Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/114

Rh This reference to the random arrow shot madly o'er the house may possibly have been taken from the play of Titus Andronicus.

Except the above brief reference to the inner wretchedness, which Horatio takes for an evil augury, Hamlet shews no disposition to melancholy after the rough incidents of his sea voyage. The practice of the King upon his own life appears to have fixed his resolve : hatched.

He'll wait till no further evil is

He that hath

“Thrown out his angle for my proper life, And with such cozenage; is t not perfect conscience,

To quit him with this arm 7 and is't not to be damn'ſ, To let this canker of our nature come In further evil 7”

Moreover, what there is to do he'll do quickly. The issue of the business in England, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, will quickly be known, but “the interim is mine ;

And a man's life's no more than to say, one.” In this temper it would have been frivolous in him to have accepted the challenge of Laertes, were it not that he saw in it an opportunity to right himself with his old friend, by the image of whose cause he read the portraiture of his own. It is after a seeming reconciliation thus obtained, that he determines to accept “this brother's wager.” Might not also the challenge be accepted as likely to offer a good opportunity to meet the King, and “quit him with this arm,” an oppor tunity which he now resolves to seize whenever it offers ? The sentiment of coming evil lends probability to the thought. “Not a whit, we defy augury; there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now : if it be not now, yet it will come : the readiness is all : since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes 2" The final scene of indiscriminate slaughter, which, as 2

H