THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 SHAKESPEARE HERMENEUTICS, 
 
 or 
 THE STILL LION.
 
 SHAKESPEARE HERMENEUTICS, 
 
 or 
 
 'The Still Lion, 
 
 Being an Essay towards the Restoration of Shakespeare's 
 
 Text. 
 
 
 BY 
 
 C. M. INGLEBY, M.A., LL.D., 
 Of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 Printed by Josiah Allen, of Birmingham, 
 6^ published by Trubner & Co., 57 6^ 59, Ludgate Hill. 
 
 1875- 
 
 [.-/// Ri,i;hts Reserved.^
 
 153
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 PAGE I.INF. 
 
 35 I dele ' Vertomannus.' 
 
 35 20 prefix ' In ' to ' Norfolk.' 
 
 38 4 for 'Phillips' read ' Phillipps.' 
 
 73 16 „ ' three fingers ' „ 'forefinger.' 
 
 74 24 prefix 'vol. v' to 'p. 5S1.' 
 95 antepenult, for ' 1 ' read ' 2.' 
 
 95 penult. „ 'Venus' ,, 'Adonis.' 
 
 106 27 „ 'G. W.' „ 'W. G.' 
 
 107 25 add '& 26' to 'April 12.' 
 107 25 „ '&3' to 'Jan. 31.' 
 
 113 15 prefix 'the ductus literaruni^ to 'the leading.' 
 
 119 6 for ' 72 ' read '68.' 
 
 121 3 „ 'the' „ 'their.'* 
 
 133 18 „ 'bacchanial' „ 'bacchanalian.' 
 
 137 3 » 'Hamlet's' „ 'Bernardo's.' 
 
 156 2 „ '2' „ '1' 
 
 167 add ' Maundevile, Sir J 41.' 
 
 * An example of the class of misprints mentioned and illustrated on pp. 118, 1 19.
 
 I^otc. 
 
 HE ensuing essay was originally written for t\\Q/ahrbiicher 
 of the German Shakespeare Society, and was pubHshed 
 at Berlin in the volume for 1867. The author saw but one 
 proof of it before its publication, and in consequence the imprint 
 was disfigured by an immense number of press-errors, only a 
 few of which were detected before the volume was issued. 
 
 The editor, Dr. Friedrich von Bodenstedt, voluntarily con- 
 ceded to the author of the essay the Society's permission to 
 \^ reprint it in England. This, however, was not done till 1874-5, 
 when, owing to the pressure put upon him by several of his 
 friends — in particular by Mr. Joseph Crosby, of Zanesville, Ohio, 
 and Mr. C. J. Monro, of Hadley — the author enlarged and 
 reprinted it, and presented the edition to the New Shakspere 
 Society. 
 
 As there was still an unsatisfied demand for the little 
 volume, he has once more enlarged and reprinted it; and it 
 "; is now, for the first time, published in England.
 
 Zahlc of Contents* 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Note ------------ V 
 
 The Still Lion discovered -------- i 
 
 Chapter I. — On the Growth of the English Language in relation 
 
 to the Text of Shakespeare - - - - - - - 13 
 
 Chapter II. — On the Corrapt and Obscure Words in Shakespeare 31 
 Chapter III. — On the Difficult Phrases in Shakespeare, and the 
 
 danger of tampering with them ------ 39 
 
 Chapter IV. — An Examination and Defense of certain Words and 
 
 Phrases in Shakespeare, which have suffered the wrongs of 
 
 Emendation .---.----48 
 
 Chapter V. — On the Conjectural Emendation of Shakespeare's Text 105 
 Supplementary Notes - - - - - - - - -I55 
 
 Passages in Shakespeare discussed in the Still Lion - - - 161 
 Authors quoted -.-_-i66
 
 THE STILL LION. 
 
 i 
 
 1 
 
 THE STILL LION DISCOVERED. 
 
 E may say of Shakespeare's text what Thomas De 
 Quincey said of Milton's : 
 
 ' On any attempt to take liberties with a passage of his, 
 YOU feel as when coming, in a forest, upon what seems a Dead 
 Lion ; perhaps he may not be dead, but only sleeping, nay 
 perhaps he may not be sleeping, but only shamming. * » # * 
 You may be put down with shame by some man reading the Hne 
 otherwise,' 
 
 or, we add, reading it in the light of more extended or more 
 accurate knowledge. 
 
 Here lies the covert danger of emendation. It is true that 
 the text of Shakespeare, as it comes down to us — " the latest 
 seed of time" — in the folio 1623, as well as in the early 
 quartos, is very corrupt. It is corrupt on two accounts. As 
 to the text of the quartos, there was no proper editorial super- 
 vision, since the editions were intended merely for the accom- 
 modation of play-goers ; the text was therefore imperfect not 
 only in form but in substance as well. As to the text of the 
 folio, the supervision of Messrs. Heminge and Condell seems to 
 
 B
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 have been confined to the selection of copies for the printers, 
 Messrs. Jaggard and Blount ; and some of those were play- 
 house copies, which had been curtailed for representation, and 
 certain other were copies of quarto editions ; while the correc- 
 tion of the press was probably left to the 'reader' of the 
 printing-house,* who certainly could not have exercised any 
 extraordinary vigilance in his vocation. Accordingly we have 
 imperfect copies at first, and a misprinted text at last. 
 
 The corrupt and mutilated condition in which the Greek 
 and Roman Classics, especially the Greek, have been handed 
 down to modern times is the sufficient reason for that latitude 
 of conjectural criticism which has been brought to bear on their 
 ancient texts. If we had to deal with an English text which 
 bore like evidences of dilapidation, we should naturally have 
 recourse to the same means for its correction. But such is not 
 the case with the works of any English author who has assumed 
 the proportions of a classic : not Chaucer, nor Shakespeare, 
 nor Milton, is a venerable ruin demanding restoration ; though 
 Shakespeare, far more than Milton, has suffered corruption, and 
 that by the very nature of the vehicle to which he committed 
 his thoughts ; exactly as the ' Last Supper ' of Leonardo da 
 Vinci has incurred an amount of destruction which it might 
 have escaped had it been painted on wood or on canvass. Such 
 corruption, however, as infects the works of Shakespeare touches 
 but comparatively small, and often isolated, portions of the 
 text, offering no very serious obstacle to the general reader, 
 
 * Not improbably Edward Blount, Isaac Jaggard's partner. See Notes 
 and Queries, 2nd S. iii. 7.
 
 TJlc Still Lion. 
 
 who is not exacting or scrupulous in the interpretation of his 
 author's phraseology. Patches of indictable nonsense, which 
 have hitherto defied all attempts at elucidation, there are, as 
 we shall soon see, in some of the plays; yet it is no very 
 violent proceeding to regard them as parts of the inferior 
 work of a joint-author, or as interpolations by the players, or 
 as matter adopted by Shakespeare from the older play on which 
 his own was founded. But the critical student is naturally in- 
 tolerant of every unexplored obscurity and every unresolved 
 difficulty ; and an editor who works for students as well as for 
 general readers feels himself bound to apply to the text all the 
 available resources of criticism. The example of the ancient 
 Classics, and the capital success which rewarded the vigilance 
 and invention of scholars in that field, could not fail to deter- 
 mine the method on which the recension of Shakespeare was 
 to be attempted by the verbal critics. 
 
 As the natural result, the text has been subjected to a 
 conjectural criticism which owns no restraint and systemat- 
 ically violates every principle of probability and of propriety. 
 Obsolete phraseology and archaic allusion are treated as cases 
 of corruption: the language, where corrupt, instead of being 
 restored or amended, is modernized and improved: and the 
 idiom, instead of being expounded and illustrated, is accom- 
 modated to the prevailing grammatical standard. By this 
 means more fatuous and incapable nonsense has been manu- 
 factured for Shakespeare than can be found in any of the 
 ancient copies of his plays. 
 
 The text of Milton, on the other hand, offers little or no
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 holding for the conjectural critic* One might have predicted 
 that of all English texts it was the least likely to have afforded 
 congenial sport to a classical scholar intent on havoc. But it 
 was not so much the promise of the coverts, but the solicitations 
 of exalted rank, that induced the combative and tenacious old 
 Master of Trinity, when he had already earned his laurels as an 
 editor of the Classics, and ' won his spurs ' as a verbal critic of 
 matchless resource and felicity, even in the 69th year of his 
 age, to undertake the recension of Paradise Lost. As some 
 sort of self-justification he framed the hypothesis that Milton's 
 text had suffered through the carelessness and also the inven- 
 tion of the scribe to whom it had been dictated by the blind 
 bard. Bentley was a great man, and this work of his is great 
 in its way. He mars his author with power and splendour, 
 
 * The systematic departure from the ordinary spelling of the time in 
 the text of the Paradise Lost of 1667 has been noticed by De Quincey. 
 Mr. B. M. Pickering says : 
 
 ' At the end of the first edition of Paradise Lost we meet with what, to 
 a casual observer, would appear to be a very singular correction, viz. Lib. 
 2. V. 414, "For %ve read wee." Even a tolerably attentive student of the 
 early editions of Milton might be at a loss what to make of this. It is 
 certain that 'Me is to be met with in this edition of Paradise Lost quite as 
 often, or rather oftener, with a single than with a double e. It occurs as 'loe 
 in the very next line to that referred to in this errata. The explanation is 
 this : — that although in ordinary cases Milton is accustomed to spell the 
 pronouns 2ue, me, he, ye, with a single e, whenever special emphasis is in- 
 tended to be put upon them he makes a point of writing 7oee, inee, hee,yee. 
 Many other words are differently spelt to what was then, or is now, usual, 
 and this not in an uncertain manner, as is common in old books, but after a 
 regular, unvarying system, deliberately formed by Milton himself, and 
 adopted upon choice and afore-thought.' (From the Prospectus of A 
 Reprint of the First Edition of PaJ-adise Lost. )
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 and we admire his learning and talents, while we deplore 
 their misapplication. 
 
 This reference to Milton, who is also a Still Lion, 
 
 THRILLING INDEED WITH LIFE, BUT OFTEN DISSEMBLING HIS 
 
 VITALITY, leads me to exhibit the salient contrasts between the 
 two English classics of the seventeenth century. I will first 
 consider the works themselves as intellectual achievements : 
 secondly, the material vehicle of their transmission. 
 
 (i) Dramatic Literature, out of the very reason for its 
 existence, is more within the compass of the ordinary under- 
 standing than an epic poem. Its appeal is to the common 
 mind. If the people fail to catch the meaning of a dialogue 
 or a soliloquy, it is a mere impertinence, how splendid soever 
 may be its diction, or profound the reach of its thought. 
 Shakespeare is, indeed, very strongly differenced from his con- 
 temporaries by the fervour of his imagination and his know- 
 ledge of human nature, as well as by the strength and range of 
 his vocabulary ; and certain portions of his works are pitched 
 in as sublime a key as the epics of Milton. But on the whole 
 the language of Shakespeare is more or less amenable to 
 undisciplined good sense. Milton, on the contrary, ' flies an 
 eagle's flight,' and is quite out of the blank of the general aim. 
 He is 'caviary to the general,' and, without the poetic tempera- 
 ment, the strongest common sense and the most delicate ear for 
 rhythm are quite at fault in the criticism of his greater works. 
 
 With this distinction in mind, the reason of Bentley's 
 deplorable failure in attempting an edition of Paradise Lost is 
 not far to seek. The work he had successfully done was in the
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 field of the Greek and Latin Classics, the emendation of which, 
 as that of our early dramatic literature, is generally within the 
 range of that strong natural sense for which Bentley was so 
 conspicuous : and this, complemented with his matchless in- 
 genuity and vast book-learning, was amply sufficient for his 
 purpose.* One almost wonders that he did not make the 
 experiment on Shakespeare rather than on Milton ; and it 
 seems natural to fancy that, had he known in what relationship 
 of marriage he stood to the Bard of Avon,t he would have 
 been drawn to the recension of his great relative's works, and 
 would have brought to the task that reverential affection which 
 is so conspicuously absent from his notes on ]\Iilton. 
 
 (2) The difference in the ' material vehicle ' consists in the 
 difference between Dramatic Art and Literature. We must 
 consider this point at somewhat greater length than the former. 
 Disallowing Bentley's pretext, as a mere device for the in- 
 dulgence of licentious criticism, which especially in the case 
 of Milton sufflanmiandus est, it is plain that Milton's epics 
 enjoyed the benefit of being printed, if not under the eye, at 
 least under the direct superintendence, of their author ; and 
 we know, moreover, that in exercising that function he was 
 fastidiously vigilant and accurate. We may be quite sure that 
 the text contains but very few misprints, and that conjecture 
 has no locus standi there. But how different was the case with 
 
 * See De Quincey's articles on Bentley and Laitdor. 
 
 t The relationship is easily stated, though it is very remote. Shake- 
 speare's granddaughter married (secondly) the brother of Mrs. Bentley's 
 grandfather.
 
 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 the dramas of Shakespeare ! Speakhig of the textual vehicle 
 only, we may be equally sure that the conjectural critic would 
 have had ' the very cipher of a function ' if those works had 
 received the final corrections and editorial supervision of their 
 author. They would still have been thronged with difficulties, 
 and pestered with obscurities, taxing the utmost erudition and 
 study of the editor, the greater number of which would have 
 belonged to the class historical, consisting wholly of allusions 
 to forgotten persons and events, and to obsolete habits and 
 customs. Not a few, however, of those difficulties would have 
 belonged to the class grammatical, demanding on the part of 
 the expositor almost as much learning and research as the 
 historical allusions in the text : for since the date of Shakes- 
 peare's floruit the English language has suffered no incon- 
 siderable change, though much less than the habits and 
 customs of the English people. 
 
 But Shakespeare died without, so far as we know, having 
 made the attempt to collect and print his works. Of this fact 
 an unnecessary difficulty has been made. A much more self- 
 conscious genius than Shakespeare has himself given us the 
 clue to its solution, a clue of which all writers, save Thomas 
 Carlyle,* have failed to perceive the significance. Goethe con- 
 fessed to Eckermann that he never reperused any of his poems 
 when once it was completed and printed, unless impelled to 
 the task by the demand for a new edition; and that he then 
 read it with no self-complacency, but rather dissatisfaction. 
 Wliy was this ? Simply because he felt a Widerwille, or 
 * Consult his Shooting Niagara, and after?
 
 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 distaste, towards the offspring of his less matured self, by 
 reason of its inadequacy to express his great ideal — the 'un- 
 bodied figure of the thought that gave 't surmised shape.' 
 He had outgrown his own powers, in the grander sense of 
 that phrase : never, like poor Swift, living to look back with 
 wonder and horror on the glory of a genius that he owned 
 no more, but prejudicially contrasting his past self with the 
 greater present. 
 
 'As for what I have done,' he would repeatedly say to me, 'I take 
 no pride in it whatever. Excellent poets have lived at the same time with 
 myself, poets more excellent have lived before me, and others will come 
 after me.' {Gespr'dche mit Goethe, 1836, vol. i. p. 86. Feb. 19th, 1829. 
 Oxenford's Translation, 1850, vol. ii. p. 145.) 
 
 He also says to Falk ("with unusual rapidity and vehe- 
 mence") : 
 
 "I will not hear anything of the matter; neither of the public, nor 
 of posterity, nor of the justice, as you call it, which is hereafter to reward 
 my efforts. I hate my lasso, just because people say that it will go down 
 to posterity; I ^tXq Iphigenie ; in a word, I hate everything of mine that 
 pleases the public. I know that it belongs to the day, and the day to it ; 
 but I tell you, once for all, I will not live for the day." Characteristics 
 of Goethe, by Sarah Austin, 1873, vol. i. p. 112. 
 
 He had, seemingly, that very contempt for self-complacency 
 which he attributes to Faust — 
 
 'Verflucht voraus die hohe Meinung, 
 Womit der Geist sich selbst umfangt.' 
 
 Now Shakespeare wrote and issued under his own eye two 
 poems as literature, and nothing else. The rest of his works, 
 save his sonnets and minor pieces, were written for represent-
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 ation on the boards, and as a simple matter of money-profit. 
 Not faultless even as dramas, they must have fully answered 
 his primary aim, which was mercenary, but not that grand ideal 
 which dwelt ' deep down in his heart of hearts.' Hence he 
 must have viewed them with some dissatisfaction, (i) as not 
 being in the best sense Literature; (2) as being 'mere im- 
 plorators of — mercenary, if not — unholy suits,' designed to 
 catch the penny with the least pains; (3) as being often 
 hasty and inchoate, and always imperfect, attempts to realize 
 his own ideal. From the effort of recasting and revising them 
 he naturally shrank. If he gave a thought to the probability 
 of his works becoming his country's crowning glory, it might 
 very reasonably have occurred to him that no revision would 
 be likely to guarantee them an exemption from the common 
 lot which was not the due of their original merits. Of one 
 thing we may be quite sure, that Shakespeare's good sense 
 and honesty of purpose rendered him perfectly indifferent to 
 that vanity of vanities which Goethe, in the speech from 
 which a citation has already been made, calls 'das Blenden 
 der Erscheinung,' for which so many a man of letters has 
 sacrificed the calm and comfort of his life. 
 
 Be all that as it may, it is a fact that the first collection 
 of his plays was published six or seven years after his death; 
 and it is a matter of certainty that the folio of 1623 was 
 printed from inaccurate quarto editions and mutilated stage- 
 copies. This is the 'case' of those who advocate the rights 
 of unlimited conjecture; and we frankly make the concession, 
 that our text needs emendation. But, before they can be 
 
 c
 
 10 The Still Lion. 
 
 permitted to conjecture, we require of them to find out where 
 the corruptions lie. If a man's body be diseased, the seat of 
 the disease can generally be determined, between the patient 
 and the doctor: in some cases, however, the malady baffles 
 alike research and experiment. 
 
 In the case of Shakespeare's text, the diagnosis is infinitely 
 perplexed: (i) from the multitude of obscurities and difficulties 
 that beset it: (2) from the close resemblance that often sub- 
 sists between those obscurities which spring from the obsolete 
 language or the archaic allusions, and those which are wholly 
 due to the misreading or misprinting of the text. Our healthy 
 parts are so like our diseased parts, that the doctor sets about 
 the medicinal treatment of that which needs no cure ; and 
 the patient's body is so full of those seeming anomalies, that 
 his life is endangered by the multiplicity of agencies brought 
 to bear on his time-worn frame. 
 
 What, if there are cases in which those kv^wi (rvvwixorai, 
 archaic phraseology and textual corruption, unite their powers 
 against us 1 Why, in such cases, it is most likely that the 
 critic would be utterly baffled : that he would be unable to 
 restore the lost integrity even by the combined forces of 
 exposition and conjecture. Now it so happens that after all 
 that contemporary literature and conjectural criticism could 
 do for Shakespeare's immortal works, there is a residue of 
 about thirty-five to forty passages which have defied all 
 attempts to cure their immortal nonsense. Does it not seem 
 likely that the perplexity in such cases is due to the joint 
 action of those two sources of obscurity, and our inability to
 
 TJic Still Lion. 1 1 
 
 persez'er or discriminate the one from the other? We shall see. 
 The vintage afforded by these remarks may be thus expressed. 
 Conjectural criticism is legitimate; for it is needful to the 
 perfection of the text : but no critic can be licensed to exer- 
 cise it whose knowledge and culture do not guarantee these 
 three great pre-requisites : (i) a competent knowledge of the 
 orthography, phraseology, prosody, as well as the language of 
 arts and customs, prevalent in the time of Shakespeare : (2) 
 a delicate ear for the rhythm of verse and prose : * ( 3 ) a 
 reverential faith in the resources of Shakespeare's genius. 
 
