times put into the
mouth of Hamlet, and in our new quarters, near Temple Bar, I assisted him
in composing the dramatic story of the melancholy Dane.

That is, I blew the bellows, and when his thought was heated to a red rose
hue he hammered out the play on the anvil of his genius, and made the
sparks fly in a shower of pristine glory.

His literary blacksmith shop was richly furnished with all the rough iron
bars and crude ingots of vanished centuries; and all the best dramatic
writers of London filled his thought factory with contributions of their
inventions. He worked many of their rough pieces of thought into his
dramatic plots; but when the phrase, scene and act were finished and placed
before the footlights for rendition, it sailed away, a full rigged ship of
dramatic grandeur, showing nothing but the royal workmanship of a master
builder, the Homer, Phidias and Angelo of artistic perfection.

Mankind cares but little for the various kinds of wheat that compose the
loaf, the wool or cotton that's in the garment, the timber or stone in the
house, or the kind of steel in the battleship or guns; all they look for is
the perfect structure, as they may see to-day in Shakspere's greatest
play--"Hamlet."

While Hamlet is the central figure of the play, old Polonius, the
diplomatic double dealer, Laertes, his son, and Ophelia, his daughter, act
prominently, while Horatio and the ghost of Hamlet's father express words
of lasting remembrance.

Cruel Claudius, the king who murdered Hamlet's father, stole his throne and
seduced his wife, is shown up as a first-class criminal villain, while
Gertrude, the mother of the young prince, is one of the most sneaking,
mild, incestuous queens in history. Such she devils, with heaven in their
eyes and face, honeyed words on their lips, and gall and hell in their
hearts, are the real seducers of infatuated, willing, ambitious man; and
each should dangle at the end of the same rope or hemlock together!

Contrast Gertrude with Ophelia, and you have a fiend of chicanery and
crime, with a sweet angel of innocence: "Too good, too fair to be cast
among the briers of this working day world and fall and bleed upon the
thorns of life. Like a strain of sad, sweet music which comes floating by
us on the wings of night and silence, like the exhalation of the violet
dying even upon the sense it charms, like the snowflake dissolved in air
before it has caught a stain of earth; like the light surf