Ib. Lear's speech:

"O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous," &c.

Observe that the tranquillity which follows the first stunning of the blow permits Lear to reason. Act iii. sc. 4. O, what a world's convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed, the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent-surely such a scene was never conceived before or since! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michael Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michael Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious, the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth, scene.

Ib. sc. 7. Gloster's blinding.

What can I say of this scene?—There is my reluctance to think Shakespeare wrong, and yetAct iv. sc. 6. Lear's speech :

"Ha! Goneril!-with a white beard!-They flattered me like a dog; and told me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay and No to every thing I said!-Ay and No too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once," &c.

The thunder recurs, but still at a greater distance from our feelings

Ib. sc. 7. Lear's speech:

"Where have I been? Where am I?-Fair daylight?-
I am mightily abused.—I should even die with pity
To see another thus," &c.

How beautifully the affecting return of Lear to reason, and the mild pathos of these speeches prepare the mind for the last sad, yet sweet, consolation of the aged sufferer's death!

""
"HAMLET."

HAMLET was the play, or rather Hamlet him

self was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakespeare, noticed. This happened first amongst my acquaintances, as Sir George Beaumont will bear witness; and subsequently, long before Schlegel had delivered at Vienna the lectures on Shakespeare, which he afterwards published, I had given on the same subject eighteen lectures substantially the same, proceeding from the very same point of view, and deducing the same conclusions, so far as I either then agreed, or now agree, with him. I gave these lectures at the Royal Institution, before six or seven hundred auditors of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in which Sir Humphrey Davy, a fellowlecturer, made his great revolutionary discoveries in chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with my lectures was so extraordinary, that all who at a later period heard the same words, taken by me from my notes of the lectures at the Royal Institution, concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel. Mr. Hazlitt, whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb-(who, God bless him! besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at least as they are at all down

in the world, is linked as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation) only as "frantic ;"—Mr. Hazlitt, I say, himself replied to an assertion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in these words;-"That is a lie; for I myself heard the very same character of Hamlet from Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither read nor could read a page of German!" Now Hazlitt was on a visit to me at my cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of the year 1798, in the September of which year I first was out of sight of the shores of Great Britain.-Recorded by me, S. T. Coleridge, 7th January, 1819.

The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as