opposing, we end them. Yet he had declared before on the religious side of the question, that the divine will was armed against our invasion of our own life; that the Everlasting had fixed his canon against self-slaughter, which, if it signifies anything, means that, instead of ending by opposing a sea of troubles, we incur eternal damnation. He quits established opinion, all pressure past, and assumes at once the certain side of the question. He thinks that in dying we renounce for ever all identity. Of this he is satisfied, and he has no hope of an hereafter, though afterwards afraid of its possibility. To die, is to sleep, to be no more: the solution of life is 'the all,' and the end all here.' To sleep and be no more, are the very words which we find used in Measure for Measure, and which excited the indignation of Johnson as the most positive denial language could produce of an hereafter. The 'No more,' which Shakspere is so fond of employing with regard to death, and which Knight says, is equivalent to the French rien de plus-nothing more, precludes everything future.

Hamlet exults in the idea that by a sleep, all the attributes of life are for ever extinct. He talks not even of the probability, but of the certainty of annihilation; and delighted with the prospect, prays, as it were, earnestly and internally, that this may be the consummation against which others so devoutly pray: a consummation, be it remarked, utterly inapplicable to the divinity, repugnant to the nature of men, and the designs of his creation—that is, if we are to compare these sentiments with received canons of faith.

Here the infirmity of Hamlet's disposition-the oscillation in thought as well as in action, the irresolution common to men's ideas on religious subjects, produce a change in his ideas. He had disposed of the question summarily, and had decided that if it was not, as it had appeared, the nobler part to die, at least such a certainty of oblivion was to be wished. Here is a natural approach to the religious side of the question. We have a possibility of the truth, not the certainty of a future state, though the ghost of his father had answered these questions by the fact of his reappearance. Religion presents itself to him, as the defeat of his hopes and expectations, it sets him afloat again amidst

a sea of troubles, and he paints the effects of religion not in its hopeful aspects, but in its terrifying forms. He repeats again, to die, to sleep,' as if resolved to end this distraction of thought and purpose. He puts it as a query, and receives no solution. He hugs, as it were, the idea as set at rest. What an advance he had made in the progress of scepticism from his speech before seeing the ghost! He appears quickly to have lost the impression of the ghostly visitation he had experienced. He repeats 'to sleep,' and the word, as it were, suggests to his memory the accompaniment of sleep-our dreams. There is a chance, there is a possibility; he says that we dream: Perchance to dream, what dreams may come must give us pause there's the rub, the respect that makes calamity of so long life.' What a way to speak of the future state, and the immortality of the soul! There is probably no infidel, no materialist, who would deny all possibility of a future state, but would allow there might be a chance of it. In this and in other respects, Shakspere employs the usual language of materialism. If tired of life, as Hamlet was, materialists speak of annihilation as agreeable to their wishes as well as their reason as the haven of everlasting rest from a sea of troubles.

The evil in this world being to Hamlet much greater than the good-who, of his opinion, would not surrender existence for exemption from sense, feeling, and personality? 'but that the dread of something after death, the undiscoverable bourn from whence no traveller returns, puzzles the will.' What gives to Christians hope, patience to bear life, and peace on the death bed, is an unravelled' puzzle to his perturbed mind. In bitterness of spirit he is made to speak of religion, not as alleviating all the ills he mentions, but as something making weak the will. He speaks of a life to come as the undiscovered country-as if that which everybody had been in search of, nobody had found-as if there had been no especial revelation of a life to come. Making us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of'- -as if religion was an unknown fear,' as Lafeu said. Shakspere repeats the old story of the wise of the earth-ignorance is the mother of superstition-or, in

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common with Lucretius, representing religion as the effect of fear. Elsewhere, Shakspere says you are religious because you fear. Hamlet says, no one who has passed the bourn, the boundary between life and death, ever returned : not the one who did return and discovered the country to his followers; nor the ghost whom he had just seen, who, delaying speaking of his own affairs, had spoken to the reality of the dread of something after death.

Though he had spoken of shaking off this mortal coil, yet the dread of a something makes him afraid men might live again in the flesh; and the sufferings of mind, the natural shocks, the ills we have, perchance might be worse in a life to come. 'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.' Now conscience and religion are often used as synonymes, and indifferently stand for the same thing in Shakspere: here it is employed in the sense of religion.

Richard III. uses conscience only as the dread of after death, which he tells his soldiers is the word of cowards. Mrs. Griffiths, writing on the morality of Shakspere, thinks the question of suicide should not be entertained, and passes over this speech. Dr. Johnson thinks it necessary to give a paraphrase of it, which turns it from a consideration of suicide, to a consideration of the possibility of his own death in bringing to punishment the murderer of his father.

In the dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia, the necessity for the discontinuance of the human species is given as the cause for breaking off all further intercourse of love between him and her. He reflects on his own family as exhibited in his mother and uncle, and thinks that such stock cannot be inoculated by virtue, or transformed by beauty into honesty; and though he says he is accounted honest, he draws a picture of himself, expressive of the utter depravity of man. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?

I say, we will have no more marriages; those that are married already, all but one, shall live, the rest shall keep as they are. These views are very material. The Christian sees original sin leavening the mass, but does not therefore profanely propose to put a stop to the creation. He considers men as the

heirs of immortality, and existence the right and benefit of posterity. Hamlet considers morality, in this place, and Shakspere everywhere, as a phrenological or physical succession. He had spoken of the world as a garden overgrown with weeds; and he here recommends all the stock to be removed as utterly worthless, and too deteriorated to be improved. The evil circumstances are in his view overpowering; and we, of the nineteenth century, might think we heard a disciple of George Combe, or Robert Owen, lecturing on the evils of society.

Hamlet, in his instructions to the players, says he has seen some persons—

Not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christian, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

The creation of man was not a subject to make a joke of, and Shakspere thought it might not be well received, and prefaces his remarks with an apology for their profanity—a line of defence which his commentators and admirers have followed. Not only this idea, but almost the words have been copied by Burns, when he says God made the lasses after he had tried his 'prentice hand on man. Burns was as fond of profanity as Shakspere; and no one can doubt the animus of the Scotch poet, in some of his pieces, satirising the truth of Christianity.

Hamlet prophetically remarks, that a great man's memory will be forgotten long before that of the pious man, who leaves behind him monuments of piety and devotion. Saints live much in the memory of the people during their lives; and after death, their doings undergo a process of accumulation, whilst all the industry of historians can now scarcely add an authentic particular to the life of Shakspere. Whatever anecdote they do produce, shows him more in the character of a sinner than a saint; and whilst his admirers reject these illustrations of the man, they have not been able to produce a single instance of his piety. The probability is, that the reverence which he showed to no person or subject, was the reason that no reverence was extended to him. Irreverence

does not produce reverence; it affects alike, with an indifference, the giver and the taker. Had Shakspere lived at another time, when the tide set in towards irreverence, he would have been recollected as the champion of progress, and gone down to posterity with all the particulars of a Molière or Voltaire: but when he did die, so far as he was personally concerned, he might put as his own epitaph, For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot.' He was looked upon in no better light than that amusement of the people, which was suppressed by puritanical influence. They who sought to live in the memory of that age, left pious monuments behind them : the works of Strype, the acts of Laud, the 'Paradise Lost' of Milton, would give more chance of immortality to their persons. Hume says, of Essex, that the way to gain popular influence, and the reverence and devotion of the pious at the end of Elizabeth's reign, was not the giving of amusements to the people, but having prayers and preachers in his house open to the public.

The player king says:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run,
That our devices still are overthrown;

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

It is made questionable whether our wills and our thoughts are ours; whether they are providentially or necessarily influenced but no Christian can think our ends are directed by the fates or necessity. This ought to be, in fact, the motto of the play: it is the theme on which it discourses-it is the action of the piece. As Knight said, it is the empire of chance [or fate] which is made to dispose events, and bring about ends most contrary to the wills, thoughts, and devices proposed by the dramatis persona.

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Rosencrantz says to Hamlet, My lord, you once did love me.' Hamlet. And do so still, by these pickers and stealers: a light appropriation of the church catechism and command, to keep our hands from picking and stealing. When Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are commissioned by the king to murder Hamlet, Guildenstern says:We will provide ourselves; Most holy and religious fear it is To keep those many, many bodies safe, That live and feed upon your Majesty.