When Hamlet speaks his part of the tragedy, of course Polonius compliments him for the good accent and good discretion with which he has spoken it. When the player delivers the remainder of the speech, the critic finds it too long. Rebuked by the prince for his censure, he takes the earliest opportunity of declaring that an affected phrase, which startles Hamlet somewhat, to declare that it is good. In the end, when the player displays an emotion roused by his art, Polonius, according to the rules of goût, desires that an end should be put to the performance. When the play is actually performed before the king, etiquette keeps him silent until he sees that there is something in it displeasing" in a high quarter," and then the shrewd courtier stops it at once. It is his voice which directs that they should "give o'er the play." He is throughout the ceremonious but sagacious attaché of a palace; and the king and queen accordingly treat him with the utmost deference, and consult him in their most critical emergencies. He dies in their service, fitly practising a stratagem in perfect accordance with the morale of the circle in which he has always moved, and in which he has engaged to show his wisdom, devotion, and address. Hamlet well characterizes the class of men to which the slain courtier belonged in his farewell to the body.

"Thou busy, rash, intruding fool, farewell;

I took thee for thy better,—take thy fortune.
Thou findest to be too busy is some danger."

But Polonius is no fool, though he is so called here. Hamlet is annoyed by his meddling and officiousness, and therefore applies the epithet. He marks his sense of his general respect for the old man, even when he is most pestered by his interference. In a peevish exclamation he styles him a " tedious old fool;" but when he sees that the players are inclined to follow his own example, he checks them by an authoritative command,

"Follow that lord, and look you mock him not."

If he calls him to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern "a great baby, not yet out of his swaddling clouts," and jeers him in their presence, it is partly to show that he is but mad north-north-west, and can know a hawk from a hand-saw when the wind is southerly, and partly to mark that he has discovered the conspiracy against him, and to display his contempt for all engaged in it.

Abstracted from his courtier-character, Polonius is a man of profound sense, and of strict and affectionate attention to his duties. A man whom his children love can never be contemptible. No one, it is said, can be a hero to his valet de chambre, because he sees all the

Hawkins, in his absurd life of Dr. Johnson, imagines that it is a word invented by Urquhart, with no more meaning than the ordinary slang words of the day.

In the conclusion of the scene between Hamlet and Polonius, the former exclaims, "These tedious old fools!" Would it not be better, "Thou tedious old fool!"-for it is plain that Hamlet is thinking only of the troublesome old man who has been pestering him.

Behind the arras I'll convey myself,

To hear the process; I'll warrant she 'll tax him home.
And, as you said, and wisely was it said,

'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother,

Since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear

The speech of vantage. Fare you well, my liege.
I'll call upon you ere you go to bed,
And tell you what I know."

petty physical wants and moral defects of his master. How much more difficult to be the object of esteem and devotion in the eyes of those who have turned their eyes upon us from childhood. Natural affection will, of course, do much; but the buffoon of the stage never could have inspired the feelings exhibited by his children, who must have been perpetually grieved and disgraced by antic buffoonery, of which they, from their connexion with the court, must have been constant witnesses. Laertes, a fine high-spirited young gentleman, and Ophelia, the rose of May, the grace and ornament of the circle in which she moved, could not have so deeply reverenced and so bitterly deplored their father, if he had been indeed a great baby still in his swaddling clouts. The double of Pantaloon, whom we see tumbling about in Drury Lane or Covent Garden, would not have roused the blood of Laertes to fury, still less led him to justify assassination in avenging his fall; nor would his death have driven Ophelia to madness. Such a father might be dead and gone,

"And at his head a grass-green turf,

And at his heels a stone,"

according to the inflexible laws of mortality; but his son would soon wipe the natural tears he might drop, and let him lie in his grave without any complaint of

"His obscure funeral;

No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones;
No noble rite, nor formal ostentation."

