hang the young traveller on the receipt of his letter. But the Queen is desirous of questioning and sounding Hamlet before his departure; and for fear he should do some mischief in his madness, the old chamberlain, Polonius, hides himself behind a tapestry hanging, in order to come to the Queen's assistance if there should be occasion. | assures the King that he will take care of this disordered person. 'Tis my duty,' says he; for what is duty? 'Tis duty. just as day is day, and night night, and time time; therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, and loquacity the body, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad; for what is madness but being mad? In fine, Madame, he is mad. This is fact; it is a great pity; it is a great pity it should be "The Prince, who was mad, or pretrue; the only business now is to find the tended to be so, comes to confer with his cause of the effect. Now the cause is that mother Gertrude; in this way he sees in I have a daughter! To prove that it a corner King Claudius, who was seized was love which had deprived the Prince with a fit of remorse; he is afraid of beof his senses, he reads to the King and ing damned for having poisoned his Queen the letters that Hamlet had written brother, married his widow, and usurped to Ophelia. Whilst thus the King and the crown. He kneels down and makes Queen and all the court talk of the melan- a short prayer not worth repeating. choly condition of the Prince, he arrives Hamlet at first has an inclination to take in great disorder, and by his discourse that time in order to kill him; but reflectconfirms the opinion that had been con- ing that Claudius is in a state of grace, ceived of his madness; he, however, he takes care not to kill him in such cirsometimes makes answers that discover a cumstances. soul deeply wounded, and which are replete with good sense. "The Chamberlains, who have orders to amuse him, propose to him to hear a company of comedians, who were just arrived; Hamlet talks very rationally of plays. The players act a scene before him; he gives his opinion of it with great good sense. Afterwards, when he is alone, he declares that he is not so mad as he appears to be. He forms a resolution to avail himself of the above-mentioned players, and directs them to play a pantomime, in which one is to sleep and another to pour poison into his ear. It is very certain that if King Claudius is guilty, he will be greatly surprised when he sees the pantomime; he will then turn pale, his guilt will be seen upon his face; Hamlet will be sure of the crime, and will have a right to avenge. Thus said thus done. "The company comes and represents the scene in dumb show before the King the Queen, and the whole court, and the dumb show is, succeeded by a scene in verse. "This likewise is a passage which Pope's commas direct us to admire. Hamlet then, having deferred the murder of Claudius in order to damn him, comes to confer with his mother; and notwithstanding his madness, overwhelms her with such bitter reproaches of her crime as to pierce her to the very heart. The old chamberlain Polonius, is apprehensive of his carrying matters too far; he cries out for help behind the hanging. Hamlet takes it for granted that it was the King who had hidden himself there, to listen to their conversation. 'Ah, mother!' cries he, there is a great rat behind the hangings.' He thereupon draws his sword, runs to the rat, and kills the good man Polonius. "The good Lord Chamberlain was an old fool, and is represented as such, as has already been seen. His daughter, Ophelia, who no doubt resembled him in this respect, becomes raving mad when she is informed of her father's death; she runs upon the stage with flowers and straw upon her head, sings ballads, and then goes and drowns herself. Thus there are three mad people in the play - Ophelia, the Chamberlain, and Hamlet, without reckoning the other buffoons who play their parts. "The King and Queen look upon these two scenes as highly impertinent. They suspect Hamlet of having played them a trick, and of not being quite so great a "The corpse of Ophelia is taken out of madman as he appeared; this idea gave the river, and her funeral is prepared. In them great perplexity: they trembled the meantime King Claudius had made with fear of having been detected. What course could they take? King Claudius resolves to send Hamlet to England, upon pretext of curing his madness, and writes to his good friend the King of England, to desire it as a favour of him that he would the Prince embark for England. Hamlet, whilst upon his passage, had conceived a suspicion that he had been sent to London with some treacherous design: he finds in the pocket of one of the chamber'lains, his conductor, the letter of King Claudius to his friend the King of England to despatch him the moment of his arrival. What does he do? He happened, luckily, to have the great seal of his father in his purse; he throws the letter into the sea, and writes another, which he signs with the name of Claudius, and requests the King of England to hang the bearer upon their arrival; then he folds up the whole packet, and seals it with the seal of the kingdom. This done, he finds a pretext for returning to court. The first thing he sees is two grave-diggers digging Ophelia's grave. These two labourers are also buffoons in the tragedy; they discuss the question whether Ophelia should be buried in consecrated ground after having drowned herself, and they conclude that she should be buried in Christian burial, because she was a young lady of quality. Then they maintain that labourers are the most ancient gentlemen upon earth, because they are of the same trade with Adam. But was Adam a gentleman ?' says one of the grave-diggers. Yes,' answers the other, for he was the first that ever bore arms.' 