there to expose the case of the afflicted maiden. At the Queen's emphatic refusal to admit the grief-stricken girl to her presence, he pleads her cause in few but forcible words. He discloses her lamentable state, and shows how her demands are importunate even to distraction. He describes pathetically and truthfully the marks of her madness both in words and action. "There's tricks in the world," she says, and she "speaks things in doubt," sometimes concerning her dead father, and sometimes concerning her dead lover; and evil-disposed listeners collect her broken thoughts and patch them totogether to fit their own evil suppositions; hence, he concludes that it is to the Queen's best interests to speak with the demented maiden, in order to hinder "ill-breeding minds" from hatching out dangerous conjectures of foul play. His conclusion wins not only the Queen's consent but, moreover, so stirs her conscience that, at his departure, she voices in remorse the sickness of her sin-stricken soul. Sin's nature is to turn every trifle into a prologue to some great calamity, and her guilty soul is filled with fears of greater ills.

Horatio returns, leading in Ophelia, and he it is who follows her away. She enters, according to the stage directions of the First Quarto, with her hair down, playing on a lute and singing. Horatio, speechless all the while amid her gentle ravings, allows the Queen to do the speaking. Of the maiden's plight, Vischer says:

"If ever it can be said of a poetical creation, that it has a fragrancy in it, it is this picture of the crazed Ophelia and the inmost secret of its bewitching fragrancy is innocence. Nothing deforms her; not the lack of sense in her sense, not the rude naïveté of those snatches of song; a soft mist, a twilight is drawn around her, veiling the rough reality of insanity."

The madness of this 'Rose of May' is turned to favor and tod prettiness. The gloom of her affliction engenders an overpowering pathos. What can be sadder than her story? One tithe of Hamlet's woe overwhelms and shatters her young mind. By an inspired fitness, the Poet has banished her lover from the scene. His simulated madness, however much necessitated, would, in contrast with her absolute insanity, never have been able to survive the test.

NURSERY RHYMES

When Ophelia is conducted before the Queen, she seems at first not to recognize her, and gazing about in vacant stare, exclaims, "Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark." The presence of her lover's mother anchors her wandering mind, and, all heedless of Gertrude's words, she begins to sing of him in snatches of old ballads. They come flowing in music from the silent halls of memory, where they had entered when perhaps her old nurse sang her to sleep in days of childhood. The first is the story of a maiden who inquires of a traveller concerning her lost lover. He may be known by "cockle hat, and staff, and sandal shoon." These were the honored insignia of religious pilgrims, who, in the fulfilment of holy vows or from devotion, journeyed to sacred shrines across the seas and often to the Holy Land. In those ages of Faith they not only afforded safety to the pious stranger in his wanderings through foreign regions, but even won for him the respect and honor due to a sacred personage. Hence, as a consequence of the common sacredness of the pilgrim's habit, lovers in their adventures sometimes resorted to its guise. The ballad was probably suggested by Hamlet's departure to a foreign clime. In Ophelia's mind all is disorder; ideas and phantasms mingle in confusion without sequence and distinctness. Afflicted over

the dual loss of her father and her lover, her stricken mind cannot perceive their objective difference, and with the death of the one she also mourns the death of the other.

Her reference to the legend of the baker's daughter discloses how the love of Hamlet and her filial love, had subsisted in her mind in conjunction with the cautions and fears which Polonius and Laertes had so indelicately avowed concerning the danger to her virtue. Though it is not certain that she had in her sanity seriously suspected the motives of her lover, yet the disagreeable aspersions of his honor were the burden of her thoughts; and now she reveals what a deep impression they had made upon her.

The legend had been often used in her early childhood to enkindle kind feelings for the poor and unfortunate. Such impressions, after others of later years have faded, remain still fresh in the memory of the insane, as well as of those in second childhood. The story, which is current to-day among the nursery tales of Gloucestershire, relates that the Savior in disguise entered a baker's shop, asking for some bread; and, when the baker charitably put a large piece of dough into the oven to bake for Him, his daughter rebuked him, and for her unkindness was changed into an owl. The idea of this sudden transformation prompts Ophelia to exclaim: "Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be." It no doubt suggested the thought of her own unkindness to Hamlet; for her equally heartless conduct had, she believed, made him insane. But as her heartlessness was due to obedience, her father's suspicions of her lover's motives now recall to her memory another ballad which recounts the somewhat analogous case of a man who with false vows had betrayed a too trusting maiden. The song she had heard in childhood when she did not understand its meaning. The stanza she sings to her Valentine she would rather have died

than sing when he lay at her feet in the Play; and she would not now sing it, were she not crazed by love.

The character of some of those ballads, thinks Hudson, is surprisingly touching. They tell us, as nothing else could do, that Ophelia is utterly unconscious of what she is saying. Their immodesty is not inconsistent with her purity, as all can testify who have had experience with insane patients." The ballad she sings contains an allusion to an old custom according to which the first maiden seen by a man on February the fourteenth was considered his Valentine or true love for that year. Scott made it the basis of his plot in The Fair Maid of Perth.

From the thought of the wrong done by the false lover of the ballad, Ophelia comes to think of the evil done by her own lover in the slaying of her father, and in sorrow exclaims: "I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him in the cold ground." Her affliction recalls to mind the advice she had heard in younger years: "We must be patient" in suffering. "Let us hope all will be well." The memory of her father gives rise to the associated idea of Laertes, and she says: "my brother will know of it," and avenge it, "and so I thank you for your good counsel." These words, no doubt refer to his last farewell, when, before departing for Paris, he had cautioned her to have no further relations with the Prince. Then that counsel was most disagreeable, but now that Hamlet has slain her father, it seems wise and good. With a deep bow and a "good night sweet ladies," Ophelia quietly departs, leaving all lost in pity and bewilderment. The King alone breaks the solemn silence 27 Dr. Strachey says: "If we bear in mind the notorious fact that in the dreadful visitation of mental derangement, delicate and refined women will use language so coarse that it is difficult to guess where they can ever even have heard such words; if we remember that mental fever quickens old forms into life, and consider that the infant ears of the motherless Ophelia might have heard the talk and the songs of such a nurse as that of Juliet, we shall find nothing improbable or even unseemly in the poor girl's songs"

by commanding the friend of her lover to follow after and to keep her from harm.

FEARS AND FOREBODINGS

Ophelia's parting reference to her brother found an echo in the King's soul, and awakened him to a sense of the troubles which were sure to come upon him, "not single but trooping in battalions;" and these he enumerates in historical order to the Queen. There is the death of Polonius; then too her son is gone, who is himself the "most violent author of his own just remove. Gertrude naturally supposes his equivocal words to refer to her son's temporary absence on the embassy; for Claudius alone knows the secret mandate within the sealed packet, and feels certain that her son is gone gone forever. His third cause of fear arises from reflection on the fact that the people in wonderment at the sudden and secret manner of Polonius' death, are confused and voice their foul suspicions. It causes him to recognize his blunder, both in suppressing the circumstances of the old man's death, and in interring him clandestinely and hurriedly without the customary public honors due to a nobleman of the realm.

The action of Laertes, however, inspires him with the greatest fear. Holding himself aloof from the court, since his secret return from France, and concealing his intentions, he moves among the people, eagerly seeking information concerning recent wondrous events. As a consequence, many tale-bearers press about him and poison his mind with pestilential insinuations, buzzers who, though ignorant of the facts, do not scruple to charge the King with his father's death. Such and other secret information fill Claudius with anxiety and fears, and cause him to complain that evil forebodings, like "a murdering piece" of ordnance afflict him