Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/158

 *crous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the less.

After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.

But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,—caught as it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note of