No play of Shakespeare has had a greater power of interesting spectators and readers, and none has given rise to a greater variety of conflicting interpretations. It has been rightly named a tragedy of thought, and in this respect as well as others takes its place beside "Julius Cæsar." Neither Brutus nor Hamlet is the victim of an overmastering passion as are the chief persons of the later tragedies-eg., "Othello," "Macbeth," "Coriolanus." The burden of a terrible duty is laid upon each of them, and neither is fitted for bearing such a burden. Brutus is disqualified for action by his moral idealism, his student-like habits, his capacity for dealing with abstractions rather than with men and things. Hamlet is disqualified for action by his excess of the reflective tendency, and by his unstable will, which alternates between complete inactivity and fits of excited energy. Naturally sensitive, he receives a painful shock from the hasty second marriage of his mother; already the springs of faith and joy in his nature are embittered; then follows the terrible discovery of his father's murder with the injunction laid upon him to revenge the crime; upon this again follow the repulses which he receives from Ophelia. A deep melancholy lays hold of his spirit, and all of life grows dark and sad to his vision. Although hating his father's murderer, he has little heart to push on his revenge. He is aware that he is suspected and surrounded by spies. Partly to baffle them, partly to create a veil behind which to seclude his true self, partly because his whole moral nature is indeed deeply disordered, he assumes the part of one whose wits have gone astray. Except for one loyal friend, he is alone among enemies. or supposed traitors. Ophelia he regards as no more loyal or honest to him than his mother had been to her dead husband. The ascertainment of Claudius's guilt by means of the play still leaves him incapable of the last decisive act of vengeance. Not so, however, with the King, who now recognizing his foe in Hamlet, does not delay to dispatch him to a bloody death in England. But there is in Hamlet a terrible power of sudden and desperate action. From the melancholy which broods over him after the burial of Ophelia, he rouses himself to the play of swords with Laertes, and at the last, with strength which leaps up before its final extinction, he accomplishes the punishment of the malefactor.

Horatio, with his fortitude, his self-possession, his strong equanimity, is a contrast to the Prince. And Laertes, who takes violent measures at the shortest notice to revenge his father's

murder, is in another way a contrast; but Laertes is the young gallant of the period, and his capacity for action arises in part from the absence of those moral checks of which Hamlet is sensible. Polonius is owner of the shallow wisdom of this world, and exhibits this grotesquely while now on the brink of dotage; he sees, but cannot see through Hamlet's ironical mockery of him. Ophelia is tender, sensitive, affectionate, but the reverse of heroic; she fails Hamlet in his need, and then in her turn becoming the sufferer, gives way under the pressure of her afflictions. We do not honor, we commiserate her.

The play is hardly consistent with respect to Hamlet's age. In Act V., Sc. 1., ls. 155-191, it is stated that he is thirty years old, while in Act I. he is spoken of as still quite youthful; yet only a few months, at most, can have elapsed in the interval of time between the beginning and the end of the action. His profoundly reflective soliloquies point to an age certainly past early youth.

Complete. All from Dowden's « Shakespeare,” London 1879. MacMillan & Co.

JOHN W. DRAPER

(1811-1882)

NE of the best essays of the nineteenth century was read to the students of Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia, in 1837, by John W. Draper, at that time professor of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy in that institution. It gave what is, no doubt, the first recorded definition of the idea he afterward developed in his "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," 1862. The extraordinary faculty he had of comprehending seemingly isolated facts in their relation to a general intellectual movement is illustrated in it by such a massing of the phenomena of progress as it would be hard to find elsewhere.

He was born near Liverpool, England, May 5th, 1811. Coming to the United States in his twenty-third year, he took his degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1836, and soon afterwards became professor of Chemistry, Natural Philosophy, and Physics, in Hampden-Sidney College. In 1839 he began a connection with the University of New York, which lasted until 1881. During this period of over forty years of scientific and literary activity, he made notable discoveries in physics, wrote a number of scientific text-books and "The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,”—a work which gave him the international reputation in literature his discoveries had given him in science. He died January 4th, 1882.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE (Read before the students of Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia, in 1837) Gentlemen:

B

EFORE we part, I am anxious to give you a brief historical sketch of the subjects we have studied during the past year, previous to awarding to the successful candidate the prize for which you have all contended with such emulation.

