tion for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered." But it is the speech of a man uttering maniacal exaggerations of feeling. Such exaggerations of anger or ferocity are occasionally recognised in the ravings of the mad, but of no other persons, however enraged or depraved. The speech, it is also to be observed, has no listeners; there is nobody by to feign to. The terrible words are the dictation of a mind so metamorphosed by disorder, that all healthy and natural feelings, all goodness and mercy, have been forcibly driven out of it. This passing glimpse of the king seems to send him to his mother's chamber in a fiercer mood than he was in when he received his mother's message. His mind continues possessed with images of his hated uncle; nothing that ensues can detach his attention from them; not his mother's distress, not the incidental slaying of Polonius, not even the reappearance of his father's ghost. The memory of his mother's marriage predominates over all immediate impressions, and imparts to all his words a diseased and disproportionate rancour. He goes to the apartment in which his mother stays

for him. Polonius has just had time to tell the queen

that Hamlet is coming, and to give her his prompt counsel how to deal with him :

POL.

Look, you lay home to him;

Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,
And that your grace hath screened and stood between
Much heat and him. I'll silence me e'en here.
Pray you, be round with him.

He conveys himself behind the arras, as he promised

to the king to do, that there audience than a partial mother.

generally had unhappy results.

the troubled queen has sent for

should be some more
His suggestions have
Even by his counsel
Hamlet, vainly led to

imagine she would have some influence over her son, and might rate him out of his strange mood. Bitter disappointment awaits her, and worse disaster falls upon her adviser. Instead of finding a son docile and submissive under maternal reproof, she finds herself scornfully accosted, assailed in the bitterest terms, and with the foulest reproaches; all unknown before. Her sending for him has rekindled in his deranged mind every feeling of exasperation against her; and rendered

him, for the first time, unable to control himself so far as to treat his mother with outward respect. His manner, after uttering a few short sentences, becomes so excited, that the queen, all alarmed, shrieks for help; and the fated Polonius, forgetting all prudent precaution, also calls aloud from his hiding place, and is immediately stabbed through the arras by Hamlet ; who, for one exulting moment, fondly believes that he has slain the king. The wild impulses of the night are still acting on Hamlet's distempered brain, and exclude the natural sorrow and remorse with which he would, if sane, have been affected on finding that he had slain an innocent old man, once the friend and favourite of his father. Every feeling seems incontestably perverted by sheer madness. Nor does he at all recover himself all through his subsequent interview with the queen. His self-command is so utterly gone that he puts into words the bitterest and coarsest thoughts that have passed through his mind in his previous reflections on her marriage, thoughts natural in a mind angrily revolving what has strongly moved it, but of which a healthy mind would suppress or mitigate the

expression. Doubtless the recent glimpse he has had of the king at his prayers, and his own struggle with the murderous impulses then upspringing, have conspired to drive him thus from all composure and decorum. Even before he entered the queen's apartment his voice was heard crying out "Mother, mother, mother," and when he appears he abruptly accosts her, asking wildly, "Now mother; what's the matter?" And when he discovers that his rude words have alarmed some unseen auditor, whom he has passionately stabbed, and that his unfortunate victim has been Polonius, his apostrophe to the dead is frivolous and heartless. No sense of what he has done affects him; he turns fiercely on his mother, regardless of her natural horror at this wanton deed of blood :—

Leave wringing of your hands; peace, sit you down,
And let me wring your heart.

All through the interview, it is not a sorrowing, princely, respectful son earnestly and passionately remonstrating with his mother; but an impetuous madman forgetful of the proper object of his purposed

revenge; forgetful of the admonition of that unearthly being, who, whilst exhorting him to revenge his murder, solemnly enjoined him not to contrive against his mother aught; and now so deprived of all self-control and healthful feeling as at the first to impress upon his mother's mind the idea that he has come to kill her; and then almost exclusively to abuse and insult her on the subject of her second marriage—his first maddening grief. He does indeed say, just after he has stabbed the unfortunate Polonius through the arras, and when his mother exclaims against that rash and bloody deed:

HAM. A bloody deed;-almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king and marry with his brother.

an expression which the queen evidently does not comprehend; for she repeats the words "as kill a king!" in amazement; and, soon afterward, more and more surprised by Hamlet's insolence, she asks

QUEEN.. What have I done, that thou dar'st wag thy tongue In noise so rude against me?

To which her son's reply is but further reproach and