tempest of passion is to keep a temperance and smoothness.  The million, we gather from the first passage, cares nothing for construction; and so, we learn in the second passage, the barren spectators want to laugh at the clown instead of attending to some necessary question of the play.  Hamlet’s hatred of exaggeration is marked in both passages.  And so (as already pointed out, p. 133) in the play-scene, when his own lines are going to be delivered, he impatiently calls out to the actor to leave his damnable faces and begin; and at the grave of Ophelia he is furious with what he thinks the exaggeration of Laertes, burlesques his language, and breaks off with the words,

                  Nay, an thou’lt mouth,
     I’ll rant as well as thou.

Now if Hamlet’s praise of the Aeneas and Dido play and speech is ironical, his later advice to the player must surely be ironical too:  and who will maintain that?  And if in the one passage Hamlet is serious but Shakespeare ironical, then in the other passage all those famous remarks about drama and acting, which have been cherished as Shakespeare’s by all the world, express the opposite of Shakespeare’s opinion:  and who will maintain that?  And if Hamlet and Shakespeare are both serious—­and nothing else is credible—­then, to Hamlet and Shakespeare, the speeches of Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia’s grave are rant, but the speech of Aeneas to Dido is not rant.  Is it not evident that he meant it for an exalted narrative speech of ‘passion,’ in a style which, though he may not have adopted it, he still approved and despised the million for not approving,—­a speech to be delivered with temperance or modesty, but not too tamely neither?  Is he not aiming here to do precisely what Marlowe aimed to do when he proposed to lead the audience

     From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
     And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

to ‘stately’ themes which beget ‘high astounding terms’?  And is it strange that, like Marlowe in Tamburlaine, he adopted a style marred in places by that which we think bombast, but which the author meant to be more ‘handsome than fine’?

2.  If this is so, we can easily understand how it comes about that the speech of Aeneas contains lines which are unquestionably grand and free from any suspicion of bombast, and others which, though not free from that suspicion, are nevertheless highly poetic.  To the first class certainly belongs the passage beginning, ‘But as we often see.’  To the second belongs the description of Pyrrhus, covered with blood that was

     Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
     That lend a tyrannous and damned light
     To their lord’s murder;

and again the picture of Pyrrhus standing like a tyrant in a picture, with his uplifted arm arrested in act to strike by the crash of the falling towers of Ilium.  It is surely impossible to say that these lines are merely absurd and not in the least grand; and with them I should join the passage about Fortune’s wheel, and the concluding lines.