He is not a commonplace pedant.  If Lear shows the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character.  Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other.  There is no attempt to force an interest:  everything is left for time and circumstances to unfold.  The attention is excited without effort, the incidents succeed each other as matters of course, the characters think and speak and act just as they might do, if left entirely to themselves.  There is no set purpose, no straining at a point.  The observations are suggested by the passing scene—­the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind.  The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark, at the remote period of time fixed upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of.  It would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and seen something of what was going on.  But here we are more than spectators.  We have not only ’the outward pageants and the signs of grief; but ’we have that within which passes show’.  We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise.  Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature:  but Shakespeare, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves.  This is a very great advantage.

The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius.  It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment.  Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be:  but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—­the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation.  He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again, where he alters the letters which Rosencraus and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death.  At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and always finds some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again.  For this reason he refuses to kill the King when he is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to some more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act ’that has no relish of salvation in it’: