Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt and
chastised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and lifelong
champion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far different
towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on
the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions
would have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_.
Having now come perforce to the inevitable verge of _Hamlet_, I hasten to
declare that I can advance no pretension to compete with the claim of
that "literary man" who became immortal by dint of one dinner with a
bishop, and in right of that last glass poured out for him in sign of
amity by "Sylvester Blougram, styled _in partibus Episcopus_, _necnon_
the deuce knows what." I do not propose to prove my perception of any
point in the character of Hamlet "unseized by the Germans yet." I can
only determine, as the Church Catechism was long since wont to bid me,
"to keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue" not only
"from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering"--though this itself is a form
of abstinence not universally or even commonly practised among the
rampant rout of rival commentators--but also, now as ever throughout this
study, from all conscious repetition of what others have said before me.
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