She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggonspokes made of longspinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
Her traces of the smallest spiders' web,
Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film;
Her waggoner a small greycoated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.

And in this state she gallops night by night

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers knees, that dream on court'sies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail,
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice;

Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,

And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,

Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again.

sun.

To a hot-tempered soldier Mercutio says: "Thou! why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. Thou hast quarrelled with a man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog lying asleep in the Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter, and with another for tying his new shoes with old riband? And yet thou wilt tutor me from quarrelling." So incorrigible a humourist is he that he jokes even in the article of death. When he is fatally stabbed by Tybalt, his friend Romeo, under whose arm the sword has passed, says, "Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much" and his answer is all the sadder because of its air of merriment: "No, it is not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door. But 'tis enough, it will serve. Ask for me to-morrow, and you will find me a grave man."

Of all the Tragedies of Shakspeare the favourite

is Hamlet. Indeed, this is universally acknowledged to be the supreme product of dramatic genius in modern times, the only possible rival to it being the Faust of Goethe.

Yet it cannot be contended that Hamlet is, from every point of view, the best of our author's works. It has not the movement and the pace of Macbeth; it is not, like Julius Cæsar or The Tempest, a work without a flaw, without a word too much or a word too little "one entire and perfect chrysolite ”—it lacks the delicate and haunting charm of The Merchant of Venice. The play within the play, performed before the King and Queen, at Hamlet's instigation, in order to probe the conscience of these evildoers, is on a theme which no company of actors would have dared to represent before the court in the circumstances, and is, therefore, altogether unnatural and out of place. There are other improbabilities and incongruities, which mar the artistic effect; and the interest falls off towards the end, the last two acts being nothing like so fine as the first three.

Still, in spite of these defects, this drama holds the foremost place. If it does not do so by its perfection as a whole, it effects it by the vast numbers of good' things it contains. It has nearly all the minor sources of interest already noted in the other tragedies. For instance, it begins well, the apparition of the ghost of the murdered king putting curiosity and attention

on the stretch.

The minor characters are decidedly interesting. There is Horatio, the friend of Hamlet, who draws forth from the hero this matchless description of friendship:

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one in suffering all that suffers nothing;

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards

Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blessed are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.

There is Ophelia, whose treatment at the hands of the hero is one of the puzzles of this play on which the commentators have expended a world of speculation without doing much to clear up the mystery, but who, in her fondness, her sufferings and her fate, is one of the most unique and pathetic of Shakspeare's female characters. And there is her father Polonius, perhaps the most effectively painted of all the minor figures in Shakspeare's vast gallery of portraits-the type of the courtier and councillor, with unbounded confidence in the virtue of his own advice, with maxims

and proverbs ready for every occasion, and with a formality and tediousness sufficient to drive any poor child of nature mad that comes within range of his longwinded eloquence. There is a strong dash of comedy in the portraiture of this worthy; and the comic element is supplied in this play in considerable quantity. It is, however, of grim and sardonic quality, the principal scene of this kind being in the churchyard, when the gravediggers, engaged in making the last resting place for Ophelia, exchange grim pleasantries, as they perform their ghastly function.

But in Hamlet, more than in any of the other Tragedies, the interest is concentrated on the heroon his character, his relations with the other figures of the play, and the catastrophe in which he is ultimately involved. His speeches, of which he is very liberal, are the finest things of the kind in existence; and the opportunities of declamation which they afford to actors doubtless account, to some extent, for the popularity of this play. His advice to the players, for example, seems expressly written for the purpose of giving an elocutionist a chance; but, as Shakspeare's own calling was that of an actor, it has also an unrivalled autobiographical interest :-" Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But, if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand