Page:A study of Shakespeare (IA cu31924013158393).pdf/172

 feelings were far different towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions would have been shared by the author of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar.

Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of Hamlet, I hasten to declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus, necnon the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me, "to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue' not only "from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"—though this itself is a form of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the rampant rout of rival commentators—but also, now as ever throughout this study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me.

In Hamlet, as it seems to me, we set foot as it were on the bridge between the middle and the