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of any word in the old copy, without substituting another in its place, is always dangerous. Our au thor, I suppose, wrote

-at

Which end o' the beam she'd bow.

MALONE.

138. Than we bring men to comfort them ;- -] It does not clearly appear whether the king and these lords' thought the ship lost. This passage seems to imply, that they were themselves confident of returning, but imagined part of the fleet destroyed. Why, indeed, should Sebastian plot against his brother in the following scene, unless he knew how to find the kingdom which he was to inherit. JOHNSON. 161. Bourn, bound of land, &c.] A bourn, in this place, signifies limit, a meer, a land-mark.

STEEVENS.

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:] The metre of this line is defective. Many of the defects in our author's metre have arisen from the words of one line being transferred to another. In the present instance the line that precedes this is redundant. Perhaps the words have here, as in many other passages, been shuffled out of their places. We might read :

And use of service none; succession,

Contract, bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard,

none.

It must be owned, however, that in the passage in Montaigne,

Diij

Montaigne, the words contract and succession, are arranged in the same manner as in the first folio.

If the error did not happen in this way, bourn might have been used as a dissyllable, and the word omitted at the press might have been none.

-Contract, succession,

None; bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard,
MALONE.

none.

167. The latter-end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.] All this dialogue is a fine satire on the Utopian treatises of government, and the impracticable inconsistent schemes therein recommended.

WARBURTON.

After perusing the foregoing extract from Montaigne, the reader perhaps may entertain some doubts of the truth of this remark of Dr. Warburton.

171.

in K. Lear:

66

MALONE.

-any engine.] An engine is the rack. So

-like an engine, wrench'd by frame of

nature

"From the fix'd place."

It may, however, be used here in its common signification of instrument of war, or military machine. STEEVENS.

173. —all foizon,-] Foison, or foizon, signifies plenty, ubertas, not moisture, or juice of grass or other herbs, as Mr. Pope says. EDWARDS.

Foyson is pure French, and signifies plenty.

So

So in Warner's Albion's England, 1602, B. XIII.

ch. 78.

"Union, in breefe, is foysonous, and discorde works decay."

Mr. Pope, however, is not entirely mistaken, as foison, or fizon, sometimes bears the meaning which he has affixed to it. See Ray's Collection of South and East Country words. STEEVENS. 178. I would with such perfection govern, sir,

To excel the golden age.] So Montaigne, ubi supra: "Me seemeth that what in those [newly discovered] nations, we see by experience, doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious poesie hath proudly embellished the golden age, and all the quaint inventions to faine a happy condition of man, but also the conceptions and desire of philosophy."

240. I am more serious than my custom: you

MALONE.

Must be so too, if heed me; which to do,

Trebles thee o'er.] This passage is repre

sented to me as an obscure one. The meaning of it seems to be--You must put on more than your usual seriousness, if you are disposed to pay a proper attention to my proposal; which attention if you bestow, it will in the end make you thrice what you are. Sebastian is already brother to the throne; but, being made a king by Antonio's contrivance, would be (according to our author's idea of greatness) thrice the man he was before. In this sense he would be trebled o'er. So, in Pericles, 1609:

"-the

the master calls

"And trebles the confusion."

Again, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634:

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258. this lord of weak remembrance,-] This lord, who, being now in his dotage, has outlived his faculty of remembering; and who, once laid in the ground, shall be as little remembered himself, as he can now remember other things. JOHNSON,

261. For he's a spirit of persuasion,-] Of this entangled sentence I can draw no sense from the present reading, and therefore imagine that the author gave it thus:

For he, a spirit of persuasion, only
Professes to persuade.

Of which the meaning may be either, that he alone, who is a spirit of persuasion, professes to persuade the king; or that, He only professes to persuade, that is, without being so persuaded himself, he makes a show of persuading the king. JOHNSON,

The meaning may be-He is a mere rhetorician, one who professes the art of persuasion, and nothing else; i. e. he professes to persuade another to believe that of which he himself is not convinced: he is content to be plausible, that has no further aim. The construction from which I draw this sense, is undoubtedly harsh; but, in a writer like Shakspere, all that is perplexed and irregular is not to be regarded as a corruption of the text. STEEVENS.

270. -a wink beyond,] That this is the utmost extent of the prospect of ambition, the point where the eye can pass no further, but where objects lose their distinctness, so that what is there discovered, is faint, obscure, and doubtful. JOHNSON.

278. she that from Naples

Can have no note, &c.] Shakspere's great ignorance of geography is not more conspicuous in any instance than in this, where he supposes Tunis and Naples to have been at such an immeasurable distance from each other. He may, however, be countenanced by Apollonius Rhodius, who says that both the Rhone and Po meet in one, and discharge themselves into the gulph of Venice; and by Æschylus, who has placed the river Eridanus in Spain.

282.

These lines are in the old edition thus:

-though some cast again;

And, by that destiny, to perform an aƐt,'
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In your and my discharge.

The reading in the later editions is without authority. The old text may very well stand, except that in the last line in should be is, and perhaps we might better sayand that by destiny; it being a common plea of wickedness to call temptation destiny. JOHNSON.

It should be remembered, that cast is here used in the same sense as in Macbeth, act ii. "though he took my legs from me, I made a shift to cast him." The modern editors published,

Is yours and my discharge.

I think

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