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86 familiarly, we feel in Julius Caesar that, although not even Shakespeare could better the style he has chosen, he has not let himself go.

In reading Hamlet we have no such feeling, and in many parts (for there is in the writing of Hamlet an unusual variety ) we are conscious of a decided change. The style in these parts is more rapid and vehement, less equable and less simple; and there is a change of the same kind in the versification. But on the whole the type is the same as in Julius Caesar, and the resemblance of the two plays is decidedly more marked than the difference. If Hamlet’s soliloquies, considered simply as compositions, show a great change from Jaques’s speech, ‘All the world’s a stage,’ and even from the soliloquies of Brutus, yet Hamlet (for instance in the hero’s interview with his mother) is like Julius Caesar, and unlike the later tragedies, in the fulness of its eloquence, and passages like the following belong quite definitely to the style of the Second Period:

This bewitching music is heard again in Hamlet’s farewell to Horatio: