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ACT IV.

10 SCENE I.-"Come, hang them on this line." MR. HUNTER, in his 'Disquisition on The Tempest,' has a special heading, "the linegrove." He invites the friend to whom he addresses the Disquisition to accompany him to the "cell of Prospero, and to the grove or berry of line-trees by which it was enclosed or protected from the weather." He adds, "if you look for the very word line-grove in any verbal index to Shakespeare you will not find it: for the modern editors, in their discretion, have chosen to alter the line in which it occurs, and we now read

In the lime-grove which weather-fends your cell.'"* The editors, then, have substituted the more recent name of the tree for the more ancient:

but the change had taken place earlier than the days of the commentators. In Dryden's alteration of 'The Tempest' (edit. of 1676) we have the above passage, with lime-grove. The effect of the change, Mr. Hunter says, is this :

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italics. On the contrary, the tree, in connection with a grove, is printed thus,-Line-grove.

2nd. Mr. Hunter furnishes no example of the. word line, as applied to a tree, being used without the adjunct of tree or grove—line-tree, linegrove. The quotation which he gives from Elisha Cole is clear in this matter:-" Linetree (tilia), a tall tree, with broad leaves and fine flowers." The other quotation which he gives from Gerard would, if correctly printed, exhibit the same thing:-"The female line,' says Gerard, 'or linden-tree, waxeth very great,' &c. But Gerard wrote, "The female line or linden tree waxeth," &c.; and the word tree as much belongs to line as to linden.

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3rd. Mr. Hunter quotes "some clumsy joking about the line, among the clowns as they steal through the line-grove with the murderous intent;" and he quotes as follows, omitting certain words, which we shall presently give :"Ste. Mistress line, is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line.

Trin. We steal by line and level," &c.

"Ste. Mistress line, is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line: now, jerkin, you are like to lose your hair, and prove a bald jerkin.

Trin. We steal by line and level," &c.

"When Prospero says to Ariel, who comes in bringing the glittering apparel, 'Come hang Now the passage really stands thus :— them on this line,' he means on one of the line-trees near his cell, which could hardly have been mistaken if the word of the original copies, line-grove, had been allowed to keep its place. But the ear having long been familiar with lime-grove, the word suggested not the branches of a tree so called, but a cord-line, and accordingly, when the play is represented, such a line is actually drawn across the stage, and the glittering apparel is hung upon it. Anything more remote from poetry than this can scarcely be imagined."

This, we admit, is exceedingly ingenious; and we were at first disposed, with many others, to receive the theory with an implicit belief. A careful examination of the matter has, however, convinced us that the poet had no such intention of hanging the clothes on a line-tree; that a clothes-line was destined to this office; and that the players are right in stretching up a clothes line. Our reasons are as follow:

1st. When Prospero says "hang them on this line," when Stephano gives his jokes of "mistress line," and "now is the jerkin under the line," the word "line" has no characteristic mode of printing, neither with a capital, nor in

Is not the "clumsy joking" about lose your hair, and bald jerkin, of some importance in getting at the meaning? Steevens has observed that "the lines on which clothes are hung are usually made of twisted horse-hair." But they were especially so made in Shakspere's day. In a woodcut of twelve distinct figures of trades and callings of the time of James I. (see Smith's Cries of London,' p. 15), and of which there is a copy in the British Museum, we have the cry of "Buy a hair-line!" The "clumsy joking" would be intelligible to an audience accustomed to a hair-line. It is not intelligible according to Mr. Hunter's assertion that the word suggested a "cord-line.”

4th. Is it likely that Shakspere would have made these drunken fellows so knowing in the peculiarities of trees as to distinguish a line-tree from an elm-tree, or a plane-tree? Is it conceivable that the trees in Prospero's island were so young that clothes could be hung upon their lower branches? Are the branches of a line

tree of such a form as to hang clothes upon them, and to remove them easily? Had not the clowns a distinct image in their minds of an old-clothes shop?

"We know what belongs to a frippery." Here is a picture of "a frippery," from a print dated 1587, with its clothes hung in "line and level." Is not the joke "we steal by line and level" applicable only to a stretched line?—or is it meaningless? It has the highest approbation of King Stephano.

Lastly, with reference to the clothes-line, when Mr. Hunter says "Anything more remote from poetry than this can scarcely be imagined," we answer that the entire scene was intended to be the antagonist of poetry. All the scenes in which Trinculo and Stephano are tricked by Ariel are essentially ludicrous, and, to a certain extent, gross. The "pool" through which they were hunted had none of the poetical attributes about it. It was, compared with a fountain or a lake, as the hair-line to the line-tree. Hunter contends that, "if the word of the original, line-grove; had been allowed to keep

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"SCENE I.-" Ye elves of hills."

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ACT V.

THE invocation of Medea, in Ovid's Metamorphoses,' was no doubt familiar to Shakspere when he wrote this passage, and he has used several expressions which we find in Golding's translation. We subjoin the passage from that translation, which Farmer quotes as one of his proofs that Shakspere did not know the original. The evidence in this as in every other case only goes to show that he knew the translation:

"Ye airs and winds, ye elves of hills, of brooks, of woods alone,

Of standing lakes, and of the night, approach ye every

one.

Through help of whom (the crooked banks much wondering at the thing)

I have compelled streams to run clear backward to their spring.

Whole woods and forests I remove, I make the mountains shake,

And even the earth itself to groan and fearfully to quake.

I call up dead men from their graves, and thee, O light

some moon,

I darken oft, though beaten brass abate thy peril soon.
Our sorcery dims the morning fair, and darks the sun at

noon.

The flaming breath of fiery bulls ye quenched for my sake,

And caused their unwieldy necks the bended yoke to

take.

Among the earth-bred brothers you a mortal war did set, And brought asleep the dragon fell, whose eyes were never shut."

12 SCENE I." Where the bee sucks," &c. There are probably more persons familiar with this song in association with the music of Dr. Arne than as readers of Shakspere. The

By charms I make the calm sea rough, and make the first line is invariably sung,

rough sea plain,

And cover all the sky with clouds, and chase them thence again.

"Where the bee sucks, there lurk 1."

It is perfectly clear that lurk is not the word

By charms I raise and lay the winds, and burst the viper's which Ariel would have used; and it is equally jaw;

And from the bowels of the earth both stones and trees

do draw.

clear that the poet meant to convey the notion of a being not wholly ethereal; who required

some aliment, although the purest and the most | Bats do not migrate, as swallows do, in search delicate:

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."

Theobald changed the word summer into sunset. Warburton supports the old reading very ingeniously:"The roughness of winter is represented by Shakspeare as disagreeable to fairies, and such like delicate spirits, who, on this account, constantly follow summer. Was not this, then, the most agreeable circumstance of Ariel's new recovered liberty, that he could now avoid winter, and follow summer quite round the globe?" But here a new difficulty arises.

of summer. Steevens says that Shakspere might, through his ignorance of natural history, have supposed the bat to be a bird of passage. He inclines, however, to the opinion, not that Ariel pursues summer on a bat's wing, but that after summer is past he rides upon the warm down of a bat's back. Excellent naturalist! Why, the bat is torpid after summer. If this exquisite song is to be subjected to this strict analysis, it is difficult to reduce all its images to the measure of fitness and propriety.

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