in the Popular Science Monthly, for May, 1880, pp. 60-71. His article is entitled "The Impediment of Adipose-a celebrated case," the celebrated case being that of our friend, Hamlet, who, he says, is described with one dash of the pen: "He's fat and scant of breath." This is that "unknown quantity" which confounded Schlegel, and which Goethe thought he had found in the lines:

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!
That ever I was born to set it right.”

Poor Hamlet (strange that nobody ever discovered it before) is weighted down with a non-executive or lymphatic temperament. By reason of his fatness and his scantness of breath, he lacks the energizing temperament, without which the brain is but a dumb mass of latent possibilities. His procrastination is the result of his "too too solid flesh." But for that burden of adipose substance, he were simply the most active fellow in Europe. He is afflicted with a spherical obesity, as is indicated by his reply to the Ghost's "Remember me : "Remember thee! Ay, thou poor Ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe." obesity is also indicated in the speech of Ophelia :

"He raised a sigh so piteous and profound

As it did seem to shatter all his bulk."

This

But she

We are informed in a footnote that medical men regard frequent sighing as a sign of heart disease, caused by superfluous fat. Ophelia also speaks of him as "pale as his shirt"; and paleness, the writer informs us, is a symptom of anæmic adipose. gives no hint that, like Falstaff, he has fallen away vilely. had been the case, it would have been the first thing to attract the attention of a young lady who believed one mad for the love of her. No; neither love nor lunacy has told the least on his "bulk."

If such

In A. V. Sc. ii. 282, the King drinks " to Hamlet's better breath"; and the queen-mother makes the exclamation, which is taken as the keynote of this adipose theory," He's fat and scant of breath";

and then adds, "Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows." And a little further on she says, Come, let me wipe thy face." Can we not see, says the writer, the perspiration trickling over the broad, heavy cheeks, as we read these lines? It was surely from experience that he spoke of sweating and grunting under a weary life.

Our attention is also called to the fact that when Hamlet takes his leisurely walk in the hall, this quiet exercise goes under no other name than a "breathing time"; and when his obesity is considered, how apt appears his reply to Osric: "Sir, I will walk here in the hall; if it please his majesty, this is the breathing-time of day with me."

The testimony as to the torpid condition of the Prince, consequent upon his fatness, and his scantness of breath, is not yet at an end. When Horatio says, "You will lose this wager, my lord," Hamlet replies, "I do not think so ; . . I shall win at the odds. But thou would'st not think how ill all's here about my heart; but it is no matter." Just such an answer, the writer informs us, as a person might make who was suffering from fatty degeneration; the consideration of the unpleasant possibilities of the duel had brought the action of the heart almost to a standstill the result of a chronic sluggish circulatory system.

The consequences of poor Hamlet's unfortunate physical condition is summed up by the writer in the following sentence: "The fine spirit, the clear insight, the keen reader of other men's thoughts is imprisoned in walls of adipose, and the desire for action dies out with the utterance of wise maxims, philosophic doubts, and morbid upbraidings of his own inertness."

Any explanation of the man Hamlet, which proceeds upon the assumption of the theories of Goethe and Coleridge, must be as wide of the mark as is this, though it may not be so fleshly. And there'll be no end to such criticism until there's a general recognition among Shakespeare scholars of what constitutes the real difficulty of the situation in which Hamlet is placed, - a difficulty entirely independent of his own intellectual and spiritual tempera

ment, but a difficulty especially fitted to bring that temperament into the fullest play. And I would add that the reader of the tragedy whose interest is in the subjective Hamlet, rather than in the dramatic action, must recognize the fact that the subjective Hamlet all the thoughts, and musings, and feelings, which so interest that reader - becomes doubly interesting when he knows its relation to the objective difficulty.

-

THE WITCH AGENCY IN MACBETH.

THE
To two alim, poet, the relations of the Witches to Mac-

HE two all-important things to be considered in the Tragedy

of Macbeth, are, I,

beth, and 2, the relations of Lady Macbeth to Macbeth, in his career of ambition.

The following bits of commentary express the usual understanding of the agency of the witches in Macbeth: "He is tempted," says Hazlitt, "to the commission of guilt by golden opportunities, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty." "Shakespeare's witches," says Charles Lamb, "orignate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination."

"The first thought of acceding to the throne," says Thomas Whateley, "is suggested, and success in the attempt is promised, to Macbeth by the witches; he is therefore represented as a man whose natural temper would have deterred him from such a design if he had not been immediately tempted and strongly impelled to it."

In the first place it may be said that such views are inconsist ent with the whole theory of the entire Shakespearian drama. Shakespeare never presents a character to us as a victim of fate at the outset. The fatalism of passion is exhibited in all his great tragedies; but those characters through whom it is exhibited begin their several careers as free agents. A true dramatic interest demands this. As a great passion is evolved, it destroys more and more the power of self-assertion, and its victim is finally

swept passively and helplessly along. Only free agency is dramatic.

The weird sisters represent the night side of nature, the powers of evil which are ever attracted to the soul whose elective affinities favor such attraction. The devil visits those only who invite him in. "They who lack energy of goodness," says Dowden, "and drop into a languid neutrality between the antagonist spiritual forces of the world, must serve the devil as slaves, if they will not decide to serve God as freemen."

The power of the weird sisters is nowhere in the tragedy exhibited as absolute, but always as relative. It is shown to depend upon what in a man's soul has affinities for that power. Where these affinities do not exist, their power is nought. But where they do exist, these outside evil forces are as quick to respond to them as Sin and Death in Milton's "Paradise Lost" are represented to have been. Even before the newly-created pair sinned, before the connatural forces started in them and were realized in act, Sin is made to say to Death, as they sit together within the gates of hell, "Methinks I feel new strength within me rise, wings growing, and dominion given me large beyond this deep; whatever draws me on, or sympathy, or some connatural force, powerful at greatest distance to unite, with secret amity, things of like kind, by secretest conveyance. Thou, my Shade inseparable, must with me along. Nor can I miss the way, so strongly drawn by this new-felt attraction and instinct. Whom thus the meagre Shadow answered soon: Go, whither Fate, and inclination strong, leads thee."

(It should be remarked here that Milton obeys the higher law in his grammar, as Shakespeare so often does; "fate" and "inclination strong" not constituting a compound idea, inclination strong being fate, when not controlled, he uses with these two subjects the singular verb "leads.")

"Go, whither Fate, and inclination strong, leads thee. I shall not lag behind, nor err the way, thou leading. So saying, with delight he snuffed the smell of mortal change on earth . .