comparison with the strikingly similar monologue in the fourth act of Goethe’s great poem; but the misfortune is, when admiration has been spent on particular passages, one can take no general impression away from the work except this, that the poet wrote under the influence of some sad disease of morbid sublimity, and his heroes were made in Titanic proportions, after his own likeness. In every view, therefore, except in regard to the power of one or two individual passages, the study of Manfred can only tend to raise in the mind of the reader a most profound admiration for the more healthy tone, the more ripe wisdom, the more rich material, and the more skilful treatment, of the German writer. With Shakespeare’s great work it is quite otherwise. Hamlet unquestionably has many striking points of similarity with Faust. The same moody melancholy, and tendency to contemplation of suicide; the same lofty discontent with his environment, and misanthropic contempt for the humanity with which he stood in direct relationship; the same communion with the unseen world, though in a different form; the same feebleness and indecision of character in the hero, with occasional blind plunges into strokes that hurry himself and others into ruin. In his morbid state of mind the ghost acts according to the same law on the hero of our great English tragedy that Mephistopheles does on the German doctor; but the ghost in the one case for the Devil, in the other—though both incarnated creations of a diseased mind—indicates in the strongest possible way the diverse character of the disease. Hamlet is an essentially noble character sunk into melancholy by the abnormal character of the immediate social element in which it was his destiny to move; the moody contemplation of the social wrongs which were rife round about him generated the idea of revenge, or taking the moral law into his own hand; and of this rash idea of revenge the ghost is dramatically the voice and the spur. But, though plunging himself and his environment into misery by following out his bloody suggestions, Hamlet never forfeits our respect. He is never selfish; and suffers more from excessive sensibility to the sins of others than from any faults that may be placed fairly at his own door. Otherwise with Faust; he is at bottom a compound of a sentimentalist and a sensualist; and, though the metaphysical perplexities in which at the outset of his career he is found entangled, excite in the reader some emotion of pity, yet the feebleness and irresolution of his conduct afterwards, the ease with which he allows himself to be dragged by his fiendish guide through all kinds of selfish indulgence and moral meanness, cannot fail to inoculate the reader with a strong feeling of contempt. This no doubt was 

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