 The present time seems most fitting for the treatment of 
 the question : To what extent, and in what manner, may con- 
 jectural criticism be safely exercised 1 For the last twenty 
 years the text of Shakespeare has been subjected to a process, 
 which for its wholesale destructiveness and the arrogance of its 
 pretensions is wholly without parallel. The English press has 
 teemed with works, from Mr. J. P. Collier's pseudo-antique 
 Corrector down to the late Mr. Staunton's papers ' On 
 Unsuspected Corruptions in the Text of Shakespeare,' most of 
 which, in our judgment, have achieved no other result than 
 that of corrupting and beraying the ancient text. We allow 
 that some of the conjectures thus put forth are invaluable, and 
 certain other may be entertained for careful consideration ; but 
 the mass we repudiate as impertinent and barbarous. We 
 
 * The late Mr. Staunton was deficient in this. Such a symptosis as 
 would be introduced into the text by reading, in Macbeth, 'Making the 
 green zone red ' and ' cleanse the clogg\i bosom, ' &c. , would ( to borrow 
 De Quincey's happy phrase) ' splinter the teeth of a crocodile,' and make 
 the adder shake her ears.
 
 12 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 deny the need of any wholesale change, and impute great 
 ignorance to the assailants : — not to insist on matters of taste, 
 which it is proverbially difficult to make matters of controversy. 
 We are fully able to prove the strength of our position, by 
 showing that the passages attacked are proof against innova- 
 tion by the power of their own sense. To do this at full length 
 and in complete detail would require the dimensions of a large 
 volume : to teach the general truth by the force of particular 
 examples is all that we now propose to accomplish. This is 
 our aim : to exemplify the growth of the written English 
 language in relation to the text of Shakespeare : to point out 
 the dangers incident to all tampering with special words and 
 phrases in it : to examine and defend certain of its words 
 and phrases which have suffered the wrongs of so-called 
 emendation ; and finally to discuss the general subject of 
 the emendation of the text, and to adduce some examples 
 of passages reclaimed or restored through this means. Having 
 accomplished this, we shall gladly leave the old text, with its 
 legion of archaisms and corruptions, to the tender mercies of 
 those critics whose object is to conserve what is sound and 
 to restore what is corrupt, and not at all to improve what, to 
 their imperfect judgment and limited knowledge, seems unsat- 
 isfactory. To the arbitration of such critics we submit the 
 question, whether in any particular case a word or phrase 
 which is intelligible to the well-informed reader, however strange 
 or uncouth, does or does not fulfil the utmost requirements of 
 the cultivated mind, regard being had to the context, the 
 situation, and the speaker.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN 
 RELATION TO THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 REAT is the mystery of archaic speUing. Let us con- 
 sider a few caprices of speUing, before proceeding 
 to notice the vitahty and consequent instability of 
 written words : just as we must consider the symboHzing and 
 uses of words before the grammatical structure and force of 
 phrases. The word (piiixa), rightly regarded, is an expressed 
 ens rationis. It is purely a matter of convenience, whether it 
 shall be represented to the eye or to the ear. We hold those 
 to be in the wrong who would wholly subordinate the written 
 sign to the sound, as if writing were de Jure, as it is de 
 facto, a secondary process ; and herein we dissent from the 
 teaching of thorough-going Phoneticians. Be that as it may, 
 the object of writing and speaking is not to impart the inner 
 word (votjua) : for transmission of aught from one man's mind 
 to another is impossible : but to suggest it. Still, in effect, 
 something is communicated, or made common, to both minds. 
 In order that we may suggest to another man's mind any word 
 that is in our own, we employ a medium which will stand for
 
 14 The Still Lion. 
 
 it, and lead him to understand it as we do. The written word 
 is simply such a mediatorial symbol. The letters which con- 
 stitute it are used to represent vocal sounds ; and these may be 
 of very variable force and range, while the word so symbolized 
 is invariable. Thus ea and a., or ea and e, may by agreement 
 represent the same vowel-sound ; and/ and g^ ox j and /, may, 
 according to circumstances, stand for the same consonant- 
 sound. But, further, several written symbols that have little or 
 nothing in common may stand for the same inner word : much 
 more may two written symbols, which have grown by habit and 
 custom from one spoken symbol, be regarded as equivalent 
 forms of, or rather terms for, one and the same word. Thus, 
 in the relative literature we have purture and pourtray, scasc 
 and scarce, scone and scar, ?fioe and more, windoe and windore, 
 kele and cool, kill and quell, leese and lose, mcve and move, ci/sse 
 and kiss, make and }nate, &c. Not a shade of difference exists 
 between the words in any of these pairs, unless, perhaps, in 
 scone and scar, the latter — and possibly not the former — having 
 sometimes the sense of value, while both mean barter. Con- 
 versely several written symbols, which in the letter are identical, 
 may not only stand for as many distinct words, but may be 
 themselves also radically distinct. We have must (new wine), 
 must (stale smell or taste), and must (il faut); jnere (mare), 
 ;//^/v(lake), and 7nere (pure); sound (sonus), sound (sanus, whole), 
 sound (arm of the sea), a word possibly related to swim, or 
 otherwise to sunder ; sound (the swimming-bladder of the cod- 
 fish), sound (sender, to fathom), sound (swoon). These two 
 classes of word-couples are not to be confounded with words
 
 TJie Still Lion. 15 
 
 which have only the same sound, without either similarity of 
 sense or identity of spelling : e. g., ought, aught, ort :* nor yet with 
 those which have only the same spelling, without ehher simi- 
 larity of sense or identity of sound : e. g., lead or tear. The 
 main points to keep distinctly in view in this study, are that 
 the orthography of the written symbol, like its vocal expression, 
 may change to almost any extent, and yet the internal word 
 signified by such letters or sounds may remain unaltered ; and 
 that the written or spoken symbol may remain unchanged, 
 while the word signified changes, or that symbol may be used 
 for words which have not a common origin. 
 
 Shakespeare has had many ugly charges brought against 
 him. Among others he has been arraigned for bad spelling 
 and bad grammar ! But what Shakespeare's orthography was 
 we have no certain means of knowing. If he had any system 
 of spelling he was a century in advance of his contemporaries. 
 We have no knowledge beyond the capricious orthography of 
 the compositors who set up his works. At the present day 
 words are spelt according to a standard that is subject to only 
 very slight variations. But even as late as the Commonwealth 
 it may be truly affirmed that there was nothing like a standard. 
 In the reigns of Elizabeth and James there was no attempt to 
 ensure uniformity of spelling, nor is it likely that the writers or 
 the readers of that time were conscious of any need or want 
 
 * Mr. A. J. Ellis and Mr. A. M. Bell hear a glide in this word which 
 we do not. There is a glide in fort and port, but we do not detect it in 
 ort or sort. Of course, if the r be sounded as in French, ort is at once 
 differentiated from ought and aiig/it.
 
 1 6 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 in that respect. The question, what determined the orthography 
 of the time, is exceedingly puzzling. We can here only record 
 our growing conviction that silent reading was tlien much 
 more than at present a purely mental process, and that the 
 handwriters and printers of that day presented their readers 
 with nothing incongruous or absurd when they indulged in 
 the most outrageous versatility of literal construction. That 
 / and j, or u and v*- should have been regarded as identical 
 consonants, or that ti and u\ or / and y, should have been 
 regarded as identical vowels (though the least extraordinary 
 of the many anomalies of their spelling), is quite enough to 
 prove that readers were not fastidious on such points. One is 
 sometimes disposed to wonder whether particular provinces 
 had not, somewhat earlier, their conventional forms of spelling 
 peculiarly adapted to the pronunciation prevalent in each pro- 
 vince, which became at length confusedly intermingled through 
 the practice of engaging handwriters and compositors of various 
 provinces to do the work of one establishment. There were, 
 indeed, in Shakespeare's day, limits to their vagaries. So far 
 as we have been able to settle the point, few words were 
 allowed as many as a dozen different forms of spelling. The 
 word which we write swoon (a fainting-fit, or to faint) is a 
 
 * The Rev. F. G. Fleay, in the AihencEiim, September 26, 1874, pretends 
 to discover a difference iDetween the same word spelt under the v and under 
 tlie II orthography. ' Thus we liave 7-ecaver, recouc?-, and recure side by side ; 
 divell and deule; even, eiien, and eene; live, line, and lie ; and many others. 
 The last of these is especially important, and explains several difficulties in 
 Shakspere.' We record this as a 'curiosity of Shakespeare criticism.' We 
 suppose Mr. Fleay, in Coriolanus iv. 7, 50 (Globe Ed.) sees live in lie.
 
 Tlic Still Lion. ly 
 
 very curious example of Protean versatility. In a Nominale 
 of the fifteenth century, edited by Mr. Thomas Wright, F.S.A., 
 the word is figured sivoyiie. Chaucer and Lord Bacon have 
 it, swoun or swoiine. In the State Trials, 1338, it is stuooii; and 
 so we find it in IMilton, Dryden, and all the moderns. But 
 Fabyan, 1364, spells it swown or swowiie., and Spenser, 1589, 
 and Walkington, 1607, adopt the same orthography; North, 
 Shakespeare, and sundry other authors give it sound; and in 
 Richard Hyrde's translations it is generally sivone ! 
 
 Within an assignable limit for each word, we may rest 
 assured that every compositor in a printing-house spelt pretty 
 much as seemed good in his own eyes. That he had just set 
 up a word in one literal form was, perhaps, a reason why he 
 should, on its recurrence, spell it in some other way. The 
 spelling of all words, in fact, like that of Sam Weller's surname, 
 depended ' upon the taste and fancy of the writer ' or of the 
 printer; and just as pedants with us will sacrifice the exact 
 render of their best thoughts in order to avoid the repetition 
 of a word (of all pedantries the most contemptible and repre- 
 hensible), so did an Elizabethan compositor sacrifice a just and 
 compendious form of spelling to his love of variety and his 
 contempt of uniformity. If he had set up foorth, poore, woorse, 
 he would on the next occasion present these words in the more 
 concise style, forth, pore, worse. If he had set up brydde for 
 the feathered biped, that feat of ' composition ' became, if any- 
 thing, a reason for transposing the r and y ; for omitting a d, 
 or the final vowel, or both ; or for substituting / for y, on the 
 next occasion when he had to cope with that Protean customer. 
 
 D
 
 1 8 The Still Lion. 
 
 To have printed, 'Among the bryddes the blackbrydde hath 
 the saddest coat, and the moaste dulceate mellodie,' would 
 have been an offence against the estabUshed economy, which 
 dictated as much prodigaHty as was consistent with conveni- 
 ence; for apart from custom, which always has more weight 
 than it deserves, the probability is that the compositor could 
 not have conformed to a standard of orthography (if such a 
 thing had ever occurred to him as desirable on other grounds) 
 without constant embarrassment and frequent unsightliness in 
 the make-up of his lines. Obviously, poetical works, in which 
 the lines do not run on and may always be adjusted without 
 dividing the final words, did not impose on him the same 
 limitations as prose works. But even in the latter it does not 
 always appear that the caprices of spelling were due to the 
 necessities of the case; as in the two following examples, taken 
 from Hyrde's translation of Vives' Instruction of a Christian 
 Woman (ed. 1592; sig. D 4): the sense is unimportant here: 
 
 and specially if there bee any long 
 space betweene the hollydaies. For think 
 not y* holy dales be ordained of the church 
 to play on, 
 
 Here it is plain that in the second line it would have made 
 no difference to the compositor had he set up ' holy dales ' as 
 in the third line; or in the third line 'hollydaies' as in the 
 second line. Here there was no such necessity as, in a line 
 a little higher on the page, occasioned the composite form 
 ' workingdaies,' instead of ' working dales," which we find in an 
 intermediate line where there was room for the lead or the
 
 The Still Lion. 19 
 
 hyphen. Indeed it is hard to imagine any reason for omitting 
 the / in the second ' holy ' which did not equally apply to the 
 first, unless, indeed, the translator intended to exhibit obtru- 
 sively the original sense of the compound word, as sanctce dies. 
 In a word, variety in spelling was not always due to the con- 
 dition of making up the lines without unsightly breaks, but is, 
 at least sometimes, referable to chance or to preference. Again, 
 
 sig. G 4, 
 
 Let her bee content with a maide not 
 
 faire and wanton, fayre, 
 
 Here * fayre ' is the catch-word at the bottom of one page, and 
 
 ' faire' is the first word on the next page. So likewise in Edward 
 
 Phillips' Theatrum Foetarum, 1675 (The Modern Poets, p. 34-5), 
 
 we have 
 
 being for great Invention and Poetic 
 
 heighth height 
 
 where ' height ' is the catch-word at the bottom of one page, 
 and ' heighth ' the first word on the next page. Again in The 
 Ttuo Angrie Women of Abington, Mistress Barnes says, 
 
 'I am abusde, my sonne, by Goursey's wife.' 
 
 On which Philip exclaims, 
 
 ' By Mistresse Goursie ! ' 
 
 How are we to account for the change of orthography in the 
 second example from Vives, unless we suppose that the y was 
 thought as good an / as i itself 1 How, in the other examples, 
 for the omission of the h from the catch-word, and the change 
 of ey into ie, unless the orthography was thought a matter of
 
 20 The Still Lion. 
 
 little, or at least of secondary, importance % That it was so is 
 proved by the fact that y was commonly used for / in manu- 
 script : e. g., in a letter from Sir Walter Cope to Viscount 
 Cranborne, dated 1604, preserved at Hatfield House, Herts, 
 we read : ' I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for 
 players Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs but fynde them harde 
 to finde^ &c. Similarly, I doubt not // was thought no worse 
 than /, and / as good as // in such a word as holyday, where the 
 was not made long as in holy : the ear being then, in most 
 cases, the arbiter of spelling. 
 
 In fairness it must be allowed that in some few printed 
 books of the Elizabethan era some approach to uniformity of 
 spelling is occasionally discernible ; but there was nothing like 
 a standard of spelling till nearly a century later. In the work 
 from which we took the first two examples (book i. chapter 3), 
 in tlie course of a single page ivool is spelled woll and 7vooll ; 
 in the next page, woolle; in the next, wolle : but wool is only 
 found in compounds ; and woolc not at all ! 
 
 In order to bring these remarks to a focus, in applying 
 them to Shakespeare's text, let us confine ourselves to words 
 of one initial letter, say H. In Lupton's Too Good to be True, 
 1580, hair is spelled twice haire, and once heare. It is also 
 spelled heare in Kyngesmyll's Comforts in Afflictions, 1585. 
 The latter is the less usual form. It occurs, however, in earlier 
 books than those. It is used, for instance, in Drant's transla- 
 tion of Horace's Satyrcs, 1566; where we read, 'I have shaved 
 of his heare:' as to which passage it must be noted that ^and 
 off (like to and too, on and one, the and thee) are not always
 
 TJic Still Lion. 2\ 
 
 distinguishable in this hterature, save by means of the context. 
 Accordingly the participial adjective haired, being written and 
 printed hcarcd, hcar''d, and heard, is sometimes presented in a 
 form identical with the past participle of hear (audire). Here 
 is an example from Shakespeare's King John, v. 2 : 
 
 This un-heard sawcinesse and boyish Troopes, 
 The king doth smile at. 
 
 where ' un-heard sawcinesse ' is the sauciness of those striplings 
 whose faces are hairless, and ' whose chins are not yet fledg'd ' 
 (2 Hen. IV., i. 2). Theobald, who must have been ignorant of 
 the fact that unheard was merely wihair'd under an earlier 
 orthography, proposed iinhair'd as an emendation. This is 
 merely an example of those orthographies, so fertile in confu- 
 sion and mistake, which coincide where they should diverge, 
 and diverge where they should coincide. Wickliff spelt hard 
 (durus) herd, both forms being a departure from the A. S. heard. 
 The Elizabethans, who inherited and retained the former style, 
 spelt herd (armentum) heard; and heard (auditus) hard; and 
 this last they pronounced as we do hard (durus); a fashion 
 which is presupposed in The Taming of the SJu-eiv, ii. i : 
 
 Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing ! 
 
 and in parts of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk we may still hear 
 the same pronunciation. 
 
 Accordingly, those who would contend that these various 
 forms of spelling afford evidence of a rude attempt at discrim- 
 ination and perseverance, must needs admit that the attempt 
 was wholly abortive ; for what was gained by distinguishing
 
 22 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 heard., hard (auditus) from heard (comatus), was lost by con- 
 founding it with hard (durus) ; and what was gained by dis- 
 tinguishing hard, heard (armentum) from herd (durus), was lost 
 by confounding it with heard (auditus). 
 
 Heard (armentum) occurs in Corio/anits i. 4, where it has 
 been the occasion of an emendation. 
 
 Enter Martius, cursing. 
 All the contagion of the South light on you, 
 You shames of Rome : you Heard of Byles and Plagues 
 Plaister you ore, that you may be abhorr'd 
 Farther than seene, and one infect another 
 Against the Winde a mile : you Soules of Geese, 
 That beare the shapes of men, &c. 
 
 The Johnsonian editors read, after Johnson himself, 
 
 you herd of — Boils and Plagues 
 Plaster you o'er, &c., 
 
 making a break after ' of,' as if the violence of Martius' passion 
 left him no time to complete his abusive epithet, through the 
 urgency of the imprecation. From Johnson to Collier every 
 editor understands by Heard., armentum, save the latter, who 
 reads 'unheard-of for 'a herd of : ' a conjecture which, like so 
 many other candidates for admission into the text, is good per 
 se as a probable misprint, but bad in this place as a substitute 
 for the suspected words. The reason is this. Passion takes 
 concrete forms and avoids generalities. Martius would, in the 
 hands of a master, have been made to denounce a specific 
 malady on the Romans, rather than have weakened the force 
 of his substantives by the prefix ' unheard-of ' But there is
 
 The Still Lion. 23 
 
 yet another reason. We cannot part with Heard in the sense 
 of armentum. Twice in this play the people are so designated, 
 and once m Julius CcEsar : in all with the same contemptuous 
 usage as in the passage under consideration. We adduce this 
 passage, not because the difficulty admits of removal, but 
 because it does not. It is just one of those which we must be 
 content to take and leave as we find it. A score of suppo- 
 sitions might be made to account for the presence of the 
 preposition 'of.' We might treat that preposition as governing 
 'boils and plagues,' with the sense of with; or, with Johnson, 
 as governed by ' you herd,' followed by an aposiopesis : or we 
 might make 'of an adverb, equivalent to ' off ! ' and so forth : 
 all these expedients being about equally unsatisfactory ; and 
 there are still other possibilities to consider. But in such a 
 case it is not decision that is required, but faith. We must 
 stand by the text, and wait. 
 
 In a similar manner the male deer was symbolized by hart 
 and hert ; but our heart (cor) was generally spelt hart, and still 
 earlier hert, so that the alternative was no security against 
 confusion. 
 
 The passage quoted from Coriolaiius resembles one in Timon 
 of Athens, act iii. last scene : 
 
 Of man and beast the infinite malady 
 Crust you quite o'er ! 
 
 and it might be thought that the latter would be of service in 
 construing or correcting the former. This led our friend Mr, 
 Perkins-Ireland of Knowe-Ware to propose a new expedient
 
 24 The Still Lion. 
 
 for restoring the passage in Coriolanus ; viz., the supposition 
 that a line is lost ! He would read : 
 
 You shames of Rome ! you herd of 
 
 An mfinite malady of boils and plagues 
 Plaster you o'er, &c. 
 
