Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/185

 the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into the geniality of Humor,—all his mirth lost of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane.

But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,—too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.

The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,—"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose