as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
is quite different.

(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in