“Between who?”
“I mean, the matter that you read, my lord?”
“Slanders, sir,” said Hamlet, looking full at him, and pretending to point to a passage in the book, “for the satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak limbs; all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should be as old as I am—if like a crab you could go backward.”
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” said Polonius aside. “Will you walk out of the air, my lord?”
“Into my grave.”
“Indeed, that is out of the air,” remarked Polonius struck by the wisdom of Hamlet’s replies. “Well, I will leave him, and suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him and my daughter. My honourable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.”
“You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal,” said Hamlet, bowing low with exaggerated courtesy; then, as he turned away, the satire in his voice changed to a note of hopeless despair—“except my life—except my life—except my life,” he ended, with almost a groan.
“Fare you well, my lord,” said Polonius; and as he fussily took himself off, Hamlet muttered under his breath, “Those tedious old fools!”
Hamlet, for his own purpose, had chosen to amuse himself at the expense of the pompous old Chamberlain, but directly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appeared he was again himself, and the warm-hearted friend of old days. He greeted them with the utmost cordiality, and nothing could have exceeded the gracious charm of his manner. If only they had met him with the same frank candour, all would have been well; but his quick penetration soon discovered from their expression that there was something in the background, and he presently made them confess that their visit to Elsinore had not been prompted solely by the desire to see Hamlet, but that they had been sent for by the King and Queen. When Hamlet won from them reluctantly this admission, his trust in them fled, and he determined to be on his guard with them. He told them he could tell why they had been sent for, and thus they need not fear betraying any secret of the King and Queen.
“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises,” he said, “and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave, o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman either, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”