'What, did he bear arms?' says the grave-digger. 'Without doubt,' says the other. Can a man till the ground without spades and pickaxes? He therefore bore arms; he was a gentleman.' 6 is thought highly proper that he should be despatched in Denmark. "The artful Claudius has recourse to the following strategem. He was used to poisoning. Hark ye,' says he to young Laertes,Prince Hamlet has killed your father, my great chamberlain. That you may have it in your power to revenge yourself, I shall propose to you a little piece of chivalry; I will lay a wager with you that in twelve passes you will not hit Hamlet three times. You shall fence with him before the whole court. You shall have a sharp foil, the point of which I have dipped in poison exceedingly subtle. If you, unluckily, should not be able to hit the Prince, I will take care to have a bottle of poisoned wine ready for him upon the table. People that fence must drink. Hamlet will drink, and one way or other must lose his life.' Laertes thinks the expedient for amusement and revenge admirably devised. Hamlet accepts the challenge; bottles are placed upon the table: the two champions appear with foils in their hands, in the presence of the whole Danish Court. They fence; Laertes wounds Hamlet with his poisoned foil. Hamlet, finding himself wounded, cries out Treachery!' and in a rage tears the poisioned foil from Laertes, stabs him and stabs the King; Queen Gertrude, in a fright, drinks in order to recover herself; thus she is poisioned likewise, and all four 6 tes, and Hamlet - die upon the stage. "In the midst of these fine harangues and the songs sung by these gentlemen in the parish church of the palace, arrives- that is, King Claudius, Gertrude, LaerPrince Hamlet with one of his friends, and they contemplate the skulls found by the "It is remarkable that an express just grave-diggers. At last the skull of the then arrives, that the two chamberlains King's jester is found, and it is concluded who had sailed for England with the that there is not any difference between packet sealed with the great seal, had been the brain of Cæsar or Alexander and that despatched upon their landing. Thus of this jester. In fine, the grave is made there does not remain one person of the whilst they thus dispute and sing. Holy drama alive; but to supply the place of the water is brought by the priests; the body deceased there is one Fortenbrass, a relaof Ophelia is brought on the stage. The tion of the family, who had conquered PoKing and Queen follow the bier; Laertes, land during the representation of the piece, in mourning accompanies the corpse, and and who comes at the conclusion of it to when it is laid in the ground, frantic with offer himself as a candidate for the throne grief, he leaps into the grave. Hamlet, of Denmark. This," concludes our comwho remembers he had once loved Ophe-mentator, "is the whole plan of the celelia, leaps in likewise. Laertes, enraged at brated tradegy of Hamlet-the masterseeing in the same grave with him the piece of the London Theatre! Such is the person who had killed the chamberlain work that is preferred to Cinna!” Polonius (taking him for a rat), flies in his face; they wrestle in the grave, and the King causes them to be parted, in order to preserve decency in the funeral ceremonies. In the meantime, King Claudius perceives that it is absolutely necessary to despatch such a dangerous madman as Prince Hamlet, and since that young prince had not been hanged in London, it That the eighteenth century - a century renowned for its clever men, its accomplished women — could have been satisfied with so gross a travesty of so grand a drama, may well be thought astounding; but the solution may be found in the disposition of the age, whose type Voltaire may be considered. The mind of the man who has been called "the perfection of mediocrity," was alike common to the men and literature of the time. "Everywhere," says a clever author, "you find wit, but little soul; much reason, little good sense; fine verses, no poetry; big words, and of conviction. none! ”米 The madness, whether actual or simulated, of the sad and lonely Hamlet, has puzzled far more thoughtful ages. The never-satisfied meditation on human destiny, and the dark perplexity of the events of the world which is there shadowed forth with so masterly a hand, could hardly find an echo in a period of levity and neverending sarcasm. How should such a period have any sympathy for the most amiable of misanthropes? The quiet sensibility which yields to every motive, and is borne away by every breath of fancy, * Hazlitt. which is distracted in the multiplicity of its reflections, and lost in the uncertainty of its resolutions, required a far more serious state of feeling to understand and grapple with it; and a being who was or imagined himself to be called upon by Heaven to accomplish a task of retribution, and who must therefore renounce every ordinary condition of affection and happiness - becoming a sort of sacred outlaw, was likely to find but little sympathy with men who only forgave to Rousseau the appearance and forms of conviction, because they were persuaded he had none of the reality. His age, therefore, and not Voltaire, should be blamed, and we should probably agree with Carlyle that "it was not till the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers." VELOCITY OF VISION.