Shakspere in the graveyard scene. He shows us every side of this
whimsical character who says of himself that he has no staying power
for any standpoint, but that he is driven about by incalculable
emergencies.

Let us read a passage in Essay II (12), and compare it with Hamlet's
enigmatic conduct towards Laertes. Montaigne describes himself in
these sentences:--'Being of a soft and somewhat heavy temperament, I
have no great experience of those violent agitations which mostly
come like a surprise upon our mind without allowing it leisure to
collect itself.' In spite of the resistance--he further says--which
he endeavoured to offer, even he, however, was occasionally thus
seized. He felt these agitations rising and growing in, and becoming
master over, himself. As in drunkenness, things then appeared to him
otherwise than he usually saw them. 'I manifestly saw the advantages
of the object which I sought after, augmenting and growing; and I felt
them becoming greater and swelling by the wind of my imagination.
I felt the difficulties of my enterprise becoming easier and simpler,
my reasoning and my conscience drawing back. But, that fire being gone,
all of a sudden, as with the flash of lightning, my mind resumed another
view, another condition, another judgment.'

In this manner Hamlet conducts himself towards Laertes. A great grief
takes possession of him when he hears of the death of Ophelia: he leaps,
like Laertes, into her grave; he grapples with him; he warns him that,
though 'not splenetive and rash,' he (Hamlet) yet has 'something
dangerous' in him. (He means the daimon which so fatally impelled
him against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.) Hamlet and Laertes wrestle,
but they are parted by the attendants. Hamlet begins boasting, in
high-flown language, of what great things he would be able to do.