 He argues that the compositor's eye wandered from 'of in the 
 first line to 'of in the second, whereby he omitted the first 
 words of that line \ and he supposes that the dotted portion 
 was originally furnished with such words as ' timorous deer,' 
 or ' heartless hinds.' All which we must allow to be very inge- 
 nious. But to such a method of dealing with a line which is 
 certainly corrupt — and the one under consideration is far from 
 being that — there is one serious objection, viz., that the supplied 
 portions rest on no evidence whatever, presenting but one out 
 of a great many equally plausible shifts. If, however, it be 
 argued that such phrases as 'infinite malady,' 'timorous deer,' 
 &:c., are more likely to be the missing words, because they are 
 used elsewhere by Shakespeare, it is sufficient to reply, that is 
 a strong argument against them : e. g., forasmuch as ' infinite 
 malady ' is used in Tiinon of Athens in a precisely similar 
 passage, it is most improbable that Shakespeare would have 
 employed that phrase in Coriolatius. It will be helpful to know 
 that Shakespeare's text cannot be emended in this fashion ; for 
 he never repeats himself in repeating the same thought or 
 sentiment.* 
 
 * Our friend, seeing this in proof, indignantly disclaims the intention 
 to affirm that the missing words in the second line were, totideni verbis, ' an 
 infinite malady;' but he does not tell us what the exact words were. Why 
 augment the mass of indefinite conjectures ?
 
 The Still Lion. 25 
 
 To return from this digression : help and heal (or hele), 
 though two distinct words, must, ages ago, have had a common 
 origin, and are often used by Elizabethan writers indifferently. 
 Thus, in Phioravantes Secrets, 1582, the second chapter is 
 headed thus: 'To helpe the Falling Sicknesse in yong children.' 
 But in the table of contents the same chapter is referred to as 
 having the title, ' To heale the Falling Sicknes : ' thus showing 
 that one and the same sense was attached to both verbs. This 
 use is common enough in Shakespeare : 
 
 Love doth to her eyes repair 
 
 To help him of his blindness, 
 And being tielpt inhabits there. — 
 
 Two Gent, of Verona, iv. 2. 
 
 a conceit frequently found in the writers of this time, but never 
 more beautifully expressed than here. Again, 
 
 Not helping, death's my fee, 
 But if I tielp, what do you promise me? — 
 
 AlVs Well that Ends Well. i. 2. 
 
 though what it doth impart 
 Help not at all, but only ease the heart. — Rieh. III., iv. 4. 
 
 Turn giddy and be holpe by backward turning. — Romeo and Juliet, i. 2. 
 
 Helena, in Alts Well that Ends Well, undertook, not what 
 we mean by help, but the perfect cure of the King. We take 
 one example from Milton ; 
 
 Plelping all urchin blasts, and ill-luck signs 
 
 That the shrewd meddling elfe delights to make. 
 
 Which she with precious vial'd liquors heals. — Covnis, 845-7. 
 
 E
 
 26 The Still Lion. 
 
 and yet one from Dr. John Hall's Select Observations upon 
 English Bodies, 1657 (translated by James Cook), 
 
 and so she was suddenly helpt, p. 223. 
 
 That this means perfectly cured is shown by the translator's 
 habit of concluding the successful cases in this fashion: 'and 
 so was cured,' p. 176, 'and in a short time became well,' 
 p. 207, 'by which he was wholly delivered,' p. 238. Here, 
 then, we have help, cure, deliver, used synonymously. 
 
 It is remarkable that this sense of help, used by every old 
 English writer on Medicine, should have been unknown to the 
 commentators on Shakespeare. Yet unknown to them it must 
 have been ; for otherwise they would not have proposed the 
 emendation of the word in some half-dozen passages which, 
 with one exception, force upon it the medical sense. Let us 
 briefly consider these. In the Comedy of Errors, i. i, the word 
 occurs twice in one line : 
 
 To seek thy help by beneficial help. 
 
 Though the custom of using the word in difl'erent senses twice 
 in one line, or even twice in contiguous lines, is not to be 
 commended, it was common at that day. A better example 
 of this could not be found than the line just quoted, or one in 
 Macbeth, v. 3, 
 
 Cleanse the stitff\{ bosom of tliat perilous stuff, 
 
 or one in K. Henry V.,\. i : 
 
 To England will I steal, and there I'll steal. 
 
 The late Rev. A. Dyce {A Few Plotcs on Shakespeare, 1853, p. 
 1 29) gives a large collection of instances : and a further instal-
 
 The Still Lion. 2 
 
 -/ 
 
 nient is contributed by Mr. Marsh, in his Lcctiin's on the English 
 Language, Lect. xxv. We give a few more in a foot-note.' 
 
 ' I will come after you, with what good speed 
 
 Our means will make us means. — AWs Well that Ends Well. 
 
 If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash 
 For his quick hunting. — Othello, ii. i. 
 
 These two are cited, with six not in point, by Malonc and Steevens, ed. 
 
 1821, xi, 253-4. 
 
 I'll take my leave 
 And leave to you the hearing of the cause. — 
 
 Measure for Measure, ii. I. 
 
 sound 
 Their watches on to mine eares the outward watch. — 
 
 Richard II., v. 5. 
 Rain added to a river that is rank 
 Perforce will force it overflow the bank. — Venus and Adonis. 
 
 If I could write the beauty of your eyes, 
 
 And in fresh numbers number all your graces, 
 
 The age to come would say, this poet lies. 
 
 Such heavenly touches ne'er toucht earthly faces. — Sonnet 17. 
 
 Yet some there were, the smaller summe were they, 
 That joyed to see the summe of all their joy. — 
 
 The Countess of Pembrooke's Passion, St. 78 (attributed to 
 Nicholas Breton). 
 
 In many places there is the play or the jingle without the repetition : e. g., 
 
 I should leave grazing, were I of your flock. 
 And only live by gazing. — Winter's Tale, iv. 3. 
 
 Cousins indeed, and by their uncle cozen'd 
 Of comfort. — Richard III, iv. 4. 
 
 Since we have locks to safeguard necessaries. 
 
 And pretty traps to catch the petty thieves. — Henry ^, i. 2. 
 
 Why tender'st thou tliat paper to me with 
 A look untender? — Cymbeline, iii. 4.
 
 28 The Still Lion. 
 
 Such instances must not be confounded with those which con- 
 stitute Section xliii. of the late W. Sidney Walker's Critical 
 Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, i860, i. p. 276. In 
 the face of so large an induction one might think that no critic 
 of judgment would have ventured on emendation in the passage 
 from the Comedy of Errors. It must be taken that the first help 
 means deliverance, the second, succour. Yet the line has been 
 tampered with by Pope, Steevens, Jackson, ColUer, Singer, and 
 Brae. We spare our readers an account of the nostrums of 
 the first five. Mr. A. E. Brae, in his admirable tract, entitled 
 Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare, 1861 (pp. 75 and 150), dis- 
 cerning with his usual penetration the sense which the passage 
 ought to carry, proposed to substitute hele for help, which would 
 be acceptable enough, but for the fact that help means hele 
 (heal) already. It is somewhat curious that helpful and healthful 
 
 Affection is a coal that must be cool'd. — ]"e)uis and Adonis. 
 
 Haply that name of chaste unhapp'ly set 
 
 This bateless edge on his keen appetite. — Lncrece. 
 
 Lean penury within his pen doth dwell, 
 
 That to his subjects lends not some small glory. — Somid 84. 
 
 This mist, my friend, is mystical. — Ardoi of Fever sham. 
 
 I sweare, Aurora, by thy starrie eyes, 
 
 And by those golden lockes, whose locke none slips. — 
 
 Stirling's Aurora, Sonnet x. 
 
 Still finest wits are stilling Venus' rose. — 
 
 Southwell's Saint Peter''s Coniplahit. 
 
 That we may praise them, or themselves prize you.— 
 
 Ilerrick. To Mild/nay, Earl of VVanoick. 
 
 And if I trusse not, let me not be trusted. — 
 
 Chapman. Bussy UAmbois, iii. 2.
 
 The Still Lion. 29 
 
 occur before, in the same scene ; and that Rowe changed the 
 first into helpless; and the editor of the FoHo 1632 changed 
 the second into helpful: so great a fatahty seems to have in- 
 vested this family of words, all occurring in one scene? Why 
 ^hapless ^geon' was not converted by some one into '■hopeless 
 ^geon,' and hopeless (on its first or second occurrence in that 
 scene) was not converted into hapless, may well excite our 
 wonder ; that they escaped, our gratitude ! 
 
 In 2 Henry VI., iv. 7, help again occurs, and is again sup- 
 planted. Lord Say thus pleads his cause with Jack Cade : 
 
 Long sitting to determine poor men's causes 
 Hath made me full of sickness and diseases. 
 
 To which Cade replies, 
 
 Ye shall have hempen caudle then, and the ke/pe of hatchet. 
 
 Better sense could not be wished : nor do we see how it could 
 be improved in any respect. Cade promises that his lordship's 
 diseases shall be administered-to ; he shall have hemp -caudle 
 and hatchet -cure : and if it be thought that Cade's small wit 
 intended a poor quibble here, here it may be found for the 
 seeking ; eord may be suspected under caudle, and helve under 
 helpe, with a side-glance at the saying ' to throw the helve after 
 the hatchet.' But there is no occasion for this refinement of 
 jest to be found in the passage. Now let us see what the 
 critics have said about it. Farmer, with an eye to the pun, 
 proposed to read pap for help, and adopts ' of a hatchet ' 
 from the Folio 1632; which reading Steevens and Ritson ad- 
 miringly approve, the former saying, * the help of a hatchet is
 
 \o TJlc Still Lion. 
 
 little better than nonsense.' But the sense, notwithstanding, is 
 perfect. Cade proposed to cure Lord Say's sickness by the 
 aid of ' the sure physician death,' by giving him the rope or 
 the axe. The article inserted by the editor of the Second 
 Folio is an impertinence. In Sonnet cliii. we have : 
 
 I, sick withal, the helpc of hatli desired. 
 
 How poor were the sound had he written, 'the helpe of a bath.' 
 He there meant bath-cure : so in the former case he meant 
 hatchet-cure. Finally, Mr. A. E. Brae (in the work lately cited, 
 p. 150) proposed to substitute hele for help in this place also. 
 Pap, helve, and hele agree in this : they carry double : each may 
 refer to a part of the hatchet, as well as to Lord Say's regimen. 
 But they also agree in being impertinent, inasmuch as help in 
 the sense of healing is a perfectly satisfactory reading. 
 
 The fatality spoken of is not confined to the Comedy of 
 Errors and 2 Henry VI. In AlPs Well that Ends Well, i. 3, 
 
 we read, 
 
 He and his physicians 
 
 Are of a mind; he, that they cannot Jidp him, 
 They, that they cannot Jielp. 
 
 W. Sidney Walker suggests (with considerable doubt, however,) 
 that heal should supersede the second help ; and the late Mr. 
 Samuel Bailey, in contravention of a recognised and accepted 
 canon, would abolish it in favour of cure! Once again, in 
 2 Henry V/., u. 1, we have : 
 
 Come, offer at my shrine, and I will //etp thee; 
 
 where both Walker and Bailey read heal for help.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ON THE CORRUPT AND OBSCURE WORDS IN 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 T will be perceived that help, heal, or health, are not 
 mere alternative forms of spelling one word ; that in 
 fact we have passed from the case of two such forms 
 to that in which the orthographies belong to two words, coin- 
 cident in one, at least, of their several significations. Help and 
 heal are twins, separable as distinct words, yet having the 
 features of a common parent. In Shakespeare we find bleak 
 and bleat (balare) ; break and breach (ruptio); w^-Zr and mate 
 (consors) ; plait and pleach (intextus) ; and in other writers 
 attach and attack (raanum inicere) ; bak and bat (vespertilio) ; 
 7noke, mote, and moth (blatta) ; quilk and quilt (culcita) ; reckless 
 and retchless (temerarius) ; where each pair or set of symbols 
 are equivalents of one and the same word. But words which 
 had once a strictly equivalent usage sometimes grow into 
 synonyms having differences, or even become the signs of 
 distinct words : e. g., bleak and black; dole and deal; list and 
 lust, Sic. ; to which with qualification may be added such pairs 
 or sets of words as rcake, watch, and wait ; ward and guard,
 
 
 
 2 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 &c. Then, to crown the work, they may receive some modi- 
 fication of form by association with cognate, or even incognate 
 signs. In this way is the balance of change maintained ; for 
 otherwise the loss, through the inaccurate or careless use of 
 words, would soon enfeeble and debase the language to such 
 an extent, that its literature would come to an end, through 
 failure of the very means of expression. 
 
 Such considerations, with a multitude of others which we 
 cannot set forth in this essay, are of the greatest importance 
 in the criticism of the text of Shakespeare, particularly where 
 we have to determine whether a word be interpretable as it 
 stands, or a corruption demanding emendation. 
 
 The risk of applying conjectural criticism to the Still 
 Lion increases as we proceed with our subject. Under appa- 
 rently nonsensical words and phrases often lurk a sense and 
 intelligence the most ' express and admirable.' Scarcely a year 
 passes over our heads but nQ.\N light, radiating from Elizabethan 
 lore, shines into some ' dark passage ' which the commentator 
 with his ' farthing candle ' has carefully shunned, or the con- 
 jectural critic, with his ingenuity and felicity, has tinkered 
 again and again, and still in vain. An old author, writing of 
 the latter, says, ' Hee is the Surgeon of old Authors, and heales 
 the wounds of dust and ignorance' {Micro- Cos?nograJ>hie, 1628, 
 § 35). If he did, it would be hard to denounce him for probing 
 them. The complaint, however, is just this, that he does not 
 heal them. His surgery not unfrequently is butchery; but of 
 the healing art he knows as little as a barber-surgeon. There 
 is an old 'jeast' of such a one who, having to shave a cus-
 
 The Still Lion. n 
 
 tomer, fell to cursing, because he cut his thumb, which he had 
 put in his patient's cheek to force it out tense and firm. 
 Happily, Shakespearian barber-surgeons sometimes do this too, 
 and, sadder or wiser by experience, handle their author with 
 more feeling for the future, or leave him alone. But though 
 some notable cures have been performed, notwithstanding, by 
 the regulars of criticism, there yet remain, after all, a number 
 of corrupt places which have persistently failed to profit by 
 their nostrums. Of single words thus situated there are some 
 thirty which thus get referred to the category of immortal 
 nonsense. 
 
 First, as to textual difficulties affecting single words. Here 
 are a sheaf of these ' ugly customers,' with most of whom every 
 conscientious editor has played a losing game. 
 
 An-lu'iycs. Merry Wives of Wind- Eiiipirickqutick. Coriolanus, ii. I. 
 
 sor, ii. I. Esil. Hamlet, v. I. 
 
 Arm-gaunt. Antony and Cleopatra, Land-damn. Winter's Tale, ii. i. 
 
 i. 5. Omyers. i Hen. IV, ii, i. 
 
 Aroint. Macbeth, i. 3. Lear, iii. 4. Paiocke. Hamlet, iii, 2. 
 
 Barlei. Macbeth, i. 6. Premie. Measure for Measm-e, iii, i. 
 
 Bone. Timon of Athens, iii. 5. Piinazvays. Romeoand Juliet, iii, 2. 
 
 Charge-house. Love's Labours Lost, Scamels. Tempest, ii, i. 
 
 V. 2. Skains- mates. Romeo and Juliet, 
 Cars. Twelfth Night, ii. 5. ii, 4. 
 
 *Cyme. Macbeth, v. 3. Strachy. Twelfth Night, ii, 5. 
 
 Ducdamc. As You Like It, ii. 5. Vllorxa. Timon of Athens, iii, 3. 
 
 Dung. Antony and Cleopatra, v. 2. Yaughan. Hamlet, v, i. 
 
 From the penultimate word we will call the entire class 
 Ullorxals. 
 
 We must allow, at the outset, that few of these strange 
 
 F
 
 34 The Still Lion. 
 
 words are utterly hopeless; that one or two will trouble no 
 one's peace any longer; and that some bid fair to justify them- 
 selves, or to reveal, through their corruption, the true words 
 which, owing to the blunder of reader, writer, or compositor, 
 suffered this perversion. One can hardly doubt that aroitit is 
 a true word, though it has been often attacked and defended 
 witli great pertinacity, ingenuity, and learning. But, though a 
 true word, its exact sense or root-meaning has not been ascer- 
 tained. It has been thought to mean, be off, from the A. S.: 
 and either get thee behind, ox plague take thee, or break thy back,* 
 from the French. But anyhow, the phrase, rynt thee, occurs 
 in an old proverb.t Barlet was corrected by the editor of 
 the folio 1632 ; it is a press-error for Martlet.X Cyme has been 
 thought to be a misprint for cetie, an obsolete form of senna : 
 but the researches of Mr. H. A. J. Munro have pretty nearly 
 estabhshed the right of cyme to its place in the text. It appears 
 to be Kvna, cyma, the name given by Galen, Celsus, Columella, 
 
 * But ireinte-toi (literally break thy back) would not be applied to a 
 witcli, whose instant flight is the desideratum. 
 t Mrs. Browning has, 
 
 ' Whisker'd cats arointed flee, 
 and we observe in the Animal JVorld, vol. v., p. 23, 
 
 ' What wonder that the vermin fled arointed.' 
 
 From these expressions one would infer that aroint is extant in some 
 northern dialect. We have heard squander applied to vermin in this very 
 way by a Yorkshireman. Aroint is used by Sir W. Scott: 'wherefore 
 aroint ye, if ye were ten times my master, unless ye come in bodily shape, 
 lith and limb. — Bride 0/ Lam mer moor, ch. vii. 
 
 J Just as we have Barlows for Marlo^vs in Richard Carew's Excelhncie 
 of the English Tongue {Cdimd^rCi Kemaines, 16 14).
 
 The Still Lion. 35 
 
 Vertomannus, &c., to the early sprouts of cabbage, which was 
 commonly used as a gentle purgative.* Ann-gaiini is assuredly 
 a misprint; for if such a word was ever applied to a horse in 
 the sense oi gauni in tlie forcquartcrs, such a horse would, in 
 Shakespeare's phrase, be almost shoiilder-shotten : and most cer- 
 tainly Anthony's high-bred charger could not have been that. 
 Either arrogant, rampaunt, or tannagaunt is a more likely correc- 
 tion than anngirt, which has been confidently proposed : but 
 nostra Judicio, termagant would be a poor, if not an inappropriate 
 epithet for the charger. The article an, as Singer observes, is in 
 favour of arrogant. Charge-house is, almost certainly, church- 
 house, and the mis-spelling may be intentional to indicate the 
 pronunciation, just as in Much Ado About Nothing, Dogberry's 
 losses may have been intended for law-suits. On the other 
 hand, was there ever such a word as charge-house, for donius 
 curationis 1 Or is charge a misprint for cleargie % Scamcls has 
 hitherto presented an irreducible crux, and ten substitutes for it 
 have been proposed. But we are happy to be able to state 
 that at length it has shown some title to its prescriptive place 
 in the text. Norfolk, a scamcl is the name for the female 
 pick: this being the male of Limosa rufa, or the Bar-tailed 
 Godwit. (See Stevenson's Birds of Norfolk, vol. ii. p. 260.) 
 Still, we are not aware of such birds frequenting the rocks for 
 
 * Philemon Holland, in his version of PHny, employes the plural cviiu-s, 
 where Pliny has the singular, cynta : ' Yet none put foorth their cymes or 
 tender buds more than they [/. e., the colewort].' Holland's Pliny, 1601 : 
 ii. p. 25 ; again, ' Of all kinds of Coleworts, the sweetest and most pIea^ant 
 to the tast, is the Col-florie cyma [in margin], although it be counted good 
 for nothing in Physicke.' But on this point doctors disagreed.
 
