in the holiday weeks.
Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead
of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with a nauseous
sermon of George Barnwell? Why _at the end of their vistas_ are we to
place the _gallows_? Were I an uncle, I should not much like a
nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is
really making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon
such slight motives;--it is attributing too much to such characters
as Millwood:--it is putting things into the heads of good young men,
which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think
anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain
against it.]

We talk of Shakspeare's admirable observations of life, when we
should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and
every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but
from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the
very "sphere of humanity," he fetched those images of virtue and of
knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we
comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the
powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than
indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the
application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and
clear echo of the same.

To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
wonderful character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is
that soreness of mind which makes him treat the intrusions of
Polonius with harshness, and that asperity which he puts on in his
interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an unhinged mind (if they be
not mixed in the latter case with a profound artifice of love, to
alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind
for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer
find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do)
are parts of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of
Hamlet, the most patient consideration of his situation is no more
than necessary; they are what we _forgive afterwards_, and explain by
the whole of his character, but _at the time_ they are harsh and
unpleasant. Yet such is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows
to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character,
who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambi