Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thoul't mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou."
The queen justly observes:
"This is mere madness."
Hamlet goes off, but maintains his extravagance of language to the last:
"Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, and dog will have his day."
If, then, a literary jury be required to decide this question, the point on which they have to give a verdict is, whether to drink vinegar (or wormwood-wine) or to drink up a river is more in consonance with the tenor of Hamlet's speech. Theobald indeed says, that "Hamlet is not proposing any impossibilities to Laertes, such as drinking up a river would be, but rather seems to mean, Wilt thou resolve to do things the most shocking and distasteful to human nature?" But on what ground does this assertion rest? Laertes himself commences with what we may surely call an impossibility:
"Till of this flat," &c.
And Hamlet speaks of more impossibilities, when he talks of throwing up "millions of acres," to "make Ossa like a wart." The drinking up a river is certainly more in unison with these extravagant proposals than a defiance "to swallow down (as Theobald has it) large draughts of vinegar;" or, as Malone gives it, "to drink a potion of vinegar." Such a proposition, Theobald admits, "is not very grand;" "a challenge to hazard a fit of the heartburn or the colic, is," says Steevens, "not very magnificent." But it is not only far from "grand" and "magnificent," but, what is worse, it is utterly tame and spiritless, in a place where anything but tameness is wanted, and where it is, quite out of keeping with the rest of the speech. MR. HICKSON, it is true, says (Vol. ii, p. 329.), that "the notion of drinking up a river would be quite unmeaning and out of place;" but this assertion is as groundless as Theobald's, and is somewhat surprising from a gentleman who exhorts those who would be critics "to master the grammatical construction of a passage, deducing therefrom its general sense," and, we may presume, its general drift, "before they attempt to fix the meaning of a doubtful word." Had MR. HICKSON looked to the general drift of this passage, before he attempted to fix the meaning of eisell, or to concur with MR. SINGER of 1850 in his attempt to fix it, he would, we may suppose, have been less ready to pronounce the notion of drinking up a river out of place. It would have been better for him to have adhered to the judgment of Archdeacon Nares, as cited by MR. SINGER (Vol. ii., p. 241.):—"The challenge to drink vinegar, in such a rant," says the Archdeacon, "is so inconsistent, and even ridiculous, that we must decide for the river, whether its name be exactly found or not. To drink up a river, and eat a crocodile with his impenetrable scales, are two things equally impossible. There is no kind of comparison between the others."