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And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish

That your good beauties be the happy cause

Of Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtues.
Will bring him to his wonted way again,

To both your honors.

Madam, I wish it may.

It has been much debated whether at any time during this scene Hamlet suspects that he is being overheard. It is evident in the soliloquy he believes that he is alone; but it is possible that he detected some constraint in Ophelia's manner, which caused him to doubt, and he knew from their own confession that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had been set upon him; there is, however, no such indication in the text, and it is difficult to conceive that Hamlet could in his right mind so wantonly and cruelly insult the girl he had loved, merely for the sake of mystifying the King or whoever might be listening. It seems more natural to suppose that, irritated by Ophelia's offering to return his presents, one of his mad fits seized him, and that he lost all self-control and spoke at random. We know that another such fit seized him in the scene with Laertes in the churchyard. "This is mere madness," said the Queen on that occasion, "and thus awhile the fit will work on him." And when Hamlet again met Laertes, before the fencing, he himself says:

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But we are rather concerned with Ophelia's behavior in this trying scene. She has entered into her father's scheme with the hope that she may be the means of restoring Hamlet by inviting him to renew his attentions to her, and she now knows that she would be acceptable to the King and Queen as a daughter-in-law. At their last interview he had bidden her a strange farewell, and she will test his sincerity by returning his presents. His first words to her show him to be in one of his moods.

Good my lord

How does your honor for this many a day?

I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

My lord, I have remembrances of yours,
That I have longed long to re-deliver;
I pray you now, receive them.

No, no; I never gave you aught.

My honored lord, you know right well you did;
And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed
As made the things more rich; their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

Then it is Hamlet bursts out:

Ha, ha! are you honest?

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Words which affect us almost as a personal affront to our

selves. Ophelia can only reply by startled exclamations.

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Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

You should not have believed me

I loved you not.

I was the more deceived.

Hamlet again talks wildly and again suddenly breaks off: Where's your father?

At home, my lord.

Of course this was an untruth, and, if deception is never justifiable, may be condemned by those moralists who do not live in glass houses. But what was she to do? Could she betray her father? No doubt a less truthful person would have found a ready equivocation, but she is not practised in that art.

Probably this question of Hamlet's was merely a bow at a venture; if he had suspected any one was listening, he would have taken it to be the King, as in the case of the interview with the Queen after the play.

If Hamlet had known Polonius was listening, he would certainly have taxed Ophelia with lying, but as it is, he accepts her answer.

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Ophelia, with "love's fine wit," perceives only too clearly the state of the case; she has now no doubt, and all her fond hopes forsake her.

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth.
Blasted with ecstasy; O, woe is me,

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

A few hours later, on the very same day, Hamlet again meets Ophelia; apparently he has no recollection of what has so recently passed between them; he speaks to her as if nothing had happened; but now, for the first time, he makes use of equivocal expressions in talking to her. It has been sought to account for this, by reference to the manners of the period, and no doubt contemporary instances of such language are to be met with; but, as Gervinus remarks, neither Romeo, nor Bassanio, nor even Proteus, has spoken so with their beloved ones. This has an important bearing to be referred to Ophelia's songs; for the present it is sufficient to note the quiet unobservance with which she puts his allusions aside.

An interval occurs before we again encounter Ophelia-and then it is not Ophelia we see. Hamlet has slain her father in mistake for the King, and in order not to excite public attention to the manner of his death, he has been buried in an obscure fashion and not according to his rank and dignity, and Hamlet himself has been sent away to England. The calamity of her father's death coming upon the top of her other troubles has overwhelmed her; her reason has given way and she has sunk into the most hopeless and pitiable of the ills that flesh is heir to, when life has become nothing but a jumbled and distorted memory. There is no need to recall the affecting scene in which she sings her snatches of songs, distributes flowers, and utters enigmatical sayings; it is only

poet, with

If there is

necessary to refer to one of the ballads, which the consummate art, has introduced among her songs. one characteristic of mental derangement more constant than another it is the impairment of the sense of decency. This is the explanation of Hamlet's equivocal talk. Shakespeare makes Lear say: "An ounce of civil good apothecary to sweeten my imagination." "The foul fluid," is a constant allusion of Edgar's during his assumption of madness, and without assuming anything as to the connection between demoniacal possession and lunacy, it may not be out of place to refer to the frequent description of the devils as unclean spirits. Sir Edward Strachey has pointed out how, in mental derangement, delicate and refined women will use language so coarse that it is difficult to guess where they can. ever have even heard such words, and reminds us that such a nurse as Juliet's would be quite sufficient to account for all that falls from Ophelia's lips. It is moreover certain that the recording tablets of the brain, as Eschylus calls them, may unconsciously receive impressions which may remain latent like the invisible picture on the photographic plate, ready to flash into consciousness when the occasion arrives. Is it possible that this saddest trait of Ophelia's malady has been so misunderstood, as to give rise to a suspiIcion of her honor?

Surely Coleridge's is the truer insight: "Note the conjunction here of these two thoughts, that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet and her filial love; with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination, of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother, concerning the dangers to which her honor lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself she turns to prettiness."

The Queen tells us us the manner of her death and her gentle words at the grave almost dispose us to forgive her for her part in the tragedy.

Such is Shakespeare's Ophelia, a creation in which he seems to have combined the purity and innocence of Miranda and the gentle tenderness of Julia with the indefinable grace which comes of patient suffering and resignation. Truly Hamlet spoke wiser than he was aware of, when he said: "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny."

Russia.

Current Events.

In Russia, since the last notes were made, what has for some time been the normal course of

unsettlement still exists. Not, however, in so aggravated a form. Only one high official has been assassinated; nor have so many hundreds of the people been shot by the orders of the Little Father. Peace, however, is far from reigning; nor will, or in fact should, it reign until fundamental changes of government, such as to make life bearable, have been made. How necessary it is that there should be a change may be judged by the simple fact that in the single year 1903 no fewer than 4,867 persons were arbitrarily arrested for holding political opinions, and sent without any trial to long imprisonment or to various forms of exile in different parts of Siberia. This was done in spite of the fact that in 1896 a Ukase had been issued which seemed to abolish all arbitrary arrest for political offences or political opinions. It is not to be wondered at that a more substantial security for life and freedom is now found necessary than the word of the supreme ruler.

The hope that such security will be realized is made brighter than ever before by the long-expected manifesto issued by the Tsar on August 19. In this manifesto the Tsar declares that "the time is come to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of the laws, attaching for this purpose to the higher State institutions a special consultative body entrusted with the preliminary elaboration and discussion of measures and the examination of the State Budget. While preserving the fundamental law regarding autocratic power, we have deemed it well to form a Lower House of Assembly and to approve the regulations for elections to this Lower House, extending the validity of these laws to the whole territory of the empire," with some exceptions.

The manifesto excludes Finland from any of these concessions and declares that, with regard to that province, the Tsar will take special measures. The general Assembly is to meet not later than the middle of January, 1906.

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