I am surprised at any body's ever questioning the real madness of Hamlet: I know but one passage in the play which tells against it, and there are a thousand that go to prove it. But leaving all isolated parts out of the question, the entire colour of the character is the proper ground from which to draw the right deduction. Gloomy, desponding, ambitious, and disappointed in his ambition, full of sorrow for a dead father, of shame for a living mother, of indignation for his ill-filled inheritance, of impatience at his own dependent position; of a thoughtful, doubtful, questioning spirit, looking with timid boldness from the riddles of earth and life, to those of death and the mysterious land beyond it; weary of existence upon its very threshold, and withheld alone from self-destruction by religious awe, and that pervading uncertainty of mind which stands on the brink, brooding over the unseen may-be of another world; in love, moreover, and sad and dreamy in his affection, as in every other sentiment; for there is not enough of absolute passion in his love to make it a powerful and engrossing interest; had it been such, the entireness and truth of Hamlet's character would have been destroyed. 'Tis love indeed, but a pulseless powerless love; gentle, refined, and tender, but without ardour or energy; such are the various elements of Hamlet's character, at the very beginning of the play: then see what follows. A frightful and unnatural visitation from the dead; a horrible and sudden revelation of the murder of the father for whom his soul is in mourning; thence burning hatred and thirst of vengeance against his uncle; double loathing of his mother's frailty; above all, that heaviest burden that a human creature can have put upon him, an imperative duty calling for fulfilment, and a want of resolution and activity to meet the demand; thence an unceasing struggle between the sluggish nature and the upbraiding soul; an eternal self-spurring and self-accusing: from which mental conflict, alone sufficient to unseat a stronger mind, he finds relief in fits of desponding musing, the exhaustion of overwrought powers. Then comes the vigilant and circumspect guard he is forced to keep upon every word, look, and action, lest they reveal his terrible secret; the suspicion and mistrust of all that surround him, authorised by his knowledge of his uncle's nature: his constant watchfulness over the spies that are set to watch him; then come, in the course of events, Polonius's death, the unintentional work of his own sword, the second apparition of his father's ghost, his banishment to England, still haunted by his treacherous friends, the miserable death of poor Ophelia, together with the unexpected manner of his first hearing of it--if all these--the man's own nature, sad and desponding--his educated nature (at a German university), reasoning and metaphysical--and the nature he acquires from