Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten to declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_ the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, "to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only "from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a form of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the rampant rout of rival commentators--but also, now as ever throughout this study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me. In _Hamlet_, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge between the middle and the final period of Shakespeare. That priceless waif of piratical salvage which we owe to the happy rapacity of a hungry publisher is of course more accurately definable as the first play of _Hamlet_ than as the first edition of the play. And this first _Hamlet_, on the whole, belongs altogether to the middle period. The deeper complexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchant outlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtler suggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of a satirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an inevitable streak of caricature in them, of the first Hamlet; they would have been at once puerile and ghastly travesties of the second. The Queen, whose finished figure is now something of a riddle, stands out simply enough in the first sketch as confidant of Horatio if not as accomplice of Hamlet. There is not more difference between the sweet quiet flow of those plain verses which open the original play within the play and the stiff sonorous tramp of their substitutes, full-charged with heavy classic artillery of Phoebus and Neptune and Tellus and Hymen, than there is between the straightforward agents of their own destiny whom we meet in the first _Hamlet_ and the obliquely moving patients who veer sideways to their doom in the second.