"Hamlet."

Mr. Clapp's final lecture, delivered in Sanders Theatre last evening, was enthusiastically heard by a large audience. The lecture proved to be one of the most interesting of the series. Mr. Clapp said in part:

"Hamlet" has had a singular power over the minds of men and women. It stands alone, the most melancholy and the most popular of all works. It has been translated into twenty seven tongues, and even during the restoration of the Stuarts, when the rest of Shakspere's plays were for the time forgotten in England, Hamlet continued to be played. This play, standing as it does among the plays of the tragic period, is the manifestation of some great grief which has entered Shakspere's life at this time. It represents also the impression which human tragedy made on his mind.

The great ethical truth to be found in "Hamlet" is the disaster, not of wickedness, but of virtue impotent and inactive. Hamlet, although in many ways a splendid character is possessed, in the words of a French critic of note, of "a will which is strongly deemed to have the willing power, but which is powerless to furnish itself with motive for the deed." In speaking of the New Testament, John Ruskin has said what may be well applied to the death of the hero of the play, that the most soul-stirring picture drawn by the Savior is the terrible condemnation of the rejected,--not of the evil doers, but of those who have failed to do good.