Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/124

Rh coinage of the poet's brain. What, then, are they not real They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet. This play has a prophetic truth which is above that of history.” Are we then wrong in treating Hamlet as a reality, and in debating the state of his mind with more care than we would choose to

bestow upon the insane vagaries of an Emperor Paul, or a Frederick the First Have we not more sure data upon which

to exercise judgment than upon, the uncertain truth of his tory 2 Buckle, in his History of Civilization, has elaborately argued the madness of Burke; a domestic grief, a change of temper, and, above all, a change of political opinions from those which the historian thinks true, to those which he thinks

false, being held sufficient to establish the confirmed insanity of the great statesman. Those who read the ingenious argument will feel convinced, at least, of this, that history rarely or never leaves grounds relative enough to solve such a question. Nay, when we are close upon the footsteps of a

man's life, when the question is not one of learned trifling, like that of the insanity of Socrates, but the practical one of whether a man just dead was competent to devise his pro perty, when his papers and letters are ransacked, his daily life minutely examined, when scores of men who knew him intimately, bear testimony to their knowledge, we often find the balance of probability so even, that it is impossible to say to which side it inclines, and the feelings of the jury as often as not fabricate the will.

But when the great mind of mind

speaks out as in Hamlet, it is not so. Then it is as in the justice of Heaven, then the “action lies in its true nature,” which neither ignorance can obscure nor sophistry pervert. It is by this great faculty that Shakespeare unfolds to our view the book of the mind, and shews alike its fairest and most

blotted pages, and leaves in us a thirst not for more light, but for more power to read.