It was not, therefore, till after Christmas-tide that Hamlet heard the secret of the grave from his father's ghost. Before this ghostly visit, and prior to the Christmas season, occurred the queen's marriage, and of its haste the prince com. plains to Horatio:

"Ham. But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
Hor. My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
Ham. I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
Hor. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.

Ham. Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."

Again, in the soliloquy of the same scene, in which Hamlet expresses his strong feelings of disgust at his mother's shameful haste in marrying within a month of his father's death, we learn that Claudius had murdered his brother in the previous month of November:

Let me not think on 't,-Frailty, thy name is woman!-
A little month, or ere those shoes were old

With which she followed my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears; why, she, even she-

O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,

Would have mourned longer-married with my uncle."

In the interim, Hamlet's mind was clouded by suspicion, and only after the Christmas season were his fears confirmed by the revelations of his father's ghost. This season must be measured according to the custom which in Hamlet's day was common to Denmark, as well as to all Christendom. Christmastide was then devoted to religious and social functions which, beginning on the eve of Christmas, continued till the festival of Epiphany and its octave. Epiphany, which signifies the manifestation of the Lord, is a solemn festival, celebrated on January the sixth with great religious pomp and ceremony; it is considered the real Christmas of gentile peoples, who as distinct from the Jews, were, in the person

of the Magi, called by the miraculous star to the knowledge of the "New-born King."

If, therefore, the ghost of Hamlet's father could not, according to the text, bring his message from the grave, till after the Christmas holidays; and, if Christmastide, according to Catholic liturgy, always closes on the octave of the Epiphany, which is January the thirteenth, we have the near date of the ghost's first appearance in the opening of the drama, when in midwinter the lonely sentinels complain of the bitter cold and the shrewdly biting air. It was the month of March following, when Hamlet, in the Third Act, slew Polonius, as is indicated by the words of Ophelia: "I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died." Now, if violets bloom in England in March, and wilt in the early part of April, we have again indicated, not only the time of Polonius's death, but also the time of the closing is of the drama. Throughout the Fourth and Fifth Acts, which follow closely on Polonius's death, Hamlet was no longer a free agent, but a prisoner of the King; Claudius knew that his own death was intended by the stroke that killed Polonius, and in consequence he kept an anxious and watchful eye upon the Prince, and appointed trusted guards to attend him. The time of the three preceding Acts, beginning towards the middle of January, and continuing till the close of March, runs through a space of little more than two months, and these two months are the sole measure of the delay which is charged to Hamlet's vacillating character.

What did Hamlet do during this time of less than three months? Was he inactive, a dreamer, or a procrastinator, ever immersed in doubt, when duty called to action? None of these was he, even though his Herculean and seemingly impossible task would have staggered the courage and blighted the resolve of many a brave man. To test the verity and veracity of his preternatural visitor; to prepare a play, and instruct the players in an effort to force from the King an

admission of his guilt; to save his mother's honor, and liberate her soul from an incestuous wedlock; to obtain such evident proof of the guilt of Claudius, as to keep his soul untainted by the crime of regicide; and to preserve his own good name untarnished, and justify his bloody deed in the eyes of all Denmark: all these were included in his purpose; and surely, considering his insuperable difficulties, two months were not too long a time to spend in their accomplish ment. They who discredit the Prince's character, by dubbing him a dreamer, a refiner of morals, a vacillator whose overthinking paralyzed his power of action, and all, because he would not murder the king at sight on the unsubstantial word of an immaterial spectre, are refuted by the fact of the insuperable subjective and objective difficulties which confronted him, and in the face of which, "it would have been vice to act, whereas it was virtue to delay."

From Shakespeare's skillful legerdemain, we turn to consider the more important and substantial view, which, on the dramatist's own express testimony, supposes the Prince to have reached the more mature age of thirty years. There should be, it seems, little room for doubt; in the first scene of the last Act, Shakespeare explicitly affirms in the person of the grave-digger, that Hamlet's age is thirty years. If the Prince was born on the same day on which his father overcame Fortinbras; and, if on that same day, the grave-digger entered upon his office, and continued therein for thirty years, we have indisputable evidence of Hamlet's true age:

Ham. How long hast thou been a grave-digger?
First Clown. I came to't that day that our last king
Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.

Ham. How long is that since?

F. Clown. Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that: it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is mad and sent into England. Why here in Denmark, I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.

Besides this evidence, there are other proofs that the age of thirty, far from being unsuitable to Hamlet, is rather in conformity with the action of the play. Hamlet himself assigns a married life of thirty years to the Player-king and queen; and later, when charging his mother with incestuous marriage, addresses her as a matron of middle age:

"You cannot call it love; for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment."'

Furthermore, throughout the play, Hamlet is seen revealed, a man fully matured in mind, firmly formed in character, and with an habitual tendency to philosophize on every phase of life; qualities, certainly not found in a fledgling youth.

If it be objected that Laertes speaks of Hamlet's love for Ophelia, as "a violet in the youth of primy nature"; and again, that Polonius calls him "young Hamlet," the difficulty is rather apparent than real; it depends for solution upon the Poet's idea of youthfulness, and his idea is seen in various dramas to be very comprehensive. He crowns his favorite prince Hal. as Henry V. at the age of twenty-six, and, nevertheless, pictures him "in the very May morn of his youth." Moreover, when in Much Ado about Nothing, he says in the person of Borachio: "How giddily he turns about all the hot bloods, between fourteen and five and thirty," he defines his idea of youthfulness, by limiting its extremes to fourteen and thirty-five years. Hamlet's age, therefore, falling within these extremes, the Poet could correctly picture him as a man still in the heyday of his years.

It is again objected that young noblemen in the Elizabethan era usually left the university under the age of twenty; hence Hamlet must have been in his teens on leaving Wittenberg. But the parity underlying this objection seems untenable. Ignoring the difference of time, it supposes the Denmark of the eleventh century, in which Shakespeare has cast

the whole drama, to have attained the same degree of civilization, and to have employed that same system of education as flourished in England in the Elizabethan era. "Blackstone's criticism," says Tschischwitz, "is founded on a very erroneous idea of German universities and their arrangements. Records show that students attending institutions of higher learning, in Hamlet's day, and even long after, were with very rare exceptions, all beyond the age of twenty-one years. What, therefore, may be true of conditions of education in the England of Shakespeare's day, is wholly without warrant for Denmark of the eleventh century. Of those days, a chronieler writes: "For fashion sake, some Danes will put their children to school, but they send them not till they are fourteen years of age." It is an historic fact that at that period Denmark being far behind its southern neighbors in civilization, had but few schools, and none for higher education; hence, as already shown, the nobility of Hamlet's time were accustomed to send their sons to the famous schools of Germany to acquire a higher education than a rude civiliza tion could offer them at home. It is reasonable, however, to suppose that considering the hardships and hazards of travel in those days these scions of nobility were not allowed to wander in foreign lands in quest of education, until they had attained the mature age of discretion, self-reliance, and defense.

Certain critics who do not weigh these considerations, seem inclined to compromise the question. They suppose that Shakespeare began in the earlier scenes to portray the Prince in the "very heyday of primy nature," but as the fearful experience which he undergoes in the progress of the drama, so enlivens and stimulates his faculties, as to ripen his character and prematurely develop his intellectual powers, the Poet felt it necessary to smooth away any visible discrepancy