 36 The Still Lion. 
 
 breeding.* EsU is either Eysell (/. ^., vinegar, or worm-wood 
 wine), or the name of a Danish river ( Yssel). Bone, one of the 
 most senseless corruptions in all Shakespeare, escaped unchal- 
 lenged, strange to say, till Mr. Staunton made two unlucky 
 guesses at it in his edition of Shakespeare. It appears to be a 
 misprint for bed, the termination one (instead of ed) having been 
 caught from 07iely or from none in the same line. Assuredly it 
 was there, and there only, that Alcibiades would have wished to 
 prolong the lives of the senators, who were already prepared by 
 their servile imbecility for being put away out of sight. Of run- 
 aways we shall have somewhat to say hereafter. Guesses enow 
 have been made at the words for which the rest in our sheaf 
 may have been press-errors : but with the exception of E>?tfi- 
 rickqutick, skains-mates, and Yaughan, they all remain to this day 
 shrouded in hopeless obscurity. As to these three, Yaughan 
 may be a proper-name; and if such a name be not found in 
 records of the time, it may well be a misprint for either 
 Vaughan or Johan, which would be the tapster's name. Skain, 
 Mr. Staunton tells us, used to be heard in the Isle of Thanet, 
 in the sense of scapegrace ; but we do not agree with him 
 that this fact removes all difficulty with the word. Empirick- 
 qutick, till the advent of the Perkins-imposture, was always 
 turned into enipirie or cmpirick, and, we think, rightly so. It 
 seems clear that Empirickqutick belongs to a very definite 
 class of misprints, which we may call duplicative. Here are a 
 
 * We arc indebted to Dr. R. G. Latham for this reference. We did 
 not take it from the note at page 120 of the Clarendon Press edition of The 
 Tempest, where the same explanation is given and the same dejection taken.
 
 The Still Lion. 37 
 
 few examples of the class, observed by the writer: — Respec- 
 tivedive for respective, in the office-copy of a \\\\\ : axiomomata 
 iox axiomata,\\\ \Y\\q\\q\Vs Philosophy of Disan'cry, i860, p. 144: 
 Aurorora for Aurora, in The English Parnassus, 1657, p. 400: 
 Blakelesley for Blakesley in Reeves and Turner's Catalogue, 
 No. 253 : Thackerary for Thackeray in Salkeld's Catalogue, 
 No. 112: Concaimon-strect for Cannon-street, in The Times of 
 March 16, 1875: zx\^ puriritie iox puritie,\x\ the first folio of 
 Shakespeare. And still more to the purpose the following : 
 ' the whiche * * they adjudged for prognostiqukys and tokens 
 of the Kynges deth:' in Fabyan's Chronicle, vol. i. c. 246: 
 where the word prognostiquykys is a misprint for pronostiques. 
 This is an error of near kin to Enipirickqutick ; and exemplifies 
 the tendency of writers and compositors to repeat some syllable 
 in a word which is susceptible of two forms of spelling : as, in 
 this case, with a qu, or a ck. In practice we have often found 
 ourselves anticipating the terminal consonants of the next 
 word, in the one we happened to be writing : as make tuork 
 for may 7aork; make speak for may speak; and so forth : and 
 in the first edition of The Still Lion, at p. 209 of the Jahrbuch, 
 the former error of writing was actually made in the copy, and 
 set up, without being subsequently detected : whereby a second 
 misprint was grafted upon a line in The Tempest, as if in com- 
 pensation for losing the one we had it in hand to expose and 
 correct. So it came to pass that the very page containing our 
 remarks on duplicative errors, presented an example of the very 
 kind. Of the residue of the words in our sheaf, nearly all of 
 which are mere printer's sphinx-riddles, ducda^ne (which, like
 
 38 The Still Lion. 
 
 aroint and prenzie, has the distinguished honour of occurring 
 more than once in the text of Shakespeare) has been regarded 
 as a nonsensical refrain ; and in support of that view Mr. J. 
 O. PhilHps (Hallivvell) cites, from the burden of an old song, 
 dusadam-mc-we. But such refrains are common enough ; and 
 if one could only be sure that ducdame is no more than such a 
 refrain, one would not be solicitous about its pedigree. Allowing 
 it to be such a refrain, and therefore one in which no meaning 
 would be looked for, is it likely that Amiens would have been 
 made to show such solicitude about it % Had it been, for 
 instance, dan-dyry-ciim-dan, thrice repeated, would Shakespeare 
 have made him ask Jaques, ' What's that dan-dyry-cum-dan ? ' 
 Surely not.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON THE DIFFICULT PHRASES IN SHAKESPEARE, AND 
 THE DANGER OF TAMPERING WITH THEM. 
 
 |UT the critic is in danger of assuming, on insufficient 
 evidence, that not a word only, but an entire sentence, 
 owes its obscurity to the corruption of words by 
 scribes and printers. It is convenient to consider phrases under 
 three heads : idioms, idiotisms, and idiasms : which may be 
 briefly explained as follows : — 
 
 All living languages are in a state of continuous change. 
 Not only do words fall into disuse, and others accrue to the 
 general stock, not only do the orthographical forms in which 
 they are presented to the eye undergo change, but each several 
 word is ever more or less changing its meaning, both in scope 
 and in force. Some words (like sJi}\ secure) obtain a signifi- 
 cation directly contrary to their former meaning; or (like let, 
 prevent) retain two contrary meanings at once. Others (like 
 knave, piece, lewd) pass from a respectable to a disreputable 
 sense ; while others (like liberty, practice, occupy* convey) throw 
 
 * 'A captain! These villains will make the word "captain" as odious 
 as the word "occupy," which was an excellent good word before it was 
 ill-sorted.' — 2 //tv/. //'. , ii. 4. This word is now restored to its old 
 respectability.
 
 40 The Still Lion. 
 
 off their disreputable association, and become honourable sym- 
 bols of speech. The literal sense of some gives way to the 
 figurative, and, perhaps more rarely, the reverse; and a word 
 which has done duty as one part of speech becomes another. 
 But not only do words thus change; but all kinds of expression 
 written and spoken change also. The normal affinides of parts 
 of speech constitute the idiom. : the singular phrase, which does 
 not conform to the idiomatic construction, is the idiotism. 
 There remain phrases and words peculiar to some creative 
 writer; these we call idiasms (iSiaafioi). Thus it appears that 
 the idiom is a regular, the idiotism a proverbial, and the idiasm a 
 private and peculiar mode of phraseology. At present we shall 
 confine our remarks to complete sentences, and the changes 
 and corrugations of sentences; passing by that intermediate 
 class of corruptions which involve several words, but not an 
 entire phrase. 
 
 The idioms of a language change, but slowly, under dialec- 
 tical and colloquial influences; and apart from those influences, 
 scarcely change at all. But idiotisms are constantly slipping 
 out as pedantries, and creeping in as slang. Shakespeare's 
 works, like all the literature of his day, as might be expected, 
 contain many idioms which by this time have become obsolete 
 or dead. The worst of it is, that we read him so much, and 
 with so little appropriate knowledge and steady reflection, that 
 we get habituated to the look and sound of his phraseology, 
 and come at last to think we understand it, mistaking the 
 familiar for the intelligible. The same has come to pass of 
 the Authorised Version of the Holy Scriptures. Such an idiom
 
 The Still Lion. 41 
 
 as is involved in the sentence, ' I do the [thee] to wytene [under- 
 stand] that it is made be [by] enchauntement,' in Maundevile's 
 Voiage and Travaile (a.d. 1322-46), is as dead as a door-nail : 
 yet we have the same, ' We do you to wit of the grace of God,' 
 in the A. V. ; and we read this over and over again, and get 
 so used to it, that it comes upon us as the voice of an old 
 familiar friend, while it is as unintelligible as an unknown 
 tongue, and was obsolescent when King James' Bible was 
 first printed. How often, too, have we read the lines in 
 Hamlet, v. 2, 
 
 Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon, 
 
 * * * * is't not perfect conscience, 
 
 To quit him with this arm ? 
 
 but to how many readers is this idiotism intelligible ? For 
 one thing, that passage is absurdly pointed in most editions 
 of the play ; the true construction being, that the idiotism 
 in question governs the infinitive, ' To quit (requite) him with 
 this arm. ' The same expression is employed in three other 
 places in Shakespeare : viz.. Rich. II., ii. 3 ; Rich. Ill, iv. 2 ; 
 and Antony and Cleopatra, ii. i. See also Romeo a?id Juliet, 
 ii. 3 (' I stand on sudden haste ' — but which is not identical 
 with the expression in question). It is usually explained cor- 
 rectly in annotated editions ; but the editors satisfy themselves 
 by quoting from other parts of Shakespeare in illustration of it. 
 We give two contemporary examples from other works : 
 
 Then they are worthy to be lianged eternally in Hel, that will not most 
 gladly, * * * come to heare the eternall God the King of heaven him - 
 selfe speake, who doth pronounce, &c., &c. . . . which to heare, marke, 
 
 G
 
 42 The Still Lioji. 
 
 remember, and observe, it stands us upon. — Lupton's Too good to be true. 
 
 1580, p. 25. 
 
 It was concealed, and therefore stands upon. 
 Whether through our advice you will be saved, 
 Or in his beastly entrails be en-graved. 
 
 Cupid and Psyche, by Shakerley Marmion, 1637. 
 
 Again, how often have we read that inimitable scene in 
 2 Hen. IV., i. 2, where Falstaff says of his mercer, 
 
 A whoreson Achitophel ! a rascally yea-forsooth knave ! to bear a gen- 
 tleman in hand, and then stand upon security. 
 
 This idiotism also occurs in six other places in Shake- 
 speare : viz., The Taming of the Shretv, iv. 2 ; Much Ado About 
 Nothing, iv. i ; Measure for Measure, i. 4 ; Cymbeline, v. 5 ; 
 Macbeth, iii. i; Hamlet, ii. 2. Examples of this are commoner 
 in Elizabethan literature, than of the former. Here are five : 
 
 There be many diseases in the bodies of men and beasts which he 
 [the Devil] seeth will breake foorth unto lamenesse or unto death, he 
 beareth the Witches in hand he doth them. 
 Giffard's Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts, 1603. The Epistle. 
 
 And yet much worse is it to make them to mary by striving and hate, 
 threatning, and sute : as when they goe to lawe together, the man for 
 the woman, bearing her /;/ ha)id that shee is his wife : — Vives' Ijtstruc- 
 tion of a Christian Woman (R. Hyrd), 1592. Sig. N 2. 
 
 And as for the manner of his Apostacy or backsliding, the priest 
 himselfe, nay the partie himselfe, nay we our selves know to be farre 
 otherwise then they woulde faine here bcare us in hand. — Racster, 1598, 
 last page. 
 
 And againe, those which being hitherto borne in hande that men's soules 
 returne againe on earth, * # * win confesse the like. — Of Ghostes 
 and Spirites, 1 5 96. To the Reader.
 
 Tlic Still Lion. 43 
 
 Salomon teacheth us to chasten children with the rod, and so to make them 
 stand in awe : he doth not say, we must bcare them in hand they shall be 
 devoured of Bugges, Hags of the night, and such like monsters. — Ibid, p. 21. 
 
 (It also occurs at pp. 27, 31, 32, 53, 187, 210, and 211 of 
 this curious and instructive treatise, which is a translation of 
 the well-known work, De Lemuribus, of Lavaterus ; and it is 
 common in Ben Jonson, Haywood, and the early dramatists.) 
 The phrase is of great antiquity. The earliest example that 
 has come under our notice is in Drant's Horace's Sat. (Sig. 
 A ii.), 1566, but is there in the form to hold one in hand in 
 the sense of persuade., simply. As to the meaning of these 
 idiotisrns, 7^o stand upon is to be incumbent on. To bear in 
 hand is to inspire misplaced confidence or belief. 
 
 It were easy to multiply to any extent examples of obso- 
 lete idiotism : for further illustrations take these four : to die 
 and live by a thing; to retnember o?ie's courtesy ; to cry on a 
 thing; to cry game; all of which have been mercilessly handled 
 by the editors and commentators. In cases where a i^w ex- 
 amples of the phrase have been discovered in contemporary 
 literature the love of emendation has yielded to the force of 
 evidence. Where that evidence cannot be adduced the sus- 
 pected phrase falls an easy prey to ' conjectural felicity,' /. e., 
 to barbarous innovation. 
 
 The slow and comparatively slight changes which the true 
 idioms of the language have undergone, do, in fact, occasion 
 the critic no, difficulty. The expression No is 1 (for Is not .?), 
 No did 1 No have ? is a totally obsolete idiom ; one instance 
 of which occurs in Shakespeare, viz., in King John, iv. 2, where
 
 44 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 ' No had ' of the FoUo has been usually altered into Had none. 
 (See Notes and Queries, ist S. vii. 520 & 593.) The use of the 
 relative absolute (with active or neuter participles) was in 
 use as late as Locke : at least three instances of it are in 
 Shakespeare : viz., two in The Tempest, i. 2 ( ' Who having, &c., - 
 he did believe,' &:c. ' A noble Neapolitan, &c., who being,' 
 &c., did give us'), and one in Love's Labours Lost, i. i ('JFho 
 dazzling so, that eye shall be,' &c.), in the first of which the 
 seeming solecism has given occasion to several emendations.* -4- 
 The suppression of the relative as subject was almost as nor- 
 mal a usage as its expression ; and in some half-dozen places 
 in Shakespeare, where such is the construction, the text has 
 been conjecturally altered. But above all other peculiarities 
 of the Elizabethan idiom was that of inflectional conjugation, 
 e. g., the use of the third person plural in s or ///, which in 
 the case of Shakespeare has been almost always regarded as 
 a grammatical inaccuracy ! Some critics have gone so far as 
 to reflect on Shakespeare's imperfect education, and to attempt 
 the poor joke, that if, as Mr. Halliwell asserts, he did go 
 to Stratford Grammar School, he must have learnt anything 
 but grammar ! Another explains the apparent irregularities in 
 Shakespeare by the supposition that ' the thought blew the 
 
 * After all is it certain that these are all instances of ' the relative 
 absolute'? at least one ('Who having into truth,' &c.) looks like a case 
 of 'the supplementary pronoun.' (See AhhoiVs Shakespearean Grammar, 
 1870, § 249.) cf. 
 
 t Which when it bites and blows, &c., I smile and say, 
 This is no flattery. —,4^- You Litce It, ii. i.
 
 The Still Lion. 45 
 
 language to shivers,' which, it appears, is a natural character- 
 istic of literary genius ! Accordingly it has been deemed an 
 act of kindness to cure him of those defects. So it has hap- 
 pened that the editors have corrected his grammar, as well as 
 modernized his speUing; but in doing this they have betrayed 
 an amount of ignorance for which they would not otherwise 
 have had the discredit. The Still Lion has been amply 
 
 AVENGED ON HIS FOES. 
 
 After all that a sound knowledge of English Literature, and 
 of the evolution of the English Language, with the concur- 
 rence of conjectural skill, can effect in vindicating and restoring 
 the genuine text of Shakespeare, there still remain a number 
 of corruptions which, like the UUorxals, are mere printers' 
 Sphinx-riddles. These, however, unlike the UUorxals, consist 
 of several entire words, and are cases not so much of corrupt 
 words as of corrupt phrases ; and, while it is possible that some 
 of these are pure idiasms, it is much more probable that they 
 are idiotisms of the time or textual corruptions. Among this 
 numerous family are the following, which will serve as sam- 
 ples of the class : 
 
 1, I see that men make ropes in such a scarre 
 That we'll forsake ourselves. 
 
 AlPs Well that Ends Well, iv. 2. 
 
 2, It is as lawful, 
 For we would count give much to as violent thefts 
 
 And rob in the behalf of charity. — Troilus and Cressida, v. 3. 
 
 The dram of eale 
 Doth all the noble substance of a doubt 
 To his own scandal. — Ilandet, i. 4.
 
 46 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 4. That I had no angry wit to be a lord. 
 
 Timon of Athens, i. i. 
 
 5. I would they would forget me, like the virtues 
 Which our divines lose by 'em. — Coriolafius, ii. 3. 
 
 6. Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung, 
 The beggars Nurse, and Csesar's. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, v. 2. 
 
 From the first of these examples, I call the family Rope- 
 scarres. In dealing with these the success of the critic has 
 been infinitesimally small. We are indebted to the collations 
 in the Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare (supplemented by 
 the editors' manuscript collections which have been placed 
 at our disposal) for the numbers in the following table. If 
 these numbers do not fairly represent the relative difficulty of 
 these passages, they will at least testify to the absolute diffi- 
 culty of all, and to the ill success that has rewarded criticism. 
 It should be borne in mind here, that to the obscurity of the 
 passage must be added the dulness of the critic. The diffi- 
 culty may lie, as in fact it often does, as much in the percep- 
 tions of the recipient, as in the obscurity of the phraseology 
 to be received. 
 
 I, 
 
 19 conjectures. 
 
 4. 
 
 15 cc 
 
 injectu 
 
 ires, 
 
 2, 
 
 15 
 
 5, 
 
 6 
 
 >> 
 
 
 J) 
 
 47 
 
 6, 
 
 7 
 
 ) } 
 
 
 It would be a thankless task to specify the actual number 
 of Rope-scarres in the entire text of Shakespeare. The list 
 is considerable : but to our mind, the wonder is that the text 
 is, on the whole, so free from misprisions and dislocations.
 
 The Still Lion. 47 
 
 When we consider the misprints which disfigure modern books, 
 even those which have received the most vigilant and jealous 
 supervision, both of Editor and of Reader, it is to be expected 
 that, at a time when printing was not conducted on so me- 
 thodical a plan as at present, and when important works 
 were generally issued without any regular editorial supervision, 
 the first Edition of Shakespeare should exhibit a harvest of 
 typographical casualties. On the whole we are disposed to 
 regard that edition as being quite as free from typographical 
 errors as the majority of dramatic works of that time. More- 
 over, we are convinced that much of the obstinate intract- 
 ability of these Rope-scarres is due to the intermixture of ob- 
 solete phrases, Shakespearian idiasms, or forgotten allusions, 
 with certain typographical errors ; so that it is not surprising 
 that the conjectural critic should find himself unable to set 
 them right by the mere exercise of his ingenuity and taste.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AN EXAMINATION AND DEFENSE OF CERTAIN WORDS 
 
 AND PHRASES IN SHAKESPEARE, WHICH HAVE 
 
 SUFFERED THE WRONGS OF EMENDATION. 
 
