
