This very indefiniteness made it possible for Hamlet to contemplate its execution from three points of view: 1) From that of an avenger of blood; 2) from that of divine justice; 3) from that of punishment by the State. Rossman thinks that the latter that Hamlet should bring the king to the bar of public justice was the proper view. But this certainly was impracticable for two reasons: The machinery of public administration was in the culprit's hands, and the Ghost could not be brought into court and made to testify. Hamlet seriously considered only the other two views. That "old stock

which he declared "virtue cannot so inoculate but we shall relish it," counseled revenge as a duty.

Am I a coward?

Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?

Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat

As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?

Ha! Swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be

But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall

To make oppression bitter; or, ere this,

I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain,
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O vengeance!

"Examples gross as earth" exhorted him, the chivalry of his times shamed him, his filial love cried out for revenge, and his contempt for that "smiling, damned villain," the king, put his hand upon his sword.

What held him in check? Was he a coward? On the platform in the presence of the Ghost, while his companions are quaking with fear, each "petty artery is as hard as Nemean lion's nerve." "I do not set my life at a pin's fee,” he exclaims, "and for my soul what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself?" What did restrain him? IIis intellect, which marshaling all the difficulties in his way could discover no path of rational action, and his conscience, which could not contemplate the killing of his uncle, his mother's husband and his king, as a clear, unmistakable duty-his moral sensibility, which separated him by a kind of virtuous solitude from that corrupt court, made him a censor of his mother, kept him from suicide, rebuked him for his treatment of Ophelia and Laertes,

irradiated his ideals, and was ever a restraining, though not always a controlling, force in his erratic life.

And thus the struggle rages. It is inevitable that a soul thus torn by conflicting elements should suffer deterioration and loss of balance. Not finding a rational course of action and persisting in it, it must be peculiarly subject to the flow of invol untary impulses and its acts colored by its environments.

This is precisely what takes place in the case of Hamlet. His carnal nature, generated by a barbarous past and stimulated by a corrupt age, overbears his will and dictates most of his acts.

Just before that scene in which he comes near killing the king every thing appeals very strongly to this part of his

nature.

'Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world; now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on.

Behold him standing behind the kneeling king:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And so I'll do't; and so he goes to heaven:

And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd.

His intellect now asserts itself, and rage subsides for a time only to break forth in the next scene, a scene full of passion, and, meeting with no opposition from his intellect, he kills Polonius behind the arras, supposing him to be the king. And when Hamlet kills the king it is in a moment of exasperation. Observe how his passion was aroused.—

Queen. O, my dear Hamlet,

The drink, the drink! I am poisoned !
Hamlet. O villainy! Ho! let the door be lock'd!
Treachery! seek it out!

Laertes. It is here, Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain;

No medicine in the world can do thee good,

In thee there is not half an hour of life:
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turn'd itself on me; lo, here I lie,
Never to rise again. Thy mother's poison'd,
I can no more—the king-the king's to blame.

Hamlet. The point envenomed, too!

Then venom, to thy work! (Stabs the king.)

King. O yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt.
Hamlet. Here, thou incestuous, murtherous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion!

(King dies.)

But how little of Hamlet is in this scene. He seems here more like Amlethus of the old Saga, and Laertes, his counterpart in this play. Behold Laertes upon his return from Paris. In a towering rage he demands of the king, "Where is my father?" "Dead," the king evasively replies. "How came he dead?" Laertes sharply asks

How came he dead? I'll not be juggled with.
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,

Let come what comes; only I'll be revenged
Most thoroughly for my father.

Hamlet sometimes feels, and in two or three instances talks, in this way. He knows that he possesses this passionate nature; he is conscious of this weakness, and sought to overcome it. And when Hamlet says to Horatio,

Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee,

he reveals his ideal of manhood, and this contributes to our knowledge of his character. His carnal nature reacted against this ideal, and his environment of lust and selfishness sought to drag him down to its own level.

The world in which Hamlet was placed was "out of joint," and he was "called upon to set it right." But it was supremely difficult to establish moral order in rotten Denmark. "The whole moral world," says Father Perek, "stands upon right, truth, and peace." When these supports of national existence. are taken away every thing will fall to pieces, the more surely the higher it is built. What evidence have we of the existence of any such supports as these in Denmark? Her king was a murderer; her queen, the widow of the murdered monarch, and the wife of the assassin; her statesmanship, that of Polonius, "baited with falsehood," "with windlaces and with assays of bias."

Surely Denmark is not ripe for a reform, but for a revolution. The pure streams of right and truth and peace cannot be made to flow from such corrupt fountains. They must be supplied from without. They must be supplied by a man that, like Hamlet, had sensed the new enlightenment that was streaming from Wittenberg, and, unlike Hamlet, was a master of practical action; by an idealist and a man of the world, and by one who could mediate the ideal and the actual. Every age of transition has such a leader, and that age had one in Fortinbras. Fortinbras leading to battle twenty thousand men to conquer a strip of land upon which it would be impossible for his army to stand shows as much energy as Laertes or Claudius, but he is immeasurably above them in that he hazarded all this for an idea, to maintain the honor of his state. He could not debate with as much subtlety as Hamlet the question of whether "to be or not to be," but he had a clear conception of what constitutes the well-being of a state, and could marshal the forces to secure it. The victorious drum-beats of Fortinbras, fresh from the conquest of Poland, are heard just as the external supports of Denmark had fallen. The king had become a victim of his own treachery; the queen and Laertes had been involved in the same fate; Hamlet had been mortally wounded by the same villainy; the "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" have run their course; "the plots have fallen upon the inventor" heads;" IIamlet gives his dying voice for Fortinbras; and

a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will,

establishes Fortinbras as the saviour of Denmark.

D. Dorchester. Jr.

ART. V.-ROYAL SEIZURE; OR, THE ETHICS OF

PLAGIARISM.

Two difficulties regarding the writings and sayings of others confront the preacher and the man of letters:

1. Dare he run the risk of unwittingly using the ideas or phraseology of other men by reading their works, and thus inwardly digesting them?

2. Knowing that an idea or a turn of speech has been used before, ought he, as a matter of conscience, each time upon employing it, to acknowledge its real or supposed authorship on the printed or written page or in the public speech ?

These two questions are at the very foundation of the ethics of intellectual commerce; and the proper answers thereto are the two commandments on which "hang all the law and the prophets." Nor are they merely matters of let or hinderance, settled by legal or judicial dictum or the ipse dixit of the critic, but they are profoundly questions of conscience, underlying character and deciding destiny, temporal and eternal, psychical and spiritual. It is therefore no light or trifling task even to attempt to answer them. Nor do we hope in this paper to do more than cast in our mite of allusion, citation, opinion, argument, and illustration toward the solution of the problem. At the threshold we remark:

1. It is often exceedingly difficult to determine the author of an idea or expression. To find a name appended by no means settles the question. Take as familiar a poem as the one containing the lines:

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

Five years ago we found these and the lines following in a popular magazine, and credited to John G. Holland. Later they appeared in a cyclopedia of quotations over the name of E. C. Stedman. And recently they have been published, strange to say, with the honors of their authorship given to that most voluminous of all contributors, Anon Y. Mous. Yet these famous lines are in "Festus," written by Philip James