Of the science of those ages appropriately and emphatically called the dark, I need hardly speak. The fanatical spirit of the times brought its own destruction; the invasion of the west of

Europe by the Mohammedans and the Saracenic conquests ended in the intrusions of the Crusaders. But if these infidels had brought the Koran, they had brought too their books of astronomy and algebra. How true it is that the dispensations of an ever-watchful Providence accompany evil with good, and cause light to spring out of darkness. The sword of Charles Martel saved Europe from the persecutions of the prophet; but the Franks and Saxons had insensibly imbibed a taste for the more solid learning of the Spanish Moors. A great change too had taken place in the social relations of domestic life, and the disenthrallment of the fair sex from the degrading bondage in which it was held contributed in no small measure to the advancement to which the moral world was progressing. The right of inherit ance of property, and the possession of lands, a right first given in the later Roman Empire, was of less importance to the elevation of woman than the chivalrous feeling which began to infect the soldiers of every country. The change thus commencing was felt in every department of life. In England parents were forbidden any longer to expose their own children for public sale, -a degrading practice, which heretofore had been lawful. The introduction of silk into the southern provinces of Europe brought with it luxury in dress; and the invention of a new system of music by Aretin, aided in no small degree to develop those finer feelings of the heart-those feelings which music alone can touch. Nor was the improvement confined to the refinements of life; the Saracen had brought with him the arithmetic of Arabia, and had taught the Spaniards the use of the Eastern notation. As if too, to prepare the way for the grandest of all human inventions, a discovery was brought from the East that the papyrus of Egypt and the parchment of Europe might be replaced by a substance made from cotton; and shortly after, paper was made from linen rags.

Looking back to this period of intellectual infancy, there are many amusing incidents to be met with. Even the language which we speak was so poor and barren that the composition of the commonest surnames was uninvented; for it was not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that surnames were generally used as distinctive appellations. Improvement, which everywhere was germinating, was cherished by many of the crowned heads of Europe. Alphonso, King of Castile, imitating the example of some of the monarchs of Asia, was not only a zealous

student of nature, but was even the author of the famous astronomical tables which bear his name.

At the close of the thirteenth century the human intellect awoke from its sleep. The Monk of Pisa who invented spectacles- a most divine invention which gave sight to the blind — may be said, without any exaggeration, to have furnished eyes to the soul as well as the body. Shall we ascribe too much importance to this invention, if we impute to it the effect of drawing men's thoughts from the crudities of the metaphysical dogmas of the schools, to an investigation of the eternal truths of nature? It led the way to the bright career of discovery and invention. The magnetic needle came into common use, and the mariner, trusting to this mysterious guide, boldly crossed the broadest seas; the ships of the enterprising Venetians, passing beyond the utmost boundary of geographical knowledge, brought home the strange story of the discovery of Greenland and its desolate inhabitants. The lucubrations of the alchemists, too, were about to develop a capital result, not, indeed, the making of gold, but a result whose effect was to destroy forever the distinction of physical power: the savage was no longer to triumph over the civi lized man, nor were the works of art or of science ever again to be endangered by an irruption of ignorant barbarians. The power of man, his mere physical power, was indefinitely exalted, and the force which nature had denied him in making him one of the weakest of creatures was compensated by science more than a thousandfold when she gave him gunpowder. To this period, too, we are to refer another invention of vast benefit,the mode of consuming pit coal,-an invention which has exercised an immense influence over the condition of nations, and to which the country from whence we all draw our descent mainly owes her position in arts and arms.

Next came the "Great Epoch." Gunpowder had given to man a kind of earthly omnipotence; printing was to give his works immortality, to diffuse throughout all the ramifications of society the knowledge that had been hoarded up by a few. No more might the philosopher fear lest his labors, in the conflicting interests of nations or passions of party, should be lost. Civilized man could spread out and perpetuate his intellectual productions. If there be any great landmark in the history of the earth — anything that points out the distinctive character of one age from another, surely it is to be met with in these great discoveries.