 HE three foregoing chapters are intended rather for 
 warning than for tlie value of the criticisms which they 
 contain. Let us now apply ourselves to a selection 
 
 of passages, which have received the doubtful benefit of con- 
 jectural emendation. Our warning has been somewhat prolix; 
 but our best excuse will be found in the treatment to which 
 portions of the ancient text of Shakespeare have been sub- 
 jected at the hands of his censors and critics. So capricious 
 are the objections preferred against particular words and 
 phrases, that it is a sheer impossibility to anticipate them. 
 Accordingly the antiquarian of the Enghsh Language, who 
 essays the vindication of the old text, stands at a great dis- 
 advantage. To learn the acknowledged peculiarities and 
 difficulties of that text is a labour of love ; and to retain 
 all the salient points of Shakespeare's phraseology in an 
 ever ready and lively memory is but a light prelude to the 
 business that is to follow. With these matters ever consciously
 
 TJic Still Lion. 49 
 
 before him — ' full of eyes before and behind ' — the critic wades 
 through a huge store of the literature of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries, noting down every word, phrase, and illu- 
 sion, which can by any possibility throw light on the text of his 
 venerated author. This is the toil which has been achieved 
 by all the leading editors from Steevens to Dyce, with a few 
 exceptions, which it is as well to forget. Fit propaedeutic is 
 such a course of study and discipline to the more genial and 
 graceful duties of verbal criticism ! The labour achieved, the 
 preliminary requirement complied with at the cost of much 
 time and effort, some vain reader, of blissful ignorance but of 
 lively fancy, conceives a liking for what he pleasantly regards 
 as the game of criticism, and rushes into the columns of some 
 periodical, such as the Athenceiwi, or Notes and Queries., to 
 proclaim with flourish of trumpets a new reading. His con- 
 jecture is, as a matter of course, described as 'the undoubted 
 restoration of a passage which has for two centuries and a half 
 defied alike exposition and correction.' Then follows, equally 
 as a matter of course, the discovery of a mare's nest. The 
 would-be critic has mistaken the sense of a passage both well 
 known and perfectly understood ; whereupon he proposes what 
 he takes for a new conjecture, but which in many cases is 
 an old and not very creditable acquaintance, whose familiar 
 features may be seen recorded in some variorum hortiis siccus, 
 under the sanction of a venerable name. In a few of such 
 cases it is no great tax upon the antiquarian to produce his 
 authority for adhering to the old text : but where there are 
 so many * Richmonds in the field,' he naturally and reason- 
 
 H
 
 50 Tlie Still Lion. 
 
 ably grudges the superfluous labour of defending what is im- 
 pregnable. He rightly feels that faith in the prodigious learn- 
 ing of a Walker or a Dyce is a simple duty with learners ; 
 and that for them to put a word or phrase on its trial merely 
 because they 'don't seem to see it,' is an impertinence, against 
 which every well-informed and competent editor would jealously 
 guard his columns. In some cases, however, the vindication 
 of a challenged expression in Shakespeare is inconclusive, by 
 reason of the very absurdity of the challenge. We have more 
 than once seen an expression denounced as senseless, which 
 assuredly had never occasioned the slightest difficulty with any 
 one ; and for this very reason no critic had ever thought it 
 worth while to register the instances of its use which had 
 occurred in the course of his reading. We ourselves have 
 noticed a peculiarity of language occurring over and over again, 
 of which we did not stop to record a single example, because 
 its employment by Shakespeare had never provoked remark, 
 and seemed unable to afford a foothold for suspicion. Yet 
 we have lived to see the passage in which it occurred obelized 
 as an ' unsuspected corruption,' and to find ourselves incapaci- 
 tated, through the want of superhuman prescience, for the 
 work of vindication. It is impossible to stop every cranny 
 against the aggression of a misplaced ingenuity, which ' infects 
 unseen,' and corrupts the text it seems to restore. 
 
 As the inquiry we are about to institute is ' of the dust 
 dusty ' in its extreme dryness and in the antiquity of the litera- 
 ture from which we shall draw our illustrations, we will preface 
 it with a couple of relevant anecdotes. As both are derived
 
 The Still Lion. 51 
 
 from the store of our forgetive friend, Mr. Perkins-Ireland, we 
 will not vouch for their literal truth. He tells us that a literary 
 bore of his acquaintance came to him one day with a pocket- 
 edition of Shakespeare, in which a well-known line in Ki7ig 
 John thus stood : 
 
 ' Bel, Booke, and Candle shall not course me back.' 
 
 The bore was swelled with the importance of a critical discovery: 
 his ' business looked out of him.' He triumphantly pointed 
 to the line, in which over the antepenult he had written the 
 woxdi, curse. 'Course,'' said he decisively, 'must be a misprint 
 (or curse.' Mr. Perkins-Ireland was taken aback by the apparent 
 felicity of the conjecture, but promptly asked his friend for 
 his proofs : who thereupon produced an extract from page 
 17 of Lupton's Too Good To Be True (an ominous title!), 
 which ran thus : 
 
 ' The best thing the Pope can do is to curse him out again, with Bel, 
 Booke, and Candle.' 
 
 This he followed up with another from page 23 of Ariostd's 
 Seven Planets Governing Italic, 
 
 ' Then roares the bulles worse then the Basan host, 
 Whilst Belles and bookes and candles curses boast.' 
 
 This he was following up with others : when Mr. Perkins-Ireland 
 stopped him, and pointed out that one thing was yet unproved, 
 that curse was ever spelt course. His friend was naturally 
 indignant at so discomforting a requisition: for if course was 
 just curse under an archaic orthography, the credit to be 
 awarded to the bore was of a very different kind, he thought
 
 52 The Still Lion. 
 
 of an inferior kind, to that he claimed: he would be no 
 longer the emender, but the exponent of the word in the text. 
 But whether he would or no, the thing was virtually done for 
 him : for Mr. Perkins-Ireland himself found course spelt curse 
 in Leland, and scourge spelt scurge in Richard Hyrd and George 
 Chapman ; so he frankly owned that his friend had, at least, 
 invested the passage in King John with a new and most admirable 
 sense. Their triumphal rejoicings, however, were of very short 
 duration. Fortunately, before breaking up the conference, Mr. 
 Perkins-Ireland, with his well-known caution, had the prudence 
 to turn to his Variorum. There, to his and his friend's astonish- 
 ment, he found the line in King John printed thus: — 
 
 ' Bell, Book and Candle shall not drive me back ; ' 
 
 and so it stood in half-a-dozen other editions at hand. Obviously 
 his friend's pocket-edition was, at least in that line, misprinted; 
 and he departed chap-fallen at this new discovery, that he had 
 been bringing his critical resources to bear on a word which 
 was not in Shakespeare's text ! 
 
 That's not a bad anecdote: but here's a better. Both enforce 
 the lesson, ' look before you leap.' It is as dangerous to criticize 
 a passage without consulting the context, as it is to do so 
 without verifying it. Mr. Perkins-Ireland was the critic in this 
 case. He was reading Much Ado About Nothing, ii. i (another 
 ominous title !), when he came upon the passage, 
 
 ' and then comes repentance, and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque- 
 pace faster and faster, till he sink [apace] into his grave.' 
 
 The addition of apace was made by his cousin, Mr. Thomas
 
 The Still Lion. 53 
 
 Perkins, of Folio 1632 celebrity; and Mr. Perkins -Ireland 
 thought it eminently ingenious. ' But,' said he to himself, 
 ' What is the meaning of cinque-pace ? Surely it must be some 
 sort of disease : in fact, the whole passage reminds one of 
 Falstaff's degrees of sickness and wickedness, which my cousin 
 Thomas so rashly altered into diseases.'' Thereupon he took 
 down his copy of Andrew Boord's Brmiaric of Health., and 
 to his delight found a disease called the Sinkopis, the descrip- 
 tion of which accorded admirably with that of Repentance, 
 'with his bad legs,' sinking into his grave. It is not to be 
 wondered at that he believed himself to have hit upon a capital 
 emendation. But for all that, his caution did not desert him; 
 and he once more applied himself to the text, this time reading 
 it with the context; and on perceiving that Beatrice had just 
 said, ' Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a 
 measure, and a cinque-pace,'' began to be ashamed of his precipi- 
 tation, if not of his ingenuity. The fact is, that emendation is 
 always a ticklish business. The critic can never tell whether 
 THE Lion is dead, asleep, or only shamming sleep. He 
 
 TAKES A DEAL OF WALKING-ROUND, AND TICKLING WITH A LONG 
 STRAW, AND POKING WITH A STICK, BEFORE ONE CAN BE REASON- 
 ABLY SURE THAT IT IS SAFE TO COME TO CLOSE QUARTERS WITH 
 HIM. 
 
 We will now proceed to consider in detail a dozen selected 
 characteristics of Shakespearian criticism. 
 
 I. It is remarkable that it is not the most difficult passages 
 in Shakespeare that have occasioned the greatest dispute : on 
 the contrary, the most hotly contested questions relate to pas-
 
 54 The Still Lion. 
 
 sages of which the only fault in the eyes of a competent critic 
 is, that the sense is perhaps too obvious. No one, attentively 
 considering such passages, can fail to find sotne sense, though 
 perhaps every one feels that after all the sense intended by 
 Shakespeare has eluded his vigilance, and believes that some- 
 thing better remains to be found in the text, or, failing that, to 
 be found for it. In such speculation, whether of investigation 
 or of tentative substitution, there is, on the whole, much good \ 
 provided the critic does not overlook what is ' under his nose,' 
 which is, in so many places, the very meaning which ought to 
 put a term to speculation. Here is an example in point. 
 Juhet, impatiently awaiting the advent of Romeo to her nuptial 
 couch, thus invokes the night : — 
 
 Spred thy close Curtaine Love-performing night, 
 That run-awayes eyes may wincke, and Romeo 
 Leape to these amies, untalkt of and unseene. 
 
 Romeo atid jhdiet, iii. 2. 
 
 So the folio 1623, and two of the quarto editions, the two earUer 
 quartos reading runnawayes. For this word run-awayes, which 
 was not suspected till after Capell's edition, and which admits 
 of explanation without the least tour de force, we find that no 
 less than thirty-two substitutes have been proposed, whereof 
 seven have been inserted in the text of as many editions I As 
 we do not intend to furnish a list of conjectural readings for 
 any other passage, we will do so in this case, merely to show 
 with what fatuous imbecility the conjectural critics would fain 
 over-ride the diction of Shakespeare, wherever it happens to 
 be obscured by archaism or weakened by seeming platitude.
 
 The Still Lion. 55 
 
 First, however, we must premise that there was such a sub- 
 stantive as ru)iaway, and that, in the language of the time, it 
 was for the whole gamut of its meaning the same as t-anngate, 
 with which every English Churchman is familiar from the ver- 
 sion of the Psalms appended to the Liturgy. But when it is 
 said that Jehovah 'letteth the i-imagates contmwe in scarceness,' 
 the persons who are so let to starve are ddinquetits, those who 
 are mnaivays from duty, who habitually rn7i away from or 
 desert the cause they are bound to support. Arthur Golding 
 thus employs both r?inagates and runaways, to describe those 
 who have deserted the enemy's camp, and come over to 
 Caesar's. But the senses of delinqiiefit and deserter are special 
 senses alike of runagate and of runa^vay. The more general 
 signification of either word is, one who having treacherously 
 acquired anything (news or goods), makes off with it, ru7is 
 aivay to escape detection and appropriate what he has so 
 obtained. In this sense Shakespeare may very well have 
 used the word in Romeo and Juliet. But again, vagabonds 
 who haunt the streets towards dusk for dishonest purposes 
 might be very well called runagates or rwiaways. It will be 
 observed that the textual word ' run-awayes ' may stand either 
 for runaways'' or for runaway s ; and if satisfactory sense can 
 be made of either, surely emendation is an impertinence. 
 Mr. N. J. Halpin, in a remarkable essay printed among the 
 Shakespeare Society's Papers and called ' The Bridal Runaway,' 
 has made out a very strong case for the latter form, taking 
 Runaway as the epithalamial sobriquet of Love. But if that 
 view should be decided against, we have still the former,
 
 56 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 which, as we have shown, admits of ample justification. Our 
 own impression is that Shakespeare is using the word as a 
 plural possessive — runmvays' eyes. He might, for the sense, 
 liave just as well employed I'unagates' : but not for the verse ; for 
 though in runagates' he would have preserved the symptosis of 
 the rim and Rom, he would have lost that of the tuays' and 7^://;//^. 
 But not only is runaways^ defensible, but it is easily shown 
 to be the appropriate word for the place. Juliet says, 
 
 Spred thy close Curtaine Love-performing night, 
 That ran-awayes eyes may winke, 
 
 What eyes ? To answer which question we must determine 
 what eyes are made to wink, or are deprived of their function, 
 as a consequence of the advent of Night. Shakespeare might 
 have used a very reprehensible metaphor, and spoken of Day's 
 eyes, as some of his contemporaries did : but the winking of 
 Day's eyes, and the closure of Night's curtain, are one and the 
 same thing, not distinct operations of which the one is dependent 
 upon the other. So, despite Mr. Dyce's deliverances, those eyes 
 are excluded from the possibilities of the case. Shakespeare 
 might also, and with great propriety, have spoken of Night's 
 eyes, meaning the stars ; but unless by wink he meant twinkle, 
 the closure of Night's curtain, so far from being the condition 
 upon which the stars are made to wink, or are veiled, is in fact 
 the only occasion of their shining forth : so Night's eyes are 
 equally excluded. Despite Walker and Mitford, no poet speaks 
 of the Moon's eyes ; but if Shakespeare had ever done so, he 
 would not have done so here ; for the advent of Night only
 
 TJie Still Lion. 57 
 
 serves to make her brighter. Lastly, can the eyes alluded to 
 be those of either or both of the lovers. To answer this we 
 must consider the next line : 
 
 That runawayes eyes may winke, and Romeo 
 Leape to these armes, untalkt of and unseene, 
 
 from which it appears that the winking of those eyes is the 
 condition precedent of Romeo's security from detection : and 
 it would be an insult to common sense to inquire whether the 
 closing of Juliet's eyes, or of Romeo's eyes, could contribute 
 to that result. Similarly, the twinkling of the stars, brought 
 out by the approach of night, could not help to insure Romeo's 
 immunity from suspicion ; so that cannot be the winking con- 
 templated by Shakespeare. We are thus driven into a corner, 
 and are obliged to find the objects connoted by runaways in 
 those who, but for the darkness, might spy out the approach 
 of the lover, and betray the secret to parties interested in the 
 frustration of his design.* 
 
 There is nothing unusual, recondite, or far-fetched, in this 
 explanation : yet the bulk of the critics will not have it. Does 
 it make one blush for mortal dulness that such a passage should 
 ha\e been singled out for almost exhaustive emendation? Perhaps 
 the best way of presenting these conjectures is to classify them 
 under the leading conceptions which gave them birth. 
 
 * Mr. F. J. Furnivall takes this view in a letter in the AcaJemy (March 
 21, 1874). After quoting Fugitif, Roder, Rodetir, &c., from Cotgrave, l6ii, 
 he concludes, ' Shakspere's runawayes, runagates, or runabouts, were the 
 rodeurs des rues with a different object, men who'd leave no young lovers 
 " vntalkt of and vnseene," while the light lasted.'
 
 5S The Still Lion. 
 
 (i) It is conceived that run-aicayes is a misprint for the proper 
 name of the source or sources of dayhght, moonlight, or 
 starHght. Hence we are favoured with five conjectures : 
 Z////«'i-, Mitford : (7)'«//«a'i', Walker : Uranus\ Anon.: Titan's, 
 Bullock : wamieritig ( wanderifig eyes being the planets. 
 Athencetifn, August 6, 1870). 
 
 (2) It is conceived that run-awayes is a misprint for some 
 word of which the last syllable is dafs. This gives us four 
 more : rude day's and soon day's, Dyce : sunny day's, Clarke : 
 noonday's, Anon. 
 
 (3) It is conceived that run-mi'ayes is a misprint for the name 
 of a mythical person. This gives us four more: t/i' Runaway's 
 (/. e., the Sun), Warburton: t/ie runa7C'ay's, Capell: Rumour s. 
 Heath : Renomy's (/. e., Renommee), Mason. 
 
 (4) It is conceived that the first syllable of run-awayes is a 
 misprint for sun. This gives us four, one being already 
 mentioned. Sun away, Taylor: sun-awake' s, Brady: sim- 
 aiveary, Mcllwaine : sunny days, Clarke (as before).* 
 
 (5) It is conceived that the misprint is in the last syllable only 
 of run-a7vayes. This gives us five more: runagate's, Beckett: 
 run-aivay^ Blackstone : run -astray, Taylor: run-abouts', 
 Keightley : runaway spies, H. K. 
 
 (6) It is conceived that ware or tvary, formed part of the word 
 for which ru7i-awayes stands. This gives us three more. 
 Unawares, Jackson : u?iwary, Taylor : waryones', Anon. 
 
 (7) A class to which we may assign various conjectures which 
 
 * On seeing this proof Mr. Perkins-Ireland maliciously asks whether 
 any one has ever proposed to read Grundys eyes.
 
 The Still Lion. 59 
 
 do not fall in tlic other six. We have rumourotis and ric- 
 
 inourcrs', Singer : eiicmifs, Collier : roavinge, Dyce : yonder, 
 
 Leo : ribalds and roaming, Anon. : Veronese [Nation, May, 
 
 187 1); amounting to eight more: 
 
 on which miscellaneous repast, of both the wholesome and the 
 
 baneful, we may well ask one blessing — a speedy deliverance 
 
 from one and all. 
 
 2. We sometimes meet with a conventional phrase or 
 idiotism employed by Shakespeare in a sense peculiar to 
 himself, /. e., as an idiasm. The following example is most 
 instructive. We quote from As Yon Like It, iii. 5 (Folio 1623). 
 
 tlie common executioner - 
 Whose heart th' accustom'd sight of death makes hard, 
 Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck, 
 But first begs pardon : will you sterner be 
 Then he that dies and lives by bloody drops ? 
 
 The Cambridge edition records nine monstrous substitutes for 
 the phrase dies and lives. The simple fact is, that this phrase 
 was a recognized hysteron proteron ; and we are indebted to the 
 Rev. W. R. Arrowsmith {N'otes and Queries, ist S. vii. 542) for 
 a collection of early examples illustrating its use, which seem 
 to have been entirely overlooked by all the previous editors 
 and commentators. Mr. Halliwell, in his Folio Edition, supple- 
 ments Mr. Arrowsmith's labours, but fails to recognize the 
 fact that none of the examples adduced is precisely in point. 
 That the phrase to die and live was formerly used for to live and 
 die, is fairly established : but of the phrase to die and live by a 
 thing not a single example has been adduced. Mr. Arrowsmith
 
 6o The Still Lion. 
 
 tells us that to die and live means ' to subsist from the cradle to 
 
 the grave.' Shakespeare's executioner, then, must have been 
 
 initiated into his ' mystery ' pretty early. But one of Mr. 
 
 Arrowsmith's examples is from a work now before us, The 
 
 Pilgrimage of Kings a) id Princes: at page 29 of which we 
 
 read, ' Behold how ready we are, how willingly the women of 
 
 Sparta will die and live with their husbands.' So that we are 
 
 gravely asked to beheve that, according to this old writer, the 
 
 Spartan women were so precocious that they 'subsisted' with 
 
 their husbands ' from the cradle to the grave ' ! Hitherto, then, 
 
 no example in point has been discovered. But even if the 
 
 phrase to die and live by a thing be a Shakespearian idiasm, 
 
 its signification is as plain as the nose on one's face. It means 
 
 of course, to make that thing a 7natter of life and death. The 
 
 profession or calling of a man is that by which he dies and lives, 
 
 i. e., by which he lives, and failing which he dies.* In the face 
 
 of this simple exposition, emendation is a sheer impertinence. 
 
 3. Not infrequently we meet with a word or phrase 
 
 which, though sounding strange to us, was familiar enough in 
 
 Shakespeare's day, and may perhaps still retain a technical use. 
 
 Here are two examples in point. In 2 Heji. IK, iv. i, we find 
 
 Westmoreland thus sharply interrogating Archbishop Scroop, 
 
 Wherefore doe you so ill translate your selfe, 
 
 Out of the Speech of Peace, that beares such grace, 
 
 Into the harsh and boystrous Tongue of Warre ? 
 
 Turning your Bookes to Graves, your Inke to Blood, 
 
 Your Pennes to Launces, and your Tongue divine 
 
 To a lovvd Trumpet, and a Point of Warre. — Folio 1623. 
 
 * We owe this remark to our valued friend, Dr. Sebastian Evans.
 