-The last number of Pflüger's Archiv für Physiologie (Band iv. Heft viii.) contains a paper by M. Baxt, of St. Petersburg, On the time requisite for a visual impression to arrive at the consciousness, and upon the duration of the period of consciousness, caused by a visual impression of definite duration." From the experiments of Helmholtz and Exner it has been shown that, if a number of ordinary letterpress letters be exhibited to the eye on a white ground, sometimes one, sometimes two or more of them are distinguished from the row according to the duration of the impression, and that of the positive after-image. M. Baxt proceeded on the same principle, and his apparatus was similar to those employed by Helmholtz, and consisted of two discs, which could be caused to revolve at known speed, but the posterior of which rotated twelve times quicker than the anterior. From the nnmerous experiments given (too complicated to be here inserted) it appears-1. That the consciousness of a given excitation is only realized or perfected by degrees; and, 2. That under the particular circumstances of his experiments, a period of 1-20th of a second must elapse between the occurrence of a relatively simple excitation of 6 or 7 letters suddenly placed before and withdrawn from the eyes and its reception or formation in the consciousness. In other experiments he found that the time required for the comprehension of a complex figure was much greater than that for a simple figure, the proportion between an ellipse and a pentagon for instance being as 1: 5. Researches on the time requisite for the production of consciousness with various strengths of illumination gave the result that this time was proportionate within rather wide limits to the degree of illumination; but if the illumination was excessively strong or weak, it increases. Ir all ecclesiastical persons and personages in England were compelled to keep truthful accounts of their stewardships, the results would be very wonderful. In the North things seems to be little better, for, with reference to such a plan, the Scotsman says: - For a clergyman, we should in many cases have something like this:- Monday. Breakfast in bed. Read newspaper most of forenoon. Called on Miss Jones. Conversed an hour with her on conversion of Jews. Had wine with her. Called on Mrs. Smith, to ask about her toothache. Told me how much she enjoyed part of yesterday's sermon, which made her cry. Had brandy and water with her. Went to Presbytery and spent five delightful hours in prosecution of Robinson for heresy of free salvation. Dined with old Grippy. Grouse overdone, but claret fair. Home. Studied hard an hour, with scissors, in Spurgeon, Newton, and Theodore Parker. Elder called to speak about glebe. Gave him toddy. Halleluja." In the case of the bonâ-fide acting elder of course, the entries would be shorter, such as the following, perhaps :- "Sabbath. Stood at plate twenty-five minutes in all, forenoon and afternoon. Three buttons, two shopkeepers' tokens, and a bad shilling in collection. Minister looked in at night. Anxious about glebe. Toddy. Amen." CHAPTER LV. ATTEMPTS AND COINCIDENCES. Ir was months before I could resume my work. Not until Charley's absence was as it were so far established and accepted that hope had begun to assert itself against memory; that is, not until the form of Charley ceased to wander with despairful visage behind me and began to rise amongst the silvery mists before me, was I able to invent once more, or even to guide the pen with certainty over the paper. The moment however that I took the pen in my hand another necessity seized ine. Although Mary had hardly been out of my thoughts, I had heard no word of her since her brother's death. I dared not write to her father or mother after the way the former had behaved to me, and I shrunk from approaching Mary with a word that might suggest a desire to intrude the thoughts of myself upon the sacredness of her grief. Why should she think of me? Sorrow has ever something of a divine majesty, before which one must draw nigh with bowed head and bated breath: in presumed madness; but all of her school believed that at the moment of dissolution the fate is eternally fixed either for bliss or woe, determined by the one or the other of two vaguely defined attitudes of the mental being towards certain propositions; concerning which attitudes they were at least right in asserting that no man could of himself assume the safe one. The thought became unendurable that Mary should believe that Charley was damned—and that for ever and ever. I must and would write to her, come of it what might. That my Charley, whose suicide came of misery that the painful flutterings of his half-born wings would not bear him aloft into the empyrean, should appear to my Athanasia lost in an abyss of irrecoverable woe; that she should think of God as sending forth his spirit to sustain endless wickedness for endless torture; it was too frightful. As I wrote, the fire burned and burned, and I ended only from despair of utterance. Not a word can I now recall of what I wrote: the strength of my feelings must have paralyzed the grasp of my memory. All can recollect is that I closed with the expression of a passionate hope that the God who had made me and my Charley to love each other, would somewhere, some day, somehow, when each was grown stronger and purer, give us once more to each other. In that hope alone, I said, was it possible for me to live. By return of post, I received the following — "SIR, "After having everlastingly ruined one of my children, body and soul, for your sophisms will hardly alter the decrees of divine justice, once more you lay your snares-now to drag my sole remaining child into the same abyss of perdition. Such wickedness wickedness even to the pitch of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, I have never in the course of a large experience of inpenitence found parallelled. It almost drives me to the belief that the enemy of souls is still occasionally permitted to take up his personal abode in the heart of him who wilfully turns aside from revealed truth. I forgive you for the ruin you have brought upon our fondest hopes, and the agony with which you have torn the hearts of those who more than life loved him of whom you falsely called yourself the friend. But I fear you have already gone too far ever to feel your need of that forgiveness which alone can avail you. Yet I say - Repent, for the mercy of the Lord is infinite. Though my boy is lost to me for ever, I should yet rejoice to see the instrument of his ruin plucked as a brand from the burning. "Your obedient well-wisher, 1 "That you should do me injustice can by this time be no matter of surprise to me. Had I the slightest hope of convincing you of the fact, I should strain every mental nerve to that end. But no one can labour without hope, and as in respect of your justice I have none, I will be silent. May the God in whom I trust convince you of the cruelty of which you have been guilty; the God in whom you profess to believe, must be too like yourself to give any ground of such hope from him. "Your obedient servant, "WILFRID CUMBERMEDE. "" If Mary had read my letter, I felt assured her reading had been very different from her father's. Anyhow she could not judge me as he did, for she knew me better. She knew that for Charley's sake I had tried the harder to believe myself. But the reproaches of one who had been so unjust to his own son, could not weigh very heavily on me, aud I now resumed my work with a tolerable degree of calmness. But I wrote badly. I should have done better to go down to the Moat, and be silent. If my reader has ever seen what I wrote at that time, I should like her to know that I now wish it all unwritten not for any utterance contained in it, but simply for its general inferiority. Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. Abraham, seated in his tent door in the heat of the day, would be to the philosophers of the nineteenth century an object for uplifted hands and pointed fingers. They would see in him only the indolent Arab, whom nothing but the foolish fancy that he saw his Maker in the distance, could rouse to run. It was clearly better to attempt no further communication with Mary at present; and I could think but of one person from whom, without giving pain, I might hope for some information concerning her. Here I had written a detailed account of how I contrived to meet Miss Pease, but it is not of consequence enough to my story to be allowed to remain. Suffice it to mention that one morning at length I caught sight of her in a street in Mayfair, where the family was then staying for the season, and overtaking addressed her. and held out her hand. She started, stared at me for a moment, How much older you look! I beg your "I didn't know you, Mr. Cumbermede. pardon. Have you been ill?” She spoke hurriedly, and kept looking over her shoulder now and then as if afraid of being seen talking to me. "I have had a good deal to make me older since we met last, Miss Pease," I said. "I have hardly a friend left in the world but you- that is, if you will allow me to call you one." but hurriedly, and with one of those uneasy Certainly, certainly," she answered, glances. "Only you must allow, Mr. Cumbermede, that that that The poor lady was evidently unprepared to meet me on the old footing, and, at the same time, equally unwilling to hurt my feelings. "I should be sorry to make you run a risk for my sake,” I said. "Please just answer me one question. Do you know what it is to be misunderstood — to be despised without deserving it?" She smiled sadly, and nodded her head gently two or three times. "Then have pity on me, and let me have a little talk with you." Again she glanced apprehensively over her shoulder. You are afraid of being seen with me, and I don't wonder," I said. "Mr. Geoffrey came up with us,” she answered. "I left him at breakfast. He will be going across the park to his club directly.' Then come with me the other way into Hyde Park," I said. With evident reluctance, she yielded and accompanied me. As soon as we got within Stanhope Gate, I spoke. "A certain sad event. of which you have no doubt heard, Miss Pease, has shut me out from all communication with the family of my friend Charley Osborne. I am very anxious for some news of his sister. She is all that is left of him to me now. Can you tell me anything about her?" |