flesh could not melt: the coffin chilled it. But how long could he listen to this man, whose affected furor showed him to be a person incapable of deep passion? It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. In the rage of a temperament whose trick it always was to baffle itself, and in the bitterness of being reminded by her cold beauty that he had had to surrender it while it was too young to die,— it is too masterful. He bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style,—
"Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou,"
but soon checks himself with a half apology, and subsides.
How mobile and impressible he was, notwithstanding his large capacity of reason! The latter aided him to dissimulate and to keep his projects waiting; but the other traits nourished a fancy that easily turned to mimicry of whatever was transpiring; as when he assumed, half-consciously, the dandified phrasing of Osric, and played with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This plastic fancy jumped to the high stilts of Laertes, and it stalked to "make Ossa like a wart."
But his bosom secret has escaped. He turns away, is followed by Horatio, to whom, before the next scene opens, we hear him (though no folio nor quarto ever lisped a syllable of it) pouring out the confidences of a fruitless passion to the only honest man of all the crowd, the still and trusty comrade. This Shakspeare would have us understand, I think, by giving Hamlet to say to Horatio, as they enter the next scene together, "So
