gives credibility and importance to this phænomenon. Horatio's address to the Ghost is brief and pertinent, and the whole purport of it agreeable to the vulgar conceptions of these matters.

HORATIO.

Stay, illufion!

If thou haft any found, or use of voice,

Speak to me.

If there be any good thing to be done,

That may to thee do eafe, and grace to me,
Speak to me.

If thou art privy to thy country's fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
Oh speak!

Or, if thou hast uphoarded in thy life

Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,

For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, Speak of it.

Its vanishing at the crowing of the Cock, is another circumstance of the established fuperstition,

Young Hamlet's indignation at his mo

ther's

ther's hafty and inceftuous marriage, his forrow for his father's death, the character he gives of that prince, prepare the spectator to fympathize with his wrongs and fufferings. The Son, as is natural, with much more vehement emotion than Horatio did, addreffes his Father's fhade. Hamlet's terror, his astonishment, his vehement defire to know the cause of this vifitation, are irresistibly communicated to the spectator by the following speech.

HAMLET.

Angels and minifters of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heav'n, or blafts from hell,

Be thy intents wicked or charitable,

Thou com'ft in fuch a questionable shape,

That I will fpeak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet,

King, father, royal Dane: oh! answer me;

Let me not burft in ignorance; but tell,

Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burft their cearments? Why the fepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn'd,

Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws,

To caft thee up again? What may this mean,

That

That thou, dead corse, again, in compleat steel,

Revifit'ft thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous?

Never did the Grecian Muse of Tragedy relate a tale fo full of pity and terror, as is imparted by the Ghost. Every circumstance melts us with compaffion; and with what horror do we hear him say!

GHOST.

But that I am forbid

To tell the fecrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold, whofe lighteft word
Would harrow up thy foul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like ftars, ftart from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood.

All that follows is folemn, fad, and deeply affecting.

Whatever in Hamlet belongs to the præ

ternatural,

ternatural, is perfectly fine; the rest of the play does not come within the fubject of this chapter.

The ingenious criticism on the play of the Tempest, published in the Adventurer, has made it unneceffary to enlarge on that admirable piece, which alone would prove our Author to have had a fertile, a sublime, and original genius.

THE