 Tlic Still Lion. 6i 
 
 For Graves Warburton would read glaives, and Steevens, 
 greaves, and it is not easy to decide between them. But what 
 can justify any tampering with the concluding expression, a 
 point of war I What can excuse such a conjecture as report 
 of war, which stands in manuscript in the Perkins Folio, and 
 in Mr. Collier's one-volume edition, or Mr. Singer's miserable 
 gloss, a bruit of warl Ignorance only; yet an ignorance which 
 is hardly credible ; for not only was the expression a point of 
 war as common as blackberries in Shakespeare's day, but it is 
 still in technical use. It now means a drum-call, such as the 
 ruffle-beat on parade, when the colours are unfurled. Steele in 
 The Tatler used it in the same sense. In occurs frequently in 
 Scott's novels (c. g., Waverley, ist ed., ii. 4; Woodstock, 1826, i. 
 21 & 142 ; and The Bride of Lanwiennoor, 1819, 247), where 
 it always means a trumpet-call. It is also of very common 
 occurrence in the old dramatists; and Macaulay has it in Ivry. 
 
 Then on the ground, while trumpets sound their loudest point of war, &c. 
 
 (See Staunton's illustrated edition of Shakespeare, i. 603.) 
 
 Our other example is from Coriolanus, v. 5, where Aufidius 
 
 says of Coriolanus, 
 
 [I] holpe to reape the Fame 
 Which he did end all his ; and tooke some pride 
 To do my selfe this wrong: (Folio 1623.) 
 
 There is not the faintest obscurity about this metaphor ; and 
 nothing in this passage but the inflection ' holpe ' is entirely 
 obsolete, and that of course never stuck with anybody. The 
 whole force of suspicion has fallen on the unoffending verb
 
 62 Tlic Still Lion. 
 
 end! Why, in the name of common sense % Aufidius says, 
 that he helped Coriolanus to reap the crop, that he endured 
 with him ' the burden and heat of the day,' but that Coriolanus 
 ended it, and made it all his own.* Certainly no difficulty in 
 this phraseology would be presented to the mind of the rudest 
 midland farm - labourer. We may still hear the farmers of 
 Worcestershire and Herefordshire employ that verb in a tech- 
 nical sense in speaking of their crops. 
 
 These points were very justly taken by the Rev. W. R. Arrow- 
 smith in a sensible, but exceedingly scurrilous and ill-written 
 pamphlet entitled, The Editor of Notes and Queries and his 
 Friend Mr. Singer. (The title makes us wonder why some of the 
 shortest publications have the longest names : one of the Rev. 
 Joseph Hunter's, consisting of barely twenty-three pages, has a 
 title comprising sixty-eight words and twelve ciphers I ) At p. 9, 
 Mr. Arrowsmith gives two newspaper-advertisements in which 
 occur the phrases, 'three excellent well-ended wheat-ricks,' 
 and 'a rick of well-ended hay.' We are almost ashamed of 
 insisting on anything so obvious : but where the suspected 
 phrase 'walks with his head in a crowd of poisonous flies,' it 
 is the duty of the critic at once to come to its aid ; and the 
 more innocent the phrase, the greater is that duty. In this 
 case no less than five substitutes have been proposed for end 
 
 * Dr. Alexander Schmidt explains the passage thus : ' I helped to 
 gather the harvest which he consummated as his alone. Perhaps [end is] 
 a technical phrase of harvest -work.' (S/iakc-spc'are - Lexicon, 1874.) It 
 certainly is so. But to j-eap is not to gather. Ending a crop is gathering 
 it. A well-ended crop is one that is secured in good condition, or has 
 made a jjood end.'
 
 The Still Lion. 63 
 
 or for did end, and three of these have been admitted into the 
 text : Of these, the one which has found greatest favour is 
 ear for end, which was proposed by Mr. CoUier, and, with the 
 transposition of reap and ear, was adopted by Mr. Singer. To 
 ear is to plough, or till : so that Mr. Collier's reading makes 
 Aufidius say he had his share of the harvest which Coriolanus 
 had tilled for himself; (and even this sense is defective, since 'did 
 ear' belongs to a later time than 'holpe;') but this is just the 
 reversal of what Aufidius meant : for the gist of his complaint 
 was that he had shared the toil with Coriolanus, and not the 
 harvest. So the late Mr. W. N. Lettsom came to the rescue, 
 and proposed {Notes and Queries, ist S. vii. 378) the transpo- 
 sition of ear and reap. But matters were made no better by 
 this : for Fame, as Mr. Arrowsmith promptly pointed out, is 
 the crop ; and though we reap the crop, we ear not the crop, 
 but the land. It is noticeable that the clever and shrewd, 
 but waspish critic of Blackwood's Magazine (Aug., Sept., and 
 Oct., 1853), the merciless castigator of Gnats and Queries {a.s 
 he designated Mr. W. J. Thoms' periodical), proposed the same 
 transposition : so wonderfully do wits jump. What a satire on 
 conjectural criticism is this little farce ! 
 
 4. But what shall we say when a passage is entirely altered 
 on the supposition that a word meant something which it never 
 did mean, and does not mean at present ] Yet this has hap- 
 pened to a passage in Troilus and Cressida, v. 2. When Troilus 
 finils that Cressid has forsaken him for Diomed, he bursts into 
 a passion of love and indignation, which is in Shakespeare's 
 finest manner. He cries,
 
 64 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 This is, and is not Cressid : 
 Within my soule there doth conduce a fight 
 Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate 
 Divides more wider then tlie slvie and earth : 
 And yet the spacious bredth of tliis division 
 Admits no Orifex for a point as subtle 
 As Ariachne's broken woofe to enter: (Fo. 1623) 
 
 Shakespeare elsewhere employs very similar imagery : ' but I 
 am not to say, it is the sea, for it is now the sky: betwixt the 
 firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point,' The 
 Winter'' s Tale, iii. 3 ; that is, though the sky and the sea are so 
 widely divided, or separated, yet the sea mounts to such a height, 
 that at times a point cannot be inserted between them. To 
 this kind of equivocal division Troilus compares the separation 
 between his heart and Cressid's. In reality the only question 
 that can be rationally raised concerning this speech of Troilus' 
 is as to the name Ariachne. That is the word of the Folio 
 1623. The quarto of 1609 has Ariachna, and the undated 
 quarto has Ariathna. This variation is thought to favour the 
 view, that the poet confounded the two names, Arachne and 
 Ariadne, and possibly also the web of the former with the clew 
 of the latter. Arachne was the spinner and weaver, and so 
 subtle, /. e., fine-spun (subtilis), was her woof, that when it was 
 woven into the web, Minerva could not see how the web was 
 made, and in a fit of jealousy and revenge tore it to pieces. 
 If Shakespeare did confound the two fables, it was no more 
 than his contemporaries did. Steevens quotes an example from 
 Day's comedy of Humour out of Breath, 1608 (Steevens says 
 1607):
 
 The Still Lion. 
 
 And you in stead of these poore weeds in robes, 
 Richer then that which Ariadne wroughte, 
 Or Cytharaes aery-moving vestment. 
 
 Accordingly, we may see, if we like, Ariadne in both Ariathna 
 and Ariachne:* but after all it may have been a custom of the 
 time to write Ariachne for Arachne, if the metre required the 
 additional syllable ; and we know that poets and dramatists 
 enjoyed a very wide discretion in the presentation of proper 
 names. 
 
 The point is of no moment. What it is of moment for us 
 to see is that by Ariachne Shakespeare meant the spider into 
 which Arachne was transformed, and which in Greek bears the 
 same name ; and that the woof he meant was finer than was 
 ever produced by human hand, viz., the woof of the spider's 
 web — those delicate transverse filaments which cross the main 
 radial threads or warps, and which are perhaps the nearest 
 material approach to mathematical lines ! Thus has Shake- 
 speare in one beautiful allusion ^vrapt up in two or three little 
 words the whole story of Arachne's metamorphosis, the physical 
 fact of the fineness of the woof-filaments of a spider's web, 
 
 * Milton made as great a mistake when he attributed to the eglantine 
 the properties of the clematis. In The Flower of Frietidshippe, Glomond 
 Tylney, 1568 [Svo], we have, 'AH the whole arbour above over our heades, 
 &c., was * * * wreathed above with the sweete bryer or eglantine,' 
 &c. In the Faery Queen, b. xi. c. 5, st. 29, Spenser describes an arbour, 
 
 Through which the fragrant eglantine did spred 
 His prickling armes, entrayled with roses red. 
 
 Yet Milton wrote 
 
 Thro' the sweet briar or the vine. 
 Or the hvisted eglantine ! 
 
 K
 
 66 The Still Lion. 
 
 and an antithesis, effective in the highest degree, to the vast- 
 ness of the yawning space between earth and heaven ! For 
 what orifice could be imagined more exquisitely minute than 
 the needle's eye which would not admit the spider's woof 
 to thread it 1 And this rich argosy has been wrecked by 
 two transpositions. 
 
 The late Mr. Thomas Keightley, a gentlemen held in 
 honour for his school histories, rather than for his unfortu- 
 nate criticisms on Shakespeare, proposed in Notes and Queries 
 (2nd S. ix. 358) what he considered an emendation of the 
 passage we are considering ; and subsequently had the temerity 
 to incorporate this change with the text of a complete edition 
 of Shakespeare's works. Observing that his great precursor 
 Beckett had proposed to read, 
 
 Subtile as Arachne's unbroken woof 
 Admits no orifex for a point to enter, 
 
 whereby that monster had demonstrated to the world that he 
 
 did not know the meaning of 7C'Oof, Mr. Keightley undertook 
 
 to amend the one line before adopting the other. The great 
 
 gain, in his view, was that Ariachne had her eye put out, 
 
 while the 'spacious breadth' was compared to Ariachne's 7i'cb / 
 
 So he read. 
 
 And yet the spacious breadth of this division, 
 As subtle as Arachne's broken woof, 
 Admits no orifex for a point to enter. 
 
 Unfortunately, this is rank nonsense. How can a ' spacious 
 breadth ' be as subtle, or fine-spun, as a thread 1 Of course, 
 it i.s easy to see that the whole farrago sprung from the one
 
 The Still Lion. 67 
 
 wretched blunder of taking a woof (which ever did and still 
 does mean a thwart or cross-thread) to mean a ^oeb. 
 
 Again, we feel almost ashamed to have to resort to minute 
 
 explanation of what every educated Englishman ought to know. 
 
 In the operation of weaving, the threads which are stretched 
 
 on the loom are called the 7oa>-^, or warps, and the single 
 
 thread which is carried through them by means of the shuttle 
 
 is called the icoof; and the two combined in a texture are 
 
 called the web. This threefold distinction has been scrupulously 
 
 observed by all accurate writers from very early times. One 
 
 or two examples of the use of 2000/, from the literature of 
 
 Shakespeare's day, may be acceptable, though supererogatory. 
 
 ^ S. Hierome \vo\Adi have Paula to handle woll, * * and 
 
 learne to dress it, and to holde and occupie a rocke, 
 
 [distatf] with a wooU basket in her lap, and turne the 
 
 spindle, and drawe forth the thread with her own fingers. 
 
 And Demetrias * * he bad have wooU in her hands, 
 
 and her selfe either to spinne, to warpe, or else winde 
 
 spindles in a case* for to throw woofe off, and to winde 
 
 on clews the spinnings of others, and to order such as 
 
 should be woven. * * * Yox should I call him a 
 
 weaver that never learned to weave, nor to draw the 
 
 7Voffe, nor to cast the shuttle, nor strike the w^eb with 
 
 the slaye.' Richard Hyrd's translation of L. Vives' 
 
 Instruction of a Christian Woman, Book i. chap. 3, and 
 
 Book ii. chap. 4. 
 
 * Probably /;/ a condition, or /;/ orde?-, cf. Tempest, iii. 2. ' I am /// case 
 to justle a constable.'
 
 68 The Still Lion. 
 
 5. In not a few cases the idiom of Shakespeare's day has 
 been overlooked by every editor, and in some passages in his 
 text the construction has been altered to make the unrecognised 
 idiom square with modern usage. The most flagrant case that 
 occurs to us, is that of * the suppression of the relative as 
 subject,' which, in a particular connection, has always created 
 difficulty with the editors. Where the relative is suppressed 
 before an auxiliary verb, the sense has always been too obvious 
 to be overlooked : besides, in the case of its suppression before 
 some tense of the verb to be, the practice still prevails in verse, 
 and in epistolary prose. In The Tempest, v. i, Prosper© says 
 to Alonzo and Sebastian, 
 
 A solemne Ayre, and the best comforter, 
 
 To an unsettled fancie, Cure thy braines 
 
 (Now uselesse) boile within thy skull : there stand 
 
 For you are Spell-stopt. (Folio 1623) 
 
 Now in the first place, as two persons are addressed, and ' you ' 
 is the pronoun properly apphed to them in the fourth Une, it 
 can hardly be doubted that the possessive pronoun 'thy' in 
 the second and third lines is an error for the. Persons who 
 have collated the old copies are familiar with this and similar 
 misprints ; the pronouns being under a singular fatality. Making 
 this simple and necessary correction, and adopting modern 
 spelling and punctuation, the passage will stand thus: 
 
 A solemn air, and the best comforter 
 To an unsettled fancy, cure the brains 
 (Now useless) boil within the skull : &c. 
 
 To modern ears this construction sounds awkward : accordingly
 
 Tlie Still Lion. 69 
 
 Pope, having no sense of humour, altered 'boile' into boiPd. 
 It was a phrase of the time to say, that a man's brains boil or 
 are boiling, when he is mad or doting. In Chettle's play of 
 Hoffman, in the last scene, the hero, who, strange to relate, 
 manages to converse with his tormentors after he is crowned 
 with the traitor's red-hot crown, says, 
 
 Ay so ; — boil on, thou foolish, idle brain, 
 For giving entertainment to love's thoughts ! 
 
 'Boiled brains' is in Shakespeare {The Winter's Tale, iii. 3), 
 
 but the phrase is humorous ; and otherwise inapplicable to the 
 
 men whom Prospero's spell had made frantic : whose brains 
 
 were boiling not boiled. The editors, having as little sense of 
 
 humour as Pope, have all adopted his abominable gloss. The 
 
 Rev. Wm. Harness, however, not long before his death privately 
 
 imparted to us his reading of the passage, which was on this 
 
 wise : a note of admiration being placed after ' fancy,' continue 
 
 thus : 
 
 Sure thy brains 
 
 (Now useless) boil within thy skull : <S:c. 
 
 which then seemed to us, and still seems, as imbecile as it is 
 unnecessary. It is as plain as the nose on one's face that the yJyjL 
 above is an instance of * the suppression of the relative as 
 subject ' before the verb ' boil.' Paraphrase the passage thus : 
 * Let a solemn air — which is the best comforter to an unsettled 
 fancy — cure the brains [which], now useless, boil within the 
 skull.' * An unsettled fancy ' is a deranged mind, or ' incertain 
 thought ' (as in Measure for Measure), ' settled ' being Shake- 
 speare's ordinary word for expressing soundness of mind ; and
 
 70 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 'fancy' or phantasy, being equivalent to the faculty we call 
 imagination. 
 
 With this example of the idiom in question compare the 
 following : 
 
 He loved me well * delivered it to me. — 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Fero/ia, iv. 4. 
 
 I have a mind * presages me such thrift. — 
 
 Me7-chant of Venice, i. i. 
 
 But let your reason serve 
 To make the truth appear, where it seems hid, 
 And hide the false * seems true. — Measure for Measure, v. i. 
 
 Besides our nearness to the king in love 
 
 Is near the hate of those * love not the king. — Richard II., ii. 2. 
 
 What wreck discern you in me 
 
 * Deserves your pity? — Cymbeline, i. 7. 
 
 Why am I bound 
 By any generous bond to follow him 
 
 * Follows his Taylor, haply so long untill 
 
 The follow'd make pursuit? — T/ie Two N'oUe Kinstnen, \. 2. 
 
 Only you 
 Of all the rest, are he * commands his love. — Volpone, i. i. 
 
 O then I find that I am bound. 
 Upon a wheel * goes ever round. 
 
 Ariosto''s Seven Planets, &c. 161 1. 
 The Second Elegy (Appendix), p. 15. 
 
 Cast him off. 
 Receive him not, let him endure the use 
 Of their enforced kindnesse that must trust him, 
 For meate and money, for apparrell, house. 
 And every thing * belongs to that estate. — 
 
 All Fooles (G. Chapman), i. i.
 
 The Still Lion. yi 
 
 I cast away a card now * makes me thinke 
 Of the deceased worthy King of Spaine. 
 
 Byro7is Tragedie (G. Chapman), iv. i . 
 
 The asterisk in each example shows where the relative (be it 
 which or who) is to be understood. 
 
 6. Sometimes a word or idiotism presents no kind of 
 difficulty, yet the passage is meaningless to modern readers, 
 owing to the loss of some allusion of the time, which every 
 one then understood in a moment. For example : in Hamlet, 
 ii. 2, and iii. 2, we have three several allusions to the occasions 
 of laughter during a theatrical performance: (i) The jests of 
 the clown; (2) exaggerated or inadequate acting; (3) the un- 
 seasotiable jests of the clown. As to the persons affected : in 
 the first and third it is the thoughtless gigglers who are pro- 
 voked to laughter : in the second, the ' unskilful! ' who, seeing 
 something out of keeping and absurd in the acting, are tickled 
 to laughter, while the 'judicious' grieve over it. Hamlet 
 welcomes the Clown, with the injunction that he shall ' speake 
 no more then is set downe for him,' but reads the old player a 
 lesson on the danger of exaggeration — which not only spoils the 
 part, but distracts the thoughtless and moves them to unsea- 
 sonable mirth. Now in the first allusion (ii. 2), Hamlet says, 
 ' the clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled 
 a the sere.' So the Folio 1623. For 'sere' IMalone once con- 
 jectured scene. We doubtless ought to read with Mr. Staunton 
 ' tickle o' the sere.' Here is one example of tickle in this sense : 
 
 He give you my word ; I have set her hart upon as tickle a pin as 
 the needle of a Uiall [Compass] ; that will never let it rest, till it be in 
 the right position. Tlie Widdowes Teares (G. Chapman), ii. 2.
 
 72 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 George Steevens offers an illustrative passage from The Tempest, 
 ii. I, in case it should 'be of use to any future commentator.' 
 We thank him, and use it accordingly: it runs thus : 
 
 I do well beleeve your Highnesse, and did it to minister occasion to 
 these Gentlemen, who are of such sensible [sensitive] and nimble Lungs, 
 that they always use to laugh at nothing. 
 
 So that ' whose lungs are tickle o' the sere,' should be of the 
 same meaning as, whose lungs are sensible and nimble — easily 
 made to explode in laughter. Yet Steevens failed to see it, 
 even with the material help of a couplet from a Dialogue between 
 the Comen Secretary and Jelowsy, touchynge the Unstableness of 
 Harlottes. (bl. 1., n. d.) 
 
 And wyll byde whysperynge in the eare, 
 Thynk ye her tayle is not light of the seare ? 
 
 Then came Douce, with a passage containing the very phrase 
 in question : 
 
 Discovering the moods and humors of the vulgar sort (according to the 
 touch of Afifrike) to be so loose and tickle of the seare. — Howard's Defensative 
 agaijist the Poyfon of supposed Prophecies. 1620, fo. 3 1. 
 
