On Blowing your Brains out.
I would put the question to any sensible man, whether he does or does not consider it nobler in the mind to suffer many inconveniences, to which slings and arrows are mere flea-bites by comparison—and especially I might indicate blighted affections, the procrastination of your family solicitor when there is property to be distributed, in which you have a share, losses on the Derby, tightness of the money-market, the impertinence of the fellow who keeps on calling for the Queen’s taxes, and, generally, the spurns that patient merit is obliged to put up with from all kinds of cads and humbugs, and stuck-up little beasts, who give themselves no end of airs, and try to ride rough-shod over everybody who has not had the same luck that they have—than to terminate one’s existence by an act of felo-de-se? Well, you know, the fact is that nobody would be fool enough to go on day after day standing this sort of thing, if it wasn’t for a deuced strong objection to becoming a body, and being sat upon by a dozen tradesmen, some of whom perhaps have been confoundedly rude to one in one’s life, when one has not happened to be able to pay one’s bills the moment one has been called upon in a sudden and peremptory, not to say insolent, manner to do so. There’s the rub! On consideration, most people will rather bear the ills they have than do anything desperate to get rid of them. (I have but this moment met with a passage in a shocking tragedy, by the well-known Shakespeare, that bears a decided family likeness to my philosophic proposition. It will scarcely be expected that I should expunge the foregoing observations, because of their likeness to what was written at a distant period of English literature.)—Punch.
——:o:——
The libretto to Ambroise Thomas’s opera of Hamlet was by M.M. Barbier and Carré, and their rendering of the Soliloquy shows the difficulty of translating Shakespeare’s blank verse, and metaphysical reasoning, into the orthodox French rhymed measure:—
Être ou ne pas être—O mystère!
Mourir—dormir—rêver.
Ah! s’il m’était permis pour t’aller retrouver,
De briser le lien qui m’attache à la terre!
Mais après? Quel est-il ce pays inconnu,
D’où pas un voyageur n’est encore revenu?