wept often enough over the old tragedy of Hamlet the Dane, who loved the fair Ophelia far more than a thousand brothers could, with all their united love, and who went mad because the ghost of his father appeared to him, and because the world was out of its course and he felt himself too weak to set it straight, and because he in German Wittenberg had from too much thinking for- gotten practical business, and because he had the choice to go mad or do something desperate—and finally because he, as a mortal man, had above all things in himself a strong tendency to madness.
We know Hamlet as well as we do our own face, which we so often see in the mirror, and yet which is far less known to us than one would think; for if we were to meet any one in the street who looked exactly like ourselves, we would gaze at the startling, strange, familiar face only instinctively, and with a secret dread, without remarking that it is our features which we have just seen.
CORDELIA.
[KING LEAR.]
"There are in this play," says an English author, " man-traps and spring-guns for the