 But Douce's eyes were held, and he cotild not see what was 
 under his nose. And when we think of it, this blindness of 
 Steevens, Douce, and their followers, to the drift (we say 
 nothing of the concrete sense) of the passage in Hamlet, is 
 passing wonderful. Here we have ' tickle o' the sere,' ' loose 
 and tickle of the seare,' and 'light of the seare;' and in the 
 two latter instances, the phrase must mean, easily provoked to 
 the use of a natural function ; and we have besides Steevens' 
 parallel passage; so that it would appear impossible to resist
 
 The Still Lion. 73 
 
 the logic — that ' tickle o' the sere,' applied to the lungs, must 
 mean, easily provoked to laughter. Yet we have nothing but 
 dogmatic assertions, that the phrase is an allusion to persons 
 afflicted with the asthma, to whom laughter would be a painful 
 operation : so that instead of ironical praise of the clown's 
 poor jesting, the commentators understood Hamlet to be com- 
 plimenting him on his power of extracting a laugh out of 
 asthmatical lungs.* It was well that, at the eleventh hour, 
 Dr. Brinsley Nicholson came to our rescue {Notes and Queries, 
 4th S., viii. 62), and at the twelfth, the Cambridge editors 
 (Clarendon Press Series: Hat^ilet, p. 157); the latter quoting, 
 for our eternal security, the following passage from Barret's 
 Theorike and Practike of Modern Warres, 1598, p. t^-^ [35]: 
 'drawing down the serre with the other three fingers:' — after 
 giving directions for holding the stock of the gun between 
 the thumb and three fingers : so that the serre, sere, seare, or 
 scear, is ' the catch in a gunlock, which keeps the hammer on 
 half or full cock and is released by the trigger.' A gun which 
 explodes with the least touch on the sere, was said to be loose, 
 light, or tickle of the sere; hence the appropriateness of the 
 
 * ' Steevens ' (say the Cambridge editors in this edition) ' explains it as 
 signifying "those who are asthmatical, and to whom laughter is most 
 uneasy. The real meaning is just the reverse." Steevens by uneasy, meant 
 unpleasant, or even painful ; and he expressly records that the baser sort, 
 who were to be moved to laughter by the clown, might be those who have 
 'sensible and niutble lungs.' There is no opposition. An asthmatical 
 person, to whom laughter may be painful, may also be one of those to 
 whom laugher is too easy, and who 'always use to laugh at notliing.' 
 Indeed, it would only be such an one, who would incur the consequences 
 of an asthmatical cachinnation.
 
 74 The Still Lion. 
 
 image to the penny-knaves' explosion of laughter on the lightest 
 
 stimulus of the clown in a play. 
 
 Again, in Loves Labour's Lost, v. i, Armado says to Holo- 
 
 fernes, 
 
 I do beseech thee, remember thy courtesy ; I beseech thee, apparel 
 thy head. 
 
 Neither Capell nor Malone understood it, and they therefore 
 proposed emendations. The latter wished to insert 7iot : 
 'remember not thy courtesy,' /. e., pay no further regard to 
 courtesy, but replace thy hat : as we should now say, •' do not 
 stand on ceremony with me.' This was an absurd proposal, 
 seeing that the phrase is frequent with the early dramatists; 
 and in a curtailed form occurs in Hamlet. Yet Mr. Dyce 
 {Fetv Notes, p. 56) adopted Malone's conjecture. But he 
 returned to the old text at the instance of the writer, who 
 gave in the Lllustrated London Neivs a complete defense of 
 the old reading, from a manuscript note of Mr. Staunton's 
 which will now be found in his edition of Shakespeare, vol. i. 
 p. 83. Mr. Dyce on this occasion did not remember his courtesy: 
 not only did he fail to acknowledge this service and assign to 
 Mr. Staunton the credit of the restoration, but wrote contemp- 
 tuously of the notes, of which this was one, evidently not 
 perceiving that one and all were Mr. Staunton's. (See Dyce's 
 Shakespeare, 1853. Vol. i. p. ccxvi., and p. 581, note (13).) 
 
 But the origin of the expression, ' remember thy courtesy,' 
 has never been given. It arose, we think, as follows : the 
 courtesy was the temporary removal of the hat from the head, 
 and that was finished as soon as the hat was replaced. If any
 
 TJic Siill Lion. 75 
 
 one from ill-breeding or from over-politeness stood uncovered 
 for a longer time than was necessary to perform the simple act 
 of courtesy, the person so saluted reminded him of the fact, that 
 the removal of the hat was a courtesy : and this was expressed 
 by the eui)hemism, ' Remember thy courtesy,' which thus im- 
 plied, ' Complete your courtesy, and replace your hat.' 
 
 Here is another example in point. In The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, ii. 3, the host says to Dr. Caius, 
 
 I will bring thee where Mistris Anne Page is, at a Farm-house a 
 Feasting : and thou shalt wooe her: Cride-game, said I well? ( Fo. 1623.) 
 
 ' Cried game ' has been superseded in several modern 
 editions by ' Cried I aim,' a conjecture of Douce's. Various 
 other substitutes have been proposed. But why should the old 
 text be superseded 1 There can hardly be a doubt that under 
 the words ' Cried game,' if authentic, there lurks an allusion 
 of the time which has now to be hunted out. If 'cried game?' 
 be either Is it cried gatnel or Cried I gatne? we apprehend the 
 allusion is not far to seek. In hare-hunting, a person was em- 
 ployed and paid to find the hare, ' muzing on her meaze,' or, 
 as we say, in her form. He was called the hare-finder. When 
 he had found her, he first cried Soho ! to betray the fact to 
 the pursuers; he then proceeded to put her up, and 'give her 
 courser's law.' What, then, can ' Cried I game ' mean but Did 
 I cry game? Did I cry So/io ? In the play before us, the pursuit 
 was after Mistress Anne Page. She was the hare, and the host 
 undertook to betray her whereabouts to Dr. Caius in order that 
 he might urge his love-suit.
 
 ^6 The Still Lion. 
 
 Again; there is a famous crux in The Wifiter's Tale, ii. 
 I, where four emendations have been proposed. Antigonus, 
 affirming the chastity of the queen against the jealous asper- 
 sions of Leontes, says — 
 
 If it prove 
 Slice's otherwise, He keep my Stables where 
 I lodge my Wife, He goe in couples with her: 
 Then when I feele, and see her, no farther trust her. (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 With Rowe we may understand by ' then ' the conjunction we 
 now write 'than'; /. e., 'no farther than,' &c. Hanmer fooUshly 
 read my stable-stand^ for 'my stables'; Rann, my stable; Collier, 
 me stable (where stable, though made plural by the Cambridge 
 editors, is an adjective), and lastly the Cambridge editors, with 
 uncommon temerity, offer us the alternative of my stabler^ 
 and my stabler s ; both of which we repudiate. Mr. Staunton, 
 adhering to the old text, attempted to fix upon it an inter- 
 pretation, which is in the last degree far-fetched and offensive. 
 He seemed to think that there was but a step between Helen 
 and Semiramis.* For our part we look upon this passage as 
 the most instructive example, in all Shakespeare, of the danger 
 of tampering with the words of the old copies, in the absence 
 of that special knowledge which alone can give value to con- 
 jectural sagacity. 
 
 The verb to keep has various senses : some of these are, to 
 
 * Since neither Antigonus nor Leontes is a despicable villain like lago, 
 it is a lame excuse for Mr. Staunton, that an image of the same degree 
 of grossness is put into the mouth of lago. {Othello, i. i.) 
 
 Zounds, sir, you are one of those, &c. . . You'll have your daughters, 
 &c.
 
 The Still Lion. "jy 
 
 maintain; to guard; to order; to continue (or remain^ v. n.): 
 the first two senses are well illustrated by the following from 
 Nicholas Nickleby, where, in reply to the remark "He keeps a 
 manservant,' it is said, ' It's my opinion his manservant keeps 
 him;' /. e., is his keeper. The second and third are here em- 
 ployed by Chapman [Biissy U Ambois, i. 2). 
 
 Our Roomes of State 
 Kept like our stables : and though our Custome 
 Keepe this assured confusion from our eyes, &c. 
 
 /. (?., kept in a perpetual litter, and therefore ill-kept; and all 
 this is guarded from inspection. In the passage which is the 
 subject of our study, we agree with Mr. Staunton that ' keep ' 
 is used in the sense of guard : but we go no further with him 
 in his interpretation. The phrase to keep one's stables was a 
 familiar phrase in Shakespeare's day; and meant to keep per- 
 sonal watch over one's wife's or one's mistress' chastity. We 
 are sorry that it should be necessary to go into detail over 
 so delicate an inquiry ; but as we intend to settle this matter 
 for good and all, we will ask our readers, if they are qualmish 
 on such matters, to omit the following paragraph. 
 
 In Airs Well that Ends Well we have the following : 
 
 I think I shall never have tlie blessing of God till I have issue a my 
 body : for they say hams are blessings. 
 
 This fixes for us the sense of barns, i. e., children. Now, in 
 Much Ado About Nothing, iii. 4, we read : 
 
 Yea, light o' love with your heels; then if your husband have stables 
 enough, you'll look he shall lack no barns.
 
 78 The Still Lion. 
 
 Of course there is a pun on barns: and there is a like pun on 
 stables, which lilce bartis had two meanings. When we know 
 that stables was the condition precedent to barns, we have 
 already pretty nearly determined its cant meaning. But a 
 man's stable (or stables) may be kept by his wife, by himself, 
 or by a third party, according to a notable custom in Italy : 
 by the wife, if she be chaste; by the husband, if he be sus- 
 picious ; by a third party, if she be unchaste and her husband 
 be absent, unsuspicious, or indifferent. The passage in The 
 Winter's Tale is an example of the second : of the other two 
 cases the following will servd 
 
 But for your wife that keepes the stable of your honour ; Let her be 
 lockt in a brazen towre, let Argus himselfe keepe lier, yet can you never 
 bee secure of your Iionour, for why ? She can runne through all with her 
 serpent nodle : besides you may hang a locke upon your horse, and so can 
 you not upon your wife.* — Chapman's AH Fools, act iv. sc. 2. 
 
 A young stripling . . . that can wait in a gentlewoman's chamber 
 wlien his master is a mile off, keep Ins stable when 'tis empty, and his purse 
 when 'tis full. — Green's James t/ie Fourth. 
 
 (Quoted by Dyce, without understanding it, in his Glossary, ed. 
 Sh., vol. ix. 1867, p. 233.) 
 
 Doubtless Rann's reading stable, would be strictly correct : 
 
 * This, however, was literally done by one Antonio Silvio, of Venice. The con- 
 trivance he employed used to be preserved in St. Mark's Palace. See Ar/osto's Seven 
 Planets Governing Italic, 1611, p. 5i. A similar fetter used to be shewn at the Palais de 
 Lu.xembourg, Paris. We observe a curious illustration in a letter from Laurence Sterne 
 to his friend Hall (1764), reporting the progress of a love-suit with a Parisian lady: 'till 
 at length I was within an ace of setting up my hobby in her stable for good and all,' i. e., 
 making her his mistress. It was /jtv stable : but had the clerical debauchee elTected his 
 purpose it would have been his.
 
 The Still Lion. 79 
 
 but the plural may have been loosely used in the same sense 
 as the singular. 
 
 7. Some expressions in the text, which were then, and still 
 are, grammatical and significant, have been altered because 
 their force is spent. They once had a sort of proverbial point, 
 which is now wholly gone from them; hence they readily fall a 
 prey to ingenious guessers. One instance will be sufficient to 
 exemplify the class. In As You Like It, iii. 5, we read. 
 
 Who might be your mother, 
 That you insult, exult, and all at once, 
 Over the wretched ? 
 
 If emendation were wanted here, that of Theobald, adopted by 
 Warburton, might be accepted, viz., rail for ' all.' Earlier in the 
 same play we have (i. i). 
 
 Thou hast rail'd on thyself. 
 
 Compare also Lear, ii. 3, 
 
 being down, insulted, rail'd 
 And put upon, &c. 
 
 Yet the text is most certainly right. There is hardly a com- 
 moner phrase, more especially at the end of a verse, than and 
 all at once. Compare Henry V.,\. i, 
 
 Nor never Hydra-headed wilfulness 
 
 So soon did lose his seat, and all at once, 
 
 As in this King. 
 
 The reader who desires to see other corroborative instances 
 from writers of the time may consult Mr. Staunton's illustrated 
 edition of Shakespeare, vol. ii. p. 65. In this case the Cambridge
 
 So The Still Lion. 
 
 editors give us a truly wonderful collection of conjectures, one 
 of which is Hanmer's domineer! and that feat of dulness is 
 capped by another, which consists of three French words ! 
 
 8. But more curious still, there are passages which have 
 occasioned a considerable amount of discussion, and have even 
 received emendation, not on account of anything difficult or 
 corrupt in the construction, but simply because no one among 
 the swarm of critics had seized the central or leading notion 
 of the speaker. The two following, which are selected from 
 many cases in point occurring in the same play, may serve as 
 samples of the class. In As You Like Lt, iii. 2, Rosalind plies 
 Celia with some questions respecting Orlando : and having 
 reminded her friend, that, though she (Rosalind) is caparisoned 
 like a man, she has a woman's curiosity, adds. 
 
 One inch of delay more, is a South -sea of discoverie. I pre'thee tell 
 me who it is quickly, and speak apace : I would thou couldst stammer, &c. 
 Is he of God's making ? What manner of man ? Is his head worth a 
 hat? or is his chin worth a beard? (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 The unfortunate association of 'South-sea' with a supposed 
 voyage of 'discoverie' affords perhaps some explanation of the 
 fact that the central or leading notion has always been missed. 
 Here we have a tale of questions — coup sur coup — falling as thick 
 as hail upon the devoted Celia. See how many things she is 
 called upon to discover; and then say whether she has not in- 
 curred a laborious and vexatious duty by her delay in answering 
 the first question. How plain it is that her inch of delay has 
 cast her upon a South Sea — a vast and unexplored ocean — of 
 discovery. The more Celia delays her revelation as to who the
 
 The Still Lion. 8i 
 
 man is, the more she will have to reveal about him. Why ? 
 Because Rosalind fills up the delay (increases it, in fact) with 
 fresh interrogatories, whereby Celia becomes lost in a South 
 Sea of questions. 
 
 There is surely some fatality about this play, for we observe 
 several other passages in it, which, without more than the shadow 
 of a pretence, have been altered in every, or almost every, edition. 
 For instance, in ii. 6, Jaques says : 
 
 Hee, that a Foole doth very wisely hit, 
 
 Doth very foolishly, although he smart 
 
 Seeme senselesse of the bob. If not, 
 
 The Wise-man's folly is anathomiz'd 
 
 Even by the squandering glances of the foole. 
 
 (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 Theobald, being conscious of a hitch in the sense, proposed 
 ' Not to seem senseless ' for ' Seeme senselesse.' In this lead 
 he has been usually followed, even by the Cambridge editors. 
 Had they seized the central notion of the passage, they would 
 not have done so. Why does a fool do wisely in hitting a wise 
 man ? Because, through the vantage of his folly, he puts the 
 wise man 'in a strait betwixt two,' to put up with the smart of 
 the bob, without dissembling, and the consequential awkward- 
 ness of having to do so — which makes him feel foolish enough 
 — or, to put up with the smart, and dissemble it, which entails 
 the secondary awkwardness of the dissimulation — which makes 
 him feel still more foolish. Taking the former alternative, /. <?., 
 ' If not ' { ' If he do not ') his ' folly is anatomized even by the 
 squandering glances of the fool'; taking the latter alternative, 
 
 M
 
 82 The Still Lion. 
 
 he makes a fool of himself in the eyes of almost everybody 
 else. So the fool gets the advantage both ways. There is a 
 passage in a paper of De Quincey's called ' Literary Novitiate,' 
 published in vol. i. of Literary Remitiiscences (Ticknor and 
 Field's edition), which has a special bearing on the above 
 passage. At page 25 we read, 'Awkwardness at the least — 
 and too probably, as a consequence of that, affectation and 
 conceit — follow hard upon the consciousness of special notice 
 or admiration. The very attempt to disguise embarrassment 
 too often issues in a secondary and more marked embarrass- 
 ment.' How plain, then, is the sense of the passage we are 
 considering. Jaques asks for ' the motley,' in order that he 
 may have a fool's privilege of making a fool of every wise man. 
 In Othello, i. 3, is a passage which, with a very different bearing, 
 may serve to illustrate this. 
 
 \Vliat cannot be preserved when fortune takes, 
 Patience her injury a mockery makes. 
 The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief; 
 He robs himself, that spends a bootless grief. 
 
 Observing that the line, 
 
 Seeme senselesse of the bob. If not, 
 
 is too short, we think it probable that the words he do originally 
 formed part of it. Be that as it may, ' If not ' must mean ' If 
 he do not.' Perhaps, 'Very foolishly' should be in a paren- 
 thesis; and 'very wisely' might be so also. 
 
 9. A strictly methodical discussion of classes of readings, 
 even if it were practicable, would not present any very great
 
 The Still Lion. Zi 
 
 advantage : so we have not attempted it. We will now proceed 
 to consider two of the cases in which Shakespeare has meta- 
 phorically employed the image of a sea : viz., ' a sea of wax,' 
 and ' a sea of troubles.' 
 
 The pedantic poet in Timoji of Athens, \. i, addresses the 
 painter in the following tumid and bombastic terms : 
 
 You see this confluence, this great flood of visitors. 
 
 I have in this rough work shaped out a man \sheiving liis inaiiuscript\ 
 
 Whom this beneath world both embrace and hug 
 
 With amplest entertainment: my free drift 
 
 Halts not particularly, but moves itself 
 
 In a wide sea of wax : no levell'd malice 
 
 Infects one comma of the course I hold ; 
 
 But flies an eagle's flight, bold and forth on, 
 
 Leaving no tract behind. 
 
 In this passage, 'my free drift' and 'a wide sea of wax' are 
 contrasted with the notion of * halting particularly' and ' levell'd 
 malice.' In other words, the poet is contrasting generality with 
 particularity. The visitors who throng the presence-chamber of 
 Lord Timon are compared by the poet to a sea, or arm of the 
 sea, when the tide is rising, and are therefore designated a 
 'confluence' and a 'great flood.' Timon is said to be em- 
 braced 'with amplest entertainment' by this flood; and the 
 poet, disclaiming particular personal censure, asserts, in a meta- 
 plior probably derived from Archery, that ' no levell'd malice 
 infects one comma,' /. e., not a single clause, in his poem. It 
 is the antecedent sentence which contains the stumblin2;-block. 
 What is the meaning of 'a wide sea of wax?' Every one 
 knows that the verb to wax means, to grow; and the old English
 
 84 The Still Lion. 
 
 writers employ it indifferently of increase or decrease ; a thing, 
 with them, may wax greater or smaller, stronger or weaker. To 
 wax was to change condition simply. But more strictly it was 
 and is still used in opposition to ivane. If anything changes 
 its condition, it either waxes or wanes. In this restricted sense 
 Shakespeare in several places uses the verb to 7vax of the sea. 
 
 Who marks the waxing sea grow wave by wave. — 
 
 Titiis Andronicjis, iii. i. 
 
 His pupil-age 
 Man-enter'd thus, he waxed like a sea. — Coriolaniis, ii. i. 
 
 The older editors and commentators seem not to have had the 
 faintest suspicion of the meaning of the expression, ' a wide 
 sea of wax.' Hanmer and Steevens explain it as an allusion 
 to the Roman and early English practice of writing with a style 
 on tablets coated with wax, so that the poet in Tiiiion must be 
 supposed literally to have ' shaped out ' his man in wax, almost 
 as much so as if he had modelled him. All the editors have 
 followed this lead. Mr. Dyce to the last was confirmed in this 
 interpretation; but Mr. Staunton, who had once accepted it, 
 was at length conducted to the extraordinary conclusion, that 
 'wax' was a press-error for tax ! Besides this, the only emenda- 
 tion attempted is Mr. Collier's verse. Very strange indeed is 
 all this speculation, in the face of the certain fact, that the 
 substantive, 7vax, occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare in an allied 
 sense. 
 
