urder
itself--she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is
instanced in the close:--

"My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good
counsel."

_Ib._ Gentleman's speech:--

"And as the world were now but to begin
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word--
They cry," &c.

Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error
of judgment in Shakespeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as
Warburton calls it, "rational and consequential," reflection in these
lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or
Messenger, as he is called in other editions.

_Ib._ King's speech:--

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will."

Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakespeare never intended us to see
the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long
done so.

_Ib._ Speech of Laertes:--

"To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!"

"Laertes is a _good_ character, but," &c.--WARBURTON.

Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh
scene of this act;--

"I will do't;
And for that purpose I'll anoint my sword," &c.--

uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;--

... "He being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils."

Yet I acknowledge that Shakespeare evidently wishes, as much as possible,
to spare the character of Laertes,--to break the extreme turpitude of his
consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;--and to
this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a
probable stimulus of passion in her brother.

_Ib._ sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play
of Shakespeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an
essential part of the plot;--but here how judiciously in keeping with the
character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by
accident or by a fit of passion!

_Ib._ sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising
the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally
points it by--

... "Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!"

_Ib._ King's speech:--

"For goodness, growing to a _pleurisy_,
Dies in his own too much."