1. Lines 29, 30: their encounters, though not personal, HAVE been royally attorneyed.-F. 1 prints hath. The correction is made in F. 2.

2. Line 33: shook hands, as over A VAST.-So F. 1; the later Ff. read a vast sea. The reading of F. 1 is confirmed by a passage in Pericles, iii. 1. 1:

Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges; where vast is unmistakably used for the boundless sea. Henley observes, in reference to the words quoted from the text, with the latter part of the clause (and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds), that

Shakespeare may have had in mind "a device common in the title-page of old books, of two hands extended from opposite clouds, and joined as in token of friendship over a wide waste of country."

3. Line 43: one that, indeed, PHYSICS the subject.-Compare Cymbeline, iii. 2. 34:

Some griefs are med'cinable; that is one of them,
For it doth physic love;

and Macbeth, ii. 3. 55:

The labour we delight in physics pain. Medicine, as a verb, is used in just the same sense in Cymbeline, iv. 2. 243: "Great griefs, I see, medicine the less;" and in Othello, iii. 3. 332.

No SNEAPING winds at home. That is apparently used for O that, as in the passage cited by Farmer from The Two Noble Kinsmen, iii. 1. 12: In thy rumination

That I, poor man, might eftsoons come between,

And chop on some cold thought! Sneaping (ie. checking or nipping) is used in Love's Labour's Lost, i. 1. 100: "an envious sneaping frost;" and in Lucrece, 333:

And give the sneaped birds more cause to sing.

5. Line 41: gest.-This word (from O. Fr. giste) means a stage or stopping-place in a journey; commonly used of the royal progresses. Steevens quotes Webster, The White Devil, 1612:

Do, like the gests in the progress,
You know where you shall find me.

6. Line 42: good deed, meaning indeed (the good being simply an expletive), may be compared with such a phrase as "in good sooth" (Tempest, ii. 2. 150).

7. Line 43: a jar o' the clock; i.e. a tick of the clock. Holt White cites from Heywood, Troia Britannica, 1609, c. 4, st. 107:

He hears no waking-clocke nor watch to jarre.

Compare Richard II. v. 5. 51, 52:

My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine ears.

8. Line 44: What lady SHE her lord.-Schmidt renders this curious expression, "i.e. a woman that is a lady." Collier and Dyce read should instead of she, taking the she of the Ff. to be a misprint for the abbreviation shd. But compare my she," iv. 4. 360, below. Compare, too,

Massinger, The Bondman, i. 3:

I'll kiss him for the honour of my country,
With any she in Corinth

and Middleton, Women beware Women, ii. 1:

Sir, I could give as shrewd a lift to chastity
As any she that wears a tongue in Florence.

9. Line 62: lordings.—Lording, the diminutive of lord, is found in The Passionate Pilgrim, xvi.: “It was a lording's daughter." Lordings is frequently used in Chaucer, often at the beginning of a speech, in the sense of "Sirs," See Canterbury Tales, Prologue (ed. Morris, Clarendon Press, 1879), 1. 761:

And sayde thus: "Lo, lordynges, trewely Ye ben to me right welcome hertely;" and again, 1. 788 below: 'Lordynges,' quoth he."

10. Lines 69-71:

we knew not

The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd

That any did.

The later Ff. read The doctrine of ill-doing, no, nor dream'd, and some editors have accepted this attempt to amend the metre. Doctrine ought, of course, to be pronounced as a trisyllable, and the stress to be laid (as it should be) on ill rather than on doing-a point of metre which may be illustrated from Mr. Swinburne's Songs of the Springtides, p. 8:

And he that much less loves it than he hates
All wrong-doing that is done

Anywhere, always underneath the sun Shall live a mightier life than time's or fate's. 11. Lines 95, 96:

ere

With spur we HEAT an acre.

Heat seems to be used here in the same sense as "a heat" in running. Mr. Hudson in his edition of the play says: Mr. Joseph Crosby, in a letter to me, justly observes that the accompanying words, 'to th' goal,' show that the metaphor is from the race-course.' And he adds that 'heat is not simply the distance run, but the sportingterm for the race itself; 'winning the heat,' 'running the heat,' &c." Collier's Corrector very unnecessarily alters heat into clear.

