cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do it. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great
Never to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?--O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."

Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only
affords him another occasion for indulging it. It is not from any want of
attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is
thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in
reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of
vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is
to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity
instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.

The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we
think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than
according to rules; amiable, though not faultless. The ethical
delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakspeare has been
well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His
plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The
Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want of
refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet.
The neglect of punctilious exactness in his behaviour either partakes of
the "licence of the time," or else belongs to the very excess of
intellectual refinement in the character, which makes the common rules of
life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him. He may be said to
be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much
taken u