le, nor
had the Queen either married the murderer, or discovered her criminal
connexion with him. Hamlet, therefore, has not, in the incestuous
marriage of his mother, that strong confirmation of the ghost's
communication, which, in Shakespeare, led him to suspect foul play even
before he sees his father's spirit. In the French play, therefore,
Hamlet is placed in one of the most dreadful situations in which the
genius of poetry can imagine a human being: Haunted by a spirit, which
assumes such mastery over his mind, that he cannot dispel the fearful
impression it has made, or disregard the communication it so often
repeats, while his attachment to his mother, in whom he reveres the
parent he has lost, makes him question the truth of crimes which are
thus laid to her charge, and causes him to look upon this terrific
spectre as the punishment of unknown crime, and the visitation of an
offended Deity. Ducis has most judiciously and most poetically
represented Hamlet, in the despair which his sufferings produce, as
driven to the belief of an over-ruling destiny, disposing of the fate of
its unhappy victims by the most arbitrary and revolting arrangement, and
visiting upon some, with vindictive fury, the whole crimes of the age in
which they live. There is in this introduction of ancient superstition,
something which throws a mysterious veil round the destiny of Hamlet,
that irresistibly engrosses the imagination, and which must be doubly
interesting in that country where the horrors of the revolution have
ended in producing a very prevalent, though vague belief, in the
influence of fatality upon human character and human actions, among
those who pretend to ridicule, as unmanly prejudice and childish
delusion, the religion of modern Europe.

The struggle, accordingly, that appears to take place in Hamlet's mind
is most striking; and when at last he yields to the authority and the
commands of the spirit, which exercises such tyranny over his mind, it
does not seem the result of any farther evidence of the guilt which he
is enjoined to revenge, but as the triumph of superstition over the
strength of his reason. He had long resisted the influence of that
visionary being, which announced itself as his father's injured spirit,
and in assuming that sacred form, had urged him to destroy the only
parent whom fate had left; but the struggle had brought him to the brink
of the grave, and shaken the empire of reason; and when at last