12. Line 104: AND CLAP thyself my love.-F. 1 has A clap, a misprint corrected in the later Ff. To clap hands over a bargain is still no uncommon expression (though strike is now the more usual word); compare Henry V. v. 2. 133: "and so clap hands and a bargain." Malone says that to clap hands was a common part of the ceremony of troth-plighting, and he gives an instance of the phrase from Middleton, No Wit, No Help like a Woman's, 1657, iv. 1. 155:

There these young lovers shall clap hands together.

13. Line 113: bounty, fertile bosom.-I fail to see how this expression is improved, as many editors think, by Hanmer's emendation, bounty's fertile bosom. There is a slight difference in the form of the words, and that is all: the original reading being the more poetical. Steevens well compares Timon of Athens, iv. 3. 177-179: Common mother, thou,

Whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast,
Teems, and feeds all.

14. Line 115: paddling palms.-See the passage in Othello, ii. 1. 259-265, where paddling “with the palm of his hand" is explained by Iago, in all its significance, as a patent sign of Desdemona's fondness for Cassio. 15. Lines 117, 118:

and then to sigh, as 't were

THE MORT O' THE DEER.

This has almost always been explained as a flourish upon the horn, blown at the death of the deer, which makes, certainly, a curious simile. In a letter to the Academy, of October 29, 1887, Prof. Skeat puts forward an explanation which harmonizes very much better with the context, and is probably the true one. "The fact is," he says, 'that mort just seems 'death;' neither more nor less, la mort, sans phrase.' The sigh is that of the exhausted and dying deer; and the simile is natural and easy. The commentators wanted to air their learning, and Steevens quotes from Greene: 'He that bloweth the mort before the death of the buck, may very well miss of his fees;' see this quotation, and another like it, duly entered in Nares. Again, Steevens refers to the oldest copy of 'Chevy Chase' The [they] blewe a mort uppone the bent;' and so, indeed, the line appears in Percy's Reliques. I regret to say I have fallen into the trap myself. I have so printed the line in my Specimens of English, part iii. p. 68, 1. 16. But I honestly collated the text with the

MS., and duly made a note that the MS. reading is mot. And mot happens to be quite right. The careful Cotgrave duly explains the French mot as 'the note winded by a huntsman on his horne,' and it is the true and usual word. We have Chaucer's authority for it in the Book of the Duchesse, 1. 376. In the Treatise on Venery,' by Twety, printed in Reliquiae Antiquæ, i. 153, we read: And when the hert is take, ye shal blowe foure motys.' It is clear that the phrase 'to blow a mot' was turned into 'to blow a mort' by that powerful corrupter of language, popular etymology." Collier, in his edition of Shakespeare privately printed in 1876, explains the term correctly: "the 'mort' o' the deer is the death of the deer, when it heaves its last sigh."

16. Line 123: We must be NEAT; not neat, but cleanly, captain.-"Leontes," says Johnson, "seeing his son's nose smutch'd, cries, 'We must be neat:' then recollecting that neat is the ancient term for horned cattle, he says, 'not neat, but cleanly.'

17. Line 125: Still VIRGINALLING.-Steevens compares Dekker's Satiromastix, 1602: "When we have husbands, we play upon them like virginal jacks, they must rise or fall to our humours, else they'll never get any good strains of music out of one of us." Compare in this connection Sonnet cxxviii., where the idea in the text is developed. The virginal was a sort of rectangular or oblong spinet, of the same shape as the clavichord, and with the same arrangement of keyboard. An ancient inscription on a wall of the Manor House of Leckington, Yorkshire, said to be as old as the time of Henry VII., reads:

