Enter HAMLET.

Ham. To be, or not to be? that is the question.--.. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to fuffer The flings and arrows of outrageous fortune; Or to take arms against a fea of troubles, (33)

(33) Cr to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?] I once imagined, that, to preferve the uniformity of metaphor, and as it is a word our Author is fond of using elsewhere, he might have wrote;a fiege of troubles.

So, in Midsummer Night's Dream;

Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death, or fickness did lay fiege to it.

King John;

Death, having preyed upon the outward parts,

- Leaves them, invitible his fiege is now, &c.

Romeo and Juliet ;

You, to remove that fiege of grief from her,
Betrothed, and would have married her, &c.

Timon of Athens;

Not even Nature,

To whom all forès lay fiege, can bear great fortune

But by contempt of nature.

Or one might conjecturally amend the paffage, nearer to

the traces of the text, thus;

Or,

Or to take arms against the ffay of troubles,

againft a 'fay of troubles;

i. e. against the attempts, attacks, &c. So, before, in this

play;

Makes vow before his uncle, never more

To give the offay of arms against your majefty.

Henry V.

Galling the gleaned land with hot affays.

Macteth;

--their malady convinces

The great lay of art.

Lear;

And that thy tongue some 'fay of breeding breathes,

&c. &c.

But, perhaps, any correction whatever may be unneceffary,

And by oppofing end them?---to die,---to fleep-----
No more; and by a fleep, to say, we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a confummation
Devoutly to be wilhed. To die --to fleep--(34)

confidering the great licentiousness of our Poet in joining heterogeneous metaphors; and confidering too, that a fea is ufed not only to fignify the ocean, but likewise a vast quantity, multitude, or confluence of any thing else. Inftances are thick both in facred and profane writers. The prophet Jeremiah, particularly, in one pallage, calls a prodigious army coming up against a city, a fea; chap. li. 42. "The frais come up upon Babylon; the is covered with the multitude of the waves thereof." Eschylus is frequent in the use of this metaphor;

Βοὰ γάρ κύμα χερσαῖον σραώ. Sep. cont. Thebas, v. 63. And again, a little lower;

Κύμα γὰρ περὶ πόλιν

Δοχμολή ρων ἀνδρων
Καχλάζει τωνοπῖς
"Αρεος ὀρόμενον.

And again, in his Persians;

Δόκιμος δ ̓ ὅτις ὑποςὰς
Μεγάλῳ ῥεύμ «Τι τωτῶν,
Ἐχωροῖς ἔρκεσιν είργειν

"Αμαχον κύμα θαλάσης.

Ibid. v. 116.

So Ciciro, in one of his letters to Atticus, lib. vii. Ep. 4. Flucbum enim totius Barbariæ ferre urbs uur non poterat. And, befades, a fea of troubles among the Greeks grew into proverbial ufage; κακῶν θάλασσα, κακῶν τρικυμία. So that the expreffion, figuratively, means the troubles of human life, which flow in upon us, and encompass us round like a fut. Our Poet too has employed this metaphor in his Antony, Speaking of a confluence of courtiers;

I was of late as petty to his ends,

As is the morn-dew on the myrtle leaf

To his grand fea.

The fame image and expreffion, I observe, is used by Beau

mont and Fletcher, in their Two Noble Kinjimen;

--Though I know,

His ocean needs not my poor drops, yet they

Muft yield their tribute there.

(34)Toe, to icep;

To fleep? perchance, to dream; av, there's therub
For in that fleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the refpect
That makes calamity of fo long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppreffor's wrong, the proud' man's contumely
The pang of despised love, the law's delay,
The infolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes;
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardles bear,.
To groan and sweat under a weary life?
But that the dread of something after death,
(That undifcovered country, from whose bourne (35)

To fleep? perchance, to dream:] This admirable fine reflection seems, in a paltry manner, to be sneered at by Beaumont and Fletcher, in their Stornful Lady;

Reg. Have patience, Sir, until our fellow Nicholas be d ceafed, that is, afleep; to fleep, to die; to die, to fleep; a very figure, Sir.

(35) That undiscovered country, from whose bourne

No traveller returns,] As some superficial critics have, without the least. fcruple, accused the Poet of forgetfulness and felf-contradiction from this paflage; feeing that in this very play he introduces a character from the other world, the ghost of Hamlet's father; I have thought this circumfrance worthy of a justification. 'Tis certain, to intoduce a ghoft, a being from the other world, and to say, that no traveller returns from those confines is, literally taken, as abfolute a contradiction as can be fuppofed et facto et termi nis. But we are to take notice, that Shakespeare brings his ghost only from a middle state, or local purgatory, a prifonhouse, as he makes his spirit call it, where he was doomed for a term only, to expiate his fins of nature. By the undifcovered country here mentioned, he may, perhaps, mean that last and eternal refidence of fouls in a state of full bliss or mifery, which spirits in a middle state could not be acquainted with, or explain. So that if any latitude of sense may be allowed

No traveller returns) puzzles the will;
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus confcience does make cowards of us all.
And thus the native hue of refolution
Is ficklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprizes of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action Soft you, now!

[Seeing Ophelia.

The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy orifons
Be all my fins remembered.

Oph. Good my Lord,

How does your honour for this many a-day?
Ham. I humbly thank you, well;--

to the Poet's words, though he admits the possibility of a
spirit returning from the dead, he yet holds, that the ftate
of the dead cannot be communicated; and, with that allow-
ance, it remains still an undiscovered country. We are to ob
ferve too, that even his ghoft, who comes from purgatory,
or whatever has been fignified under that denomination)
comes under restrictions; and though he confefsses himself
fubject to a viciffitude of torments, yet he says, at the fame
time, that he is forbid to tell the secrets of his prifon-house.
The ancients had the fame notion of our obfcure and twi-
light knowledge of an after being. Valerius Flaccus, I re-
member, (if I may be indulged in a short digression) fpeak
ing of the lower regions, and state of the spirits there, has
an expreffion, which, in one sense, comes close to our Au-
thor's undiscovered country;

Superis incognita tellus.

And it is obfervable that Virgil, before he enters upon a
description of Hell, and of the Elysian Fields, implores the
permiffion of the infernal deities, and profefses, even then,
to discover no more than hearfay concerning their mysteri-
ous dominions:

Dii, quibus imperium eft animarum, umbraque filentes,
Et Chaos, et Phlegethon, loca nočte tacentia late,.

Sit mihi fas auaita loqui, fit numine veftro
Pandere res alta terra et caligine merfas.

1

Æneid. VI.

Oph. My Lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longed long to re-deliver.
I pray you, now receive them.

Ham. No, I never gave you aught.
[you did;
Oph. My honoured Lord, you know right well,
And with them words of fo fweet breath compofed,
As made the things more rich: that perfume loft,
Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind. There, my Lord.

Ham. Ha, ha! are you honeft?

Oph. My Lord--
Ham. Are you fair?

Oph. What means your Lordship? Ham. That if you be honest and fair, you should admit no discourse to your beauty.

Oph. Could beauty, my Lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

Ham. Ay, truly; (36) for the power of beauty will fooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd, than the force of honesty can tranflate beauty into its likeness. This was fometime a pa

(36) Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will fooner transform hor esty from what it is to a bawd, &c.] Our Author has twice before, in his As you like it, played with a fentiment bordering upon this;

Celia. 'Tis true, for those that the makes fair, the scarce makes honest; and those that the makes honest, the makes very ill-favoured.

And again;

Audr. Would you not have me honef??

Clown. No truly, unless thou wert hard favoured; for honesty, coupled to beauty, is to have honey a fauce to fugar. The foundation of both paflages may posibly have been of claffical extraction:

Lis est cum forma magna pudicitia

-Rara eft a leo concoraia forme

A que pudicitia.

Ovid.

Juvenal.