Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/161

 it with its proper color subdued to the solemn reassurance, "Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!" Then our own spirits venture forth into calmness and hush of the breaking day.

Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this tragedy to reconcile us with the drift of it. Polonius belongs to comedy, because he is an old counsellor who was once valuable, whose wits have grown seedy on purpose to delight us with his notion that he fathoms and circumvents the Prince. When a man's feeling of importance has outlived his value, so that his common-sense trickles feebly over the lees of maxims, and his policies are absurd attempts to appear as shrewd as ever before persons who are in better preservation, he belongs to the comic side of life. We cannot help smiling at his most respectable recommendations; for they are like hats lingering in fashion, but destitute of nap. He wears one of these, and goes about conceiting that his head mounts a gloss. There is not enough of Polonius left to tide him through this tragedy, unless it might have been in dumb show: he must lurk behind an arras to get himself mistaken for a king; and, as he does this after sending a spy into France to watch his son's habits, we have not a tear to spare. And we only think how delightfully bewildered he will be if his ghost gets out of the body, escaping a politic convocation of worms, in time to help receive the other ghost, and to understand then, if any wit is left over in him, that his king was murdered and Hamlet is harping on something besides his daughter. But his absurdity survives,