thetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!

If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]

Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?

(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched t