And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,--too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.
The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,--"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose macaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."
I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.
But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds which took up so readily with the theory of Hamlet's madness; all of them incapable of irony, therefore not competent to fly into his meaning; limited, like the dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the plain appearance. "Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him," says Osrick.
So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death with a presentiment which his soul was great enough to put aside, and also give him breath to say how great it was: "We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." No crotchet of real or assumed madness could lurk in the repose of such a man.
[Footnote 7: One interpretation of this word gives it a Jewish origin, and makes of it the Dance of the Maccabees, established to commemorate the martyrdom of the seven brothers of the Maccabees, together with Eleazar and their mother, who went out to death in succession. This was imitated by a solemn dance of priests and civil authorities, who went out in turn and disappeared as if to death. Afterwards, in mediæval times, the dance was emphasized by the introduction of the figure of Death as the leader of it. Another interpretation derives the word from the Arabic _Makbar_, pl. _Makabir_, place of interment.]