Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/177

 you made me believe so." Hamlet is enraged at his own love, and appears to have discarded it, for that too may smile and be a villain, or hers may. "You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it." That is to say, if I had felt true love grafted on my stem I should have received and imparted its flavor of sincerity. But nothing is sincere: "I loved you not."

Hamlet's observation of human nature had furnished him with elements which only needed provocation to develop into this uncompromising irony. His mother, married to that satyr of an uncle,

"Or ere those shoes were old, With which she follow'd my poor father's body,"

might well cast a slur upon the sex in his opinion, and prompt the text which cynics use, "Frailty, thy name is woman,"—all but Ophelia: it does not include her until all life's illusions vanished with the ghost. Then she would do well not to walk in the sun, and would be safest in a nunnery.

Previous to that, he had dispatched a missive to her, which is commonly supposed to have been written on purpose to foster the notion that he was mad. But its tone does not seem to me to have been rightly interpreted. It begins in the style of Pistol: "To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." Then comes a verse fit for a valentine,—

"Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar,  But never doubt I love."