A slac strynge in a Virginall soundithe not aright, It doth abide no wrestinge, it is so loose and light; The sound-borde crasede, forsith the instrumente, Throw misgovarnance, to meke notes which was not his intent. Compare Blount, Glossographia, 1656: "Virginal (virginalis), maidenly, virginlike, hence the name of that musical instrument called Virginals, because maids and virgins do most commonly play on them." Another explanation of the name is that keyed stringed instruments were used to accompany the hymn "Angelus ad Virginem," as similar instruments without keys, the psaltery for instance, had been before them. From Henry VII.'s time to nearly the close of the 17th century, Virginal in England included all quilled keyboard instruments, the harpsichord and trapeze-shaped spinet, as well as the rectangular spinet. I take these particulars from Mr. Barclay Squire's article, Virginal, in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. iv.

Blacks was a term used for mourning garments. Compare Massinger and Middleton, The Old Law, ii. 1:

I would not hear of blacks, I was so light,
But chose a colour orient like my mind:
For blacks are often such dissembling mourners,
There is no credit given to 't; it has lost
All reputation by false sons and widows.
Now I would have men know what I resemble,

A truth, indeed; 'tis joy clad like a joy;
Which is more honest than a cunning grief,
That's only faced with sables for a show,
But gaudy-hearted.

19. Line 137: my collop!-Compare I. Henry VI. v. 4. 18: God knows thou art a collop of my flesh;

and see the note on that passage (vol. i. p. 343, note 254).

20. Line 148: LEON. What cheer? how is 't with you, best brother?-Hanmer gives this line to Polixenes, and the change has been adopted by most editors-even the Cambridge. It seems to me unnecessary. Leontes wants to say something, because he sees Polixenes and Hermione are observing his altered looks, and so, in answer to the former's How, my lord! he replies with a counterquestion, in which one may even see a touch of his uneasy suspicion, to which he cannot help giving vent in indirect ways. It will be noticed that Leontes, a little below, calls Polixenes brother, as in this line; and again, a little below that, he speaks to Hermione of "our brother's welcome."

21. Line 149: you look as if you held a brow of much distraction. This line is printed by most editors as two, you look being joined, metrically, with the preceding line; an arrangement which does not result in harmony. It is evident that the printers of the Folio set the line in its present form advisedly, for in the original copy the catch-word Leo. is moved back so as to get room for the whole line.

22. Lines 161, 162:

Will you take eggs for money?

Mam. No, my lord, I'll fight.

To take eggs for money was a proverbial phrase, meaning to put up with an affront, or to act in a cowardly manner. Boswell quotes Robert Dallington, A Method for Travell, 1593: "L'infanterie Francoise escaramouche bravement de loin et la Cavallerie a une furieuse brutée a l'affront, puis apres q'elle s'accomode." Reed gives a translation of this sentence, occuring in Relations of the most famous Kingdomes and Commonwealths thorowout the World, 1630: "The French infantry skirmisheth bravely afarre off, and cavallery gives a furious onset at the first charge; but after the first heat they will take eggs for their money” (p. 154).

23. Line 163: happy man be's dole !-A proverbial expression. See Taming of the Shrew, note 38.

24. Line 177: APPARENT to my heart; i.e. next to my heart. Compare the French apparenté, related, or of kin; from which our phrase, the heir apparent, is derived. 25. Line 183: How she holds up the NEB, the bill to him! -Neb, used generally of a bird's bill, is Anglo-Saxon for face, mouth, beak. Skeat, in his Etymological Dictionary, quotes the Ancren Riwle (Camden Society ed.): "Ostende mihi faciem, sheau thi neb to me" (p. 73). Ogilvie, Imperial Dictionary, quotes Scott: "the neb o' them's never out of mischief." Boyer, French Dictionary, has "The Nib of a bird, Bec d'oiseau." Steevens quotes from the story of Anne of Hungary in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1566: "the amorous wormes of love did bitterly gnawe and teare his heart wyth the nebs of their forked heads."

26. Line 209: I am like you, THEY SAY.-This is the reading of F. 2. F. 1 has say.

27. Line 217: rounding.-"To round in the ear" is a familiar phrase; compare King John, ii. 1. 566, 567: