This wonderful work, engraved for Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery, is
esteemed among the best of Fuseli's works. It is, indeed, strangely wild
and superhuman--if ever a Spirit visited earth, it must have appeared to
Fuseli. The "majesty of buried Denmark" is no vulgar ghost such as
scares the belated rustic, but a sad and majestic shape with the port of
a god; to imagine this, required poetry, and in that our artist was
never deficient. He had fine taste in matters of high import; he drew
the boundary line between the terrible and the horrible, and he never
passed it; the former he knew was allied to grandeur, the latter to
deformity and disgust. An eminent metaphysician visited the gallery
before the public exhibition; he saw the Hamlet's Ghost of Fuseli, and
exclaimed, like Burns' rustic in Halloween, "Lord, preserve me!" He
declared that it haunted him round the room.