_Angel and ministers of grace defend us!_ As the spectre approaches, he deliberates with himself, and determines, that whatever it be he will venture to address it. _Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee_, &c. This he says while his father is advancing; he then, as he had determined, _speaks to him_, and _calls him--Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane: oh! answer me_. (1773) I.iv.43 (180,4) questionable shape] [By _questionable_ is meant provoking question. HANMER.] So in _Macbeth_, _Live you, or are you aught That man may_ question? I.iv.46 (180,5) tell,/Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death,/ Have burst their cearments?] [W: in earth] It were too long to examine this note period by period, though almost every period seems to me to contain something reprehensible. The critic, in his zeal for change, writes with so little consideration, as to say, that Hamlet cannot call his father _canonized_, because _we are told he was murdered with all his sins fresh upon him_. He was not then told it, and had so little the power of knowing it, that he was to be told it by an apparition. The long succession of reasons upon reasons prove nothing, but what every reader discovers, that the king had been buried, which is implied by so many adjuncts of burial, that the direct mention of _earth_ is not necessary. Hamlet, amazed at an apparition, which, though in all ages credited, has in all ages been considered as the most wonderful and most dreadful operation of supernatural agency, enquires of the spectre, in the most emphatic terms, why he breaks the order of nature, by returning from the dead; this he asks in a very confused circumlocution, confounding in his fright the soul and body. Why, says he, have _thy bones_, which with due ceremonies have been intombed _in death_, in the common state of departed mortals, _burst_ the folds in which they were embalmed? Why has the tomb, in which we saw thee quietly laid, opened his mouth, that mouth which, by its weight and stability, seemed closed for ever? The whole sentence is this: _Why dost thou appear, whom we know to be dead?_ Had the change of the word removed any obscurity, or added any beauty, it might have been worth a struggle; but either reading leaves the sense the same. If there be any asperity in this controversial note, it must be imputed to the contagion of peevishneas, or some resentment of the incivility shewn to the Oxford editor, who is represented as supposing the ground _canonized_ by a funeral, when he only meant to say, that the _body_ has deposited in _holy ground_, in ground consecrated according to the _canon_. I.iv.65 (183,9) I do not set my life at a pin's fee] The value of a pin. (1773)