Nor would his daughter, in her broken-hearted insanity, have imagined that at his death violets, the sweetest flowers of the spring, had universally withered. Let me observe, that by this remark I mean no disrespect to our actors, many of the most eminent of whom have performed the part. They yield to long-established custom, and, as the part is not of the same importance in the play as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, it is not probable that any Macklin will arise to rescue him from buffoonery. Besides, as it is necessary that he should in one part of the play designedly act up to the follies of Hamlet, it would be difficult to make the distinction between the assumed and the natural character; and yet perhaps it ought to be attempted, for, as it is played at present, it is perhaps the least attractive of the prominent dramatis persona of Shakspeare.

Even in the very part to which I have just alluded, where he is fooling Hamlet to the top of his bent, he cannot avoid displaying glances of his habitual shrewdness. He suspects the reality of the madness from the beginning. The insulting taunts addressed to him at second hand from Juvenal only call forth the reflection that there is method in the madness. In the end he plainly considers it as nothing more than a prank. He bids the Queen

"Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,

And that your grace hath screened and stood between
Much heat and him."

Neither Laertes nor Ophelia are present while he is engaged in bandying folly against folly, and he therefore does not such before those by whom he most desires to be respected. When alone with

them, his true character appears;-and what can be more sensible? His counsels to his son have never been for worldly wisdom surpassed. The ten precepts of Lord Burleigh, addressed to his son Robert, on which it is generally supposed the apophthegms of Polonius are based, are perhaps equal in shrewdness, but they want the pithiness and condensation of verse. Neither are they as philosophical, being drawn, to talk logically, à posteriori, while those of Shakspeare are deduced à priori. Take, for example, Lord Burleigh's fifth maxim on borrowing and lending money :

"Beware of suretyship for thy best friends. He that payeth another man's debts seeketh his own decay. But if thou canst not otherwise choose, rather lend thy money thyself upon good bonds, although thou borrow it; so shalt thou secure thyself, and pleasure a friend. Neither borrow money of a neighbour or a friend, but of a stranger, where, paying for it, thou shalt hear no more of it, otherwise thou shalt eclipse thy credit, loose thy freedom, and pay as dear as to another. But in borrowing of money be precious of thy word, for he that takes care of keeping payment is lord of another man's purse."

Full of practical good sense, no doubt, as indeed is everything that "wise Burleigh spoke;" but it might occur to minds of smaller calibre than that of the Lord High Treasurer. Polonius takes higher ground.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend;
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

Lord Burleigh gives us but the petty details,-in Shakspeare we find the principle.

Again, his Lordship's ninth precept is :

"Trust not any man with thy life, credit, or estate; for it is mere folly for a man to enthrall himself to a friend, as though, occasion being offered, he should not care to become thine enemy." It is good advice; but how much better done by Polonius! "This above all. To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

A comparison of all the precepts of the poet and the statesman would yield a similar result. And yet nobody ever thought of exhibiting Burleigh, inferior as he is in dramatical wisdom, as an object of merriment upon the stage for many a year after he had been gathered to his fathers, until it pleased the author of the Critic to put him forward to make his oracular nod. There is no use in moralizing, but we cannot help reflecting that Sheridan would have done better in life if he could have followed the prudential advice of the great minister whom he mocked. It is certain that if he had avoided mimicking him at humble distance elsewhere, and never thought of playing at Parliament,-if, content with winning dramatic honours only second to those of Molière, he had eschewed throwing himself into paths where the half-nods of the less than tenth-rate Burleighs are of more weight than all the wit and genius of the School for Scandal, there would not have been any necessity that his death should be neglected and his funeral honoured, with a contempt and a sympathy equally characteristic of those whom

his lordship calls "the glow-worms, I mean parasites and sycophants, who will feed and fawn upon thee in the summer of prosperity, but in adverse storms they will shelter thee no more than an arbour in winter."

