w great a part conscience bears in the omission because of
which he condemns and even contemns himself. The conscience does not
naturally examine itself--is not necessarily self-conscious. In any
soliloquy, a man must speak from his present mood: we who are not
suffering, and who have many of his moods before us, ought to understand
Hamlet better than he understands himself. To himself, sitting in
judgment on himself, it would hardly appear a decent cause of, not to
say reason for, a moment's delay in punishing his uncle, that he was so
weighed down with misery because of his mother and Ophelia, that it
seemed of no use to kill one villain out of the villainous world; it
would seem but 'bestial oblivion'; and, although his reputation as a
prince was deeply concerned, _any_ reflection on the consequences to
himself would at times appear but a 'craven scruple'; while at times
even the whispers of conscience might seem a 'thinking too precisely on
the event.' A conscientious man of changeful mood wilt be very ready in
either mood to condemn the other. The best and rightest men will
sometimes accuse themselves in a manner that seems to those who know
them best, unfounded, unreasonable, almost absurd. We must not, I say,
take the hero's judgment of himself as the author's judgment of him. The
two judgments, that of a man upon himself from within, and that of his
beholder upon him from without, are not congeneric. They are different
in origin and in kind, and cannot be adopted either of them into the
source of the other without most serious and dangerous mistake. So
adopted, each becomes another thing altogether. It is to me probable
that, although it involves other unfitnesses, the Poet omitted the
passage chiefly from coming to see the danger of its giving occasion, or
at least support, to an altogether mistaken and unjust idea of his
Hamlet.]

[Page 194]

There's trickes i'th'world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurnes enuiously at Strawes,[1] speakes things in doubt,[2]
That carry but halfe sense: Her speech is nothing,[3]
Yet the vnshaped vse of it[4] doth moue
The hearers to Collection[5]; they ayme[6] at it,
[Sidenote: they yawne at]
And botch the words[7] vp fit to their owne thoughts

[_Continuation of quote from Quarto from previous text page_:--

And spur my dull reuenge. [8]What is a man
If his chiefe good and market of his time
Be but to sleepe and feede, a