That the austere Lord High Treasurer might have been the mark for the covert wit of the dramatist,-covert indeed, for in his time, or in that which immediately succeeded it, there was no safety in making unseemly jests too openly about him, is highly probable; and the enemy of Essex and Raleigh* could not be an object of admiration in the eyes of Shakspeare. Lord Burleigh, in his courtly demeanour, was as observant of etiquette as Polonius, and as ready in using indirections to find thereby directions out. The Queen was fond both of ceremony and statecraft: but I doubt much that the old gentleman in Hamlet is intended for anything more than a general personification of ceremonious courtiers. If Lord Chesterfield had designed to write a commentary upon Polonius, he could not have more completely succeeded than by writing his famous letters to his son. His Lordship, like every man of taste and virtue, and what Pope has comprehended in the expressive term of "all that," in his time utterly despised Shakspeare. There is nothing to blame in this. What can we talk on but of what we know? Öne of the grandest of the herd, Horace Walpole, wrote the Mysterious Mother, and therefore he had a right (had he not?) to offer an opinion on Macbeth, and to pronounce Midsummer's Night's Dream a bundle of rubbish, far more ridiculous than the most absurd Italian opera. Lord Chesterfield wrote nothing, that I know of, to give him a name as an author, except his letters. Of course he wrote despatches, protocols, and other such ware, worthy, no doubt, of the Red Tapery of which he was so eminent a member.

• Even in these precepts his lordship cannot avoid a "gird" at those remarkable men whose accomplishments were, however, much more likely to please poets and adventurers than sober statesmen. We know how Spenser immortalizes the Shepherd of the Ocean, and with what pomp of verse" the general of our gracious emperess" is introduced almost by name in the chorus of Henry V. Shakspeare's most national play, as a fit object of comparison with the hero of Azincour himself. In Lord Burleigh they only appear as suiteth examples to point the moral of a maxim. "Yet I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex-shun to be Raleigh."

SONG.

WELL, be it so, we meet no more!
I cannot prize so cold a heart;
And, since Love's dreamy life is o'er,
"Tis better that we thus should part.
I do not ask thy love again,
Thy falsehood leaves too keen a pain.

They told me thou could'st never be
Long constant to one idol's shrine;
But I had loved thee-only thee,
And knew how true I was to mine:
I did not deem that one so fair
Could be as false as others were.

480

THE LEG.

A TALE FROM THE GERMAN.

In the autumn of 1782 the surgeon, Louis Thevenet, of Calais, received an anonymous letter, requiring his attendance on the following day at a certain house not far from the town, and requesting him to bring with him the necessary instruments for amputating a limb. Thevenet was, at that period, renowned far and wide for his skill, and it was by no means uncommon for patients to send for him from England, in order to be guided by his judgment in cases of more than ordinary importance. He had been long attached to the army, and, though of somewhat uncouth manner, was universally beloved on account of the kindness of his disposition.

Thevenet puzzled a long time over the anonymous communication. Both time and place were indicated with the greatest exactness; at such an hour, and at such a spot, would he be expected; but, as before observed, the letter bore no signature. "A hoax, in all probability," was the conclusion he arrived at, and he resolved not to go.

Three days afterwards he received a similar invitation, though couched in more pressing terms, with the announcement that a carriage would be at his door at nine the next morning, to convey him to the appointed spot.

Scarcely had the clock finished striking the hour of nine, on the following morning, than a handsome open carriage drove to the surgeon's door; he made no further hesitation, but entered it. As he got in, he inquired of the coachman whither he was going to drive him, and the man replied in the English language, " I do not meddle with things that are no business of mine."

"O ho! so I have to do with an Englishman, you surly dog," replied Thevenet.

The coach arrived at length at the appointed house.

"Who am

I to see, who lives here,-who is ill?" asked Thevenet of the coachman as he left the carriage. The man repeated his former answer, and was thanked for his civility in terms very much resembling those above quoted.

He was received at the door by a handsome young man, about twenty-eight years old, who conducted him up a staircase to a large room. His accent betrayed him to be a native of Great Britain. Thevenet addressed him in English, and was replied to with much politeness.

"You desired my attendance," said the surgeon.

"I am very grateful for the trouble you have taken to visit me. Pray rest yourself; here are refreshments of all kinds, if you wish anything before performing the operation."

"First of all, sir, let me see and examine the patient; possibly it may not be necessary to proceed to amputation." "It will be necessary, Monsieur Thevenet. Let me entreat you to be seated. I have the fullest confidence in you-listen to me. Here is a purse containing a hundred guineas, they are yours when