 Chief Justice. Wiiat ! you are as a candle, the better part burnt out. 
 Fahtaff. A wassail candle, my lord; all tallow: if I did say of wax, 
 my growth would approve the truth. — 2 Henry IV., i. 2.
 
 The Still Lion. 85 
 
 It is all very well to say that this is a quibble or pun : it is so : 
 but such a pun would be insufferable — not to say impossible — 
 unless there were a substantive wax, meaning growth, on which 
 to make the pun. It is, indeed, open to question whether wax 
 be used in this sense, in the proverbial phrase ' a man of wax,' 
 which occurs in Romeo and Juliet, i. 3.* 'A wide sea of wax' 
 seems to be merely an affected and pedantic mode of indicating 
 a sea that widens with the flood. 
 
 In Hamlet, iii. i, we read : 
 
 Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 And by opposing end them : 
 
 Hamlet's question implies an option, either to endure his 
 troubles, or to end them, even at the cost of his life. If 'a sea 
 of troubles ' be taken to mean a troublous sea (somewhat as in 
 
 * I formerly accepted Mr. Brae's view, that in Ben Jonson's posthumous 
 fragment TIic Fall of Mortimer, the word waxc had the sense of personal 
 aggrandisement : but I am now convinced that Mr. Dyce was quite right in 
 referring the word in question to the waxen seal attached to the Earl's 
 patent of nobility. Evidently Mortimer is noting the oicfward insignia of 
 his rank — viz., his 'crownet,' his 'robes,' and the Great Seal, which lie bore 
 in /lis Jiaiid. This last is a point overlooked by Mr. Dyce. Mr. Brae, 
 wlio has privately retracted his interpretation, refers me to Nobilitas Politica 
 vet Civitis, by Robert .Glover, Somerset Herald: edited in 1608 by his 
 nephew Thomas Milles. He tells us that an Earl 'bore a patent with the 
 Great Seal pendent by Cord and Tassel.' Mr. Brae seems to have been 
 misled by the two lines which follow 'crownet, robes, and waxe,' in Jonson's 
 play, in which he saw a possible allusion to the poet's speech in Tiiiioii. 
 
 There is a fate that flies with towering spirits 
 Home to the mark, and never checks at Conscience. 
 
 But the metaphor is taken from hawking
 
 86 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 the passage we have just considered 'a sea of wax' means a 
 tvaxing sea, or a sea rising at flood tide), the phrase ' to take arms 
 against a sea of troubles' expresses as futile a feat as 'to wound 
 the still-closing waters.' Would Shakespeare have put such a 
 catachresis into the mouth of the philosophical Hamlet ? The 
 doubt thus engendered has manifested itself, as usual, in a 
 plentiful crop of emendations, which in this case are all inge- 
 nious, with the exception of one proposed by the late Mr. 
 Samuel Bailey. By far the best is Mr. A. E. Brae's conjecture 
 of assay for 'a sea.' In the presence of that we think it im- 
 pertinent to name its rivals. It is not only singularly clever, 
 but it gives a sense, force, and dignity to the passage, which, 
 thus emended, is in Shakespeare's best manner. But this is 
 not enough. 
 
 In the first place let us clearly realize the fact, that the 
 metaphor, a sea of troubles, sorrows, griefs, dangers, &c., is as 
 old as the hills, and is found in all languages : and it is ad- 
 mirably expressive of the two attributes of those sorrows that 
 come * in battalions,' their multiplicity, and their power to over- 
 whelm. Accordingly no defense or illustration of the figure is 
 needed. Moreover it has been contended by many critics, as 
 Johnson, Malone,Warburton (in his second thoughts), Caldecott, 
 De Quincey, and Staunton, that the want of consistency or 
 integrity in this metaphor is no argument against Shakespeare 
 having written the passage as it stands. Caldecott {Speeimen of 
 a New Edition of Shakespeare, 1819, p. 65) puts it thus: ' He 
 uses it [the metaphor] himself everywhere and in every form : 
 and the integrity of his metaphor is that which by him is of
 
 The Still Lion. Zj 
 
 all things the least thought of.' In support of this assertion 
 
 Caldecott refers to three passages in Shakespeare, not one of 
 
 which bears it out. The fact is, that Shakespeare employs sea 
 
 figuratively eight times: viz., Timon of Athens, i. i, 'sea of wax'; 
 
 and iv. 2, 'sea of air': Pericles, v. i, 'sea of joys': Hejiry VIII., 
 
 iii. 2, 'sea of glory'; and ii. 4, 'sea of conscience': i Henry VI. ., 
 
 iv. 7, 'sea of blood': Lucrece, st. 158, 'sea of care'; and the 
 
 instance in question. In every case, except the last which is on 
 
 its trial, the integrity of the metaphor is sufficiently preserved. 
 
 That, however, in Timon of Athens, iv. 2, has been thought 
 
 questionable; and Mr. Richard Garnett {Athenceum, October 
 
 15, 1859), after quoting the lines, 
 
 Leak'd is our bark, 
 And we, poor mates, stand on the dying-deck, 
 Hearing the surges threat; we must all part 
 Into t/iis sea of n/r, 
 
 remarks — 'I, for one, can neither understand the phrase in italics, 
 nor correct it.' Without asserting that these lines were written 
 by Shakespeare, we may very readily illustrate their meaning. 
 ' Part,' of course, is depart; * and the ' sea of air ' is that into 
 which the soul, freighting his wrecked bark, the body, must at 
 length take its flight. Compare with the above, the following 
 from Drayton's Battle of Agineourt: 
 
 Now where both armies got upon that ground, 
 As on a stage, where they their strengths must try, 
 Whence /ro/n the ividth of viauy a gaping wound 
 There's many a soul into the air »iust fly. 
 
 * The converse is the case with an expression in the Marriage Service; 
 so in Green's Groatsivorth of Wit: ' but I am yours till death us depart.'
 
 88 The Still Lion. 
 
 As to Shakespeare's metaphor in the passage under con- 
 sideration, ' a sea of troubles,' it occurs once in the Faerie 
 Queen (Book VI. c. ix. st. 31); and the sea is otherwise em- 
 ployed metaphorically by Spenser in many places (see the 
 Faerie Queen, Book I. c. xii. st. 14: Book HI. c. iv. st. 8, tScc), 
 but not once does he do violence to the metaphor. It is also 
 frequently found in prose works of the time. In Sir Richard 
 Morysine's translation of L. Vives' Introduction to Wysedom, 
 Book IV., we have 'sea of evils'j and in Andrew Kingsmyll's 
 Comforts in Afflictions (fol. 6) we have 'seas of sorrows': and 
 in both cases is the integrity of the metaphor preserved. Are 
 we, then, to believe that Shakespeare departed from this con- 
 scientious custom in one passage, where a sea is not an im- 
 probable misprint for assay? 
 
 We are thus presented with the horns of a dilemma: viz., on 
 the one hand the imputation of a lame metaphor to Shakespeare's 
 most philosophic character, and on the other, a conjectural 
 emendation. Now it seems to us that there is a way out of 
 this dilemma — a middle course which has hitherto escaped the 
 notice of the critics. One consideration of the highest im- 
 portance has been entirely ignored. When Hamlet talked of 
 ending his sea of troubles, or, as he afterwards describes it, 
 shuffling off his mortal coil,* he had a covert consciousness, a 
 
 * Shakespeare represents the human body under various figures : a 
 coil: a case: z. frame: a iiiac/iiiie: a vesture: a hefl: a motion or puppet: 
 &c. It has been contended that in Hamlet's speech, the 'mortal coil' is 
 the coil, /. d"., trouble or turmoil, incident to man's mortal state: but the 
 analogies are too strong in favour of the ' mortal coil ' being what Fletcher 
 calls the 'case of flesh.' {Bondttca, iv. i.)
 
 TJic Still Lion. 89 
 
 conscietice, in fact, which stayed the hand he would have raised 
 against his own Ufe; viz., that this so-called ending and shuffling 
 off, was a mere delusion, just as much so as repelling the ad- 
 vancing waves of the sea with shield and spear. Is not the 
 metaphor, then, sound and whole % If there be an incongruity 
 in the notion of taking arms, offensively or defensively, against 
 the sea, is there not just as great an incongruity in using *a 
 bare bodkin ' against the soul — the immortal part, which (as 
 Raleigh has it) ' no stab can kill ' % But, in fact, that seeming 
 incongruity is defensible, quite apart from the metaphor. The 
 late Mr. Samuel Bailey, in his discussion of the passage in 
 question, has the following remark: 'The objection is not to 
 the metaphorical designation a sea of troubles, [ — who ever said 
 it was % ] but to the figurative absurdity implied in " taking up 
 arms against a sea of troubles," or indeed against any other 
 sea, literal or imaginary. I question whether any instance is 
 to be found of such a fight in the whole compass of English 
 Literature.' {The Received Text of Shakespeare, p. 39.) Why 
 restrict the search to English Literature % But the instance 
 we have in view is to be found in various literatures. In 
 Ritson's Memoirs of the Celts (p. 118) occurs the following 
 passage, which is a translation of one in ^lian : 
 
 ' Of all men I hear that the Celts are most ready to undergo 
 dangers. * * * So base, indeed, do they consider it 
 to fly, that frequently they will not escape out of houses 
 tumbling down and falling in upon them, nor even out 
 of those burning, though themselves are ready to be 
 
 N
 
 90 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 caught by the fire. Many, also, oppose the overwhelming 
 sea : there are some, likewise, who taking arms rush 
 upon the waves, and sustain their attack, extending their 
 naked swords and spears, in like manner as if they were 
 able to terrify or wound them.' 
 
 The same tradition is referred to by Aristotle in his Eudemian 
 Ethics, iii. i : 
 
 diov o\ Ke\ro( Trpof to. KVjiara 'dTrXa dTrai'riocn XajSdi'reg. 
 
 See also Arist. Nich. Eth. iii. 7. 
 
 We think, then, Hamlet's soliloquy might be fairly paraphrased 
 thus : 
 
 ' To exist: or to cease to exist: that is the question for me 
 to decide. Whether it is the nobler part to endure the 
 outrages of fortune, and to dare the surrounding sea of 
 troubles; or to imitate the fabled feats of the Celts, and 
 " taking arms to rush upon the waves." Doubtless it is 
 far nobler to endure unshaken; and is it not also more 
 prudent 1 For, it seems probable, that the attempt to end 
 our troubles by self-destruction would be as futile as that 
 of the Celts to assail the ocean; and that after death 
 itself we should find ourselves overwhelmed by evils of 
 which we know nothing, and which therefore, for aught 
 we know, may be greater than those from which we should 
 have escaped. Thus does conscience make cowards of 
 us all.' 
 
 All things considered, then, in the case before us, we elect
 
 The Still Lion. 91 
 
 to adhere to the received text, and refuse to allow even the 
 most admirable of emendations to allure us from our allegiance 
 to a consistent metaphor which has all the external evidences 
 of authenticity. 
 
 While on this famous soliloquy, we may as well note that 
 
 The undiscovered country from whose bourn 
 No traveller returns 
 
 is the allegorical country of the Meropes, well known to every 
 reader in Shakespeare's day. In the fifth discourse of the 
 Spanish Mandevile (London, 1600, p. 126), Bernardo, one of 
 -the interlocutors, says, 
 
 ' That which I will tell you is out of Theopompus, alleaged 
 by ^lianus in his book De varia Historia. [It is in 
 ^1. Var. Hist. iii. 18.] This Sylenus * * * * in 
 one communication that hee had with King Mydas, dis- 
 coursed unto him, that out of this Land or world in which 
 wee live * * * * there is another Land so great 
 that it is infinite and without measure * * * * and 
 the men which dwell therein are twise so great as we are, 
 and their life twise as long * * * *. There were 
 in other provinces thereof certain people called Meropes. 
 who inhabited many and great Citties, within the bounds 
 of whose Country there was a place called Anostum, 
 which word signifieth, a place whence there is no return e : 
 this Country, saith he, is not cleare and light, neither yet 
 altogether darke, but between both, through the same
 
 92 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 runne two Rivers, the one of delight, the other of griefe,' 
 &c.* 
 
 It is noteworthy, too, that 'the undiscovered country' is not 
 mentioned in the 4to, 1603. Shakespeare may have read this 
 passage in ^Uan between 1602 and 1604, in which latter year 
 the first enlarged Hamlet was published, containing the allusion 
 to Anostum. 
 
 10. Some of the obscurities in Shakespeare's text arise 
 
 from the consilience of two sources of perplexity. Here is one 
 
 example, in which a word employed in an obsolete sense forms 
 
 part of a phrase which is itself of peculiar construction. In 
 
 Hamlet, i. 4, Horatio tries to dissuade Hamlet from accompanying 
 
 the ghost, lest it should 
 
 assume some other horrible form, 
 Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason, 
 And draw you into madness. 
 
 The verb to deprive is at present used with the same construc- 
 tion as bereave or rob ; but in Shakespeare it corresponds to our 
 ablate. Thus in Lucrece, st. clxx. : 
 
 'Tis honour to deprive dishonour'd life. 
 
 And again in st. ccli. : 
 
 That life was mine which thou hast here depriv'd. 
 
 But the passage from Hamlet contains yet another source of 
 perplexity, viz., to 'deprive your sovereignty of reason^ i. e., to 
 
 * For these two illustrations from /Elian we are indebted to our friend 
 Dr. Sebastian Evans : who from the passage in Hamlet would omit the 
 pronoun after 'end,' understanding by that verb die.
 
 The Still Lion. 93 
 
 deprive the sovereignty of your reason ; or, as we should more 
 naturally say, to deprive your reason of its sovereignty:* in 
 view of which the Rev. Joseph Hunter (Few Words) proposed 
 to transpose ' your ' and ' of.' In defense of the original text, 
 take the following from a letter of Sir Thomas Dale, 16 16 (the 
 year of Shakespeare's death). He calls Virginia 'one of the 
 goodliest and richest kingdoms in the world, which being in- 
 habited by the king's subjects, will put such a bit into our 
 ancient enemy's mouth as will curb liis hautiness of monarchy.' 
 
 II. Occasionally it is the figurative language of the text 
 which throws the critic on a false scent, and thus leads him to 
 look for a corruption where there is none. The best example 
 which we can call to mind is a passage in Much Ado About 
 Nothing, iv. i. Leonato, learning that Hero has fainted under 
 the shock of her disgrace, cries, 
 
 Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes : 
 For, did I think thou wouldst not quickly die. 
 Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames, 
 Myself would on the rearward of reproaches 
 Strike at thy life. 
 
 This is the reading of the quarto, which has the spelling 
 rereward. The military metaphor has perplexed the critics. 
 
 * It is purely an accident that the object of 'deprive' is expressed by 
 two substantives connected by of, suggesting to the modern reader the con- 
 struction here given. A learned friend suggests that in some possible poem, 
 entitled (say) ' The Battle of the High and the Low,' the following might 
 
 occur : 
 
 To make an application to the bishop, 
 
 Who might deprive the rector of the parish, 
 
 And turn him out of office.
 
 94 The Still Lion. 
 
 The war is between Hero's spirits and her shames or reproaches. 
 The latter have, in the onset, assailed her, and she lies insensible 
 from their violence. Then says Leonato, ' if owing to the sus- 
 taining power of her spirits, her reproaches fail to kill her, I 
 will come, as a reserve, in their rear, and I will slay her myself 
 Not perceiving the integrity of the metaphor, for which ' rear- 
 ward ' (the opposite of voynuard, vayward, or vanguard) is abso- 
 lutely required, Mr. A. E. Brae, this time most infelicitously, 
 proposed to read reword for the reading of the folio, 'reward.' 
 This reading would greatly weaken the passage ; for as it 
 stands, the very deficiency of the reproaches (which are enough 
 to prostrate, but not to kill her) is the reason for Leonato's 
 interference: whereas Mr. Brae's reading seems to make him 
 say, that if that deficiency were abated, if their power were 
 recruited, he would then interpose to do a work of supereroga- 
 tion. But this reading distinguishes between Hero's shames 
 and her reproaches., which are evidently one and the same. 
 If, then, the text were faulty, Mr. Brae's reading would be no 
 cure, but, if anything, make matters worse. The objection to 
 re7vard, taken in the old sense of regard, or to rezvord, on the 
 ground of prosody, would be untenable. Reward and reword 
 might be indiff"erently iambuses or trochees. Relapse, scuere, 
 supretne, and J^rz^/-<? (Shakespeare), reflect (Fletcher), regret {Drdecii), 
 revere (May), and recluse (Donne), are all occasionally used as 
 trochees. The real objection to reward is, that the sense of 
 regard was already obsolete when Shakespeare wrote; that to 
 reword is, tliat it makes Leonato's declaration inconsistent with 
 itself and violates the integrity of the metaphor, or else it
 
 TJie Still Lion. 95 
 
 degrades Hero's reproaches (her shames, in fact) into verbal 
 accusations ('upon the repetition of these charges' is Mr. Brae's 
 paraphrase): to both ahke, that the relative text presents no 
 difficulty to the reader who understands the military figure 
 which it involves, and therefore no footing for the conjectural 
 critic. We have, in fact, the same metaphor, in Shakespeare's 
 90th Sonnet, which in one version has also suffered emendation 
 ( ' woe ' being altered into foe) : 
 
 Oh ! do not, when my heart hath scap'd this sorrow 
 
 Come in the rem-ward of a conquer' d woe ; 
 
 Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, 
 
 To linger out a purpos'd overthrow. 
 
 If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, 
 
 When other petty griefs have done their spite, 
 
 Biit in the onset come ; so shall I taste 
 
 At first the very worst of Fortune's might; <S:c. 
 
 We will give one more example of the same fatality. 
 Shakespeare's figurative use of the word stain, whether sub- 
 stantive or verb, is various. The primary notion is that of 
 giving to something a colour from without; this may be a stain 
 of foulness or otherwise, and stai)i may thus xwifsax pollute, pollu- 
 tion; or somewhat more generally, dishonour; otherwise, dye, 
 indue (verb, in Shakespeare's peculiar sense), and therefore sub- 
 due (verb), i. <?., to a particular attribute or quality; and again, 
 infect, infection, and finally compromise. In another view the 
 substantive stain may signify the reverse oi foil, as in Venus 
 and Adonis, st. 1, ' stain to all nymphs,' /. e., casting their charms 
 into the shade by comparison with those of Venus. The passage 
 we have in view, in making these remarks, is in Antony and
 
 g6 The Still Lion. 
 
 Cleopatra, iii. 4. Antony complains to Octavia that her brother 
 has gone to war against Pompey without reason, and without 
 his (Anthony's) concurrence; that he has given him (Antony) 
 'narrow measure' in speaking of him. This touches his honour, 
 and he therefore declares that while his wife goes, as reconciler, 
 between the two triumvirs, he will give Caesar a strong motive 
 for making overtures of friendship. He says, 
 
 The mean time, lady, 
 I'll raise the preparation of a war 
 Shall stain your brother. 
 
 The metaphor, which once seized can never occasion the least 
 perplexity, has misled the critics, who have accordingly attempted 
 to remedy a seeming imperfection by treating ' stain ' as a mis- 
 print. Theobald reads strain; Boswell proposed stay, which 
 Mr. J. P. Collier and Mr. A. Dyce adopted, the latter compli- 
 menting his two predecessors on having perceived 'what was 
 tlie true remedy (Dyce's ed. 1867, vol. vii, p. 612).' Rann has 
 'stain for sustain. Jackson proposed stuti; and the Cambridge 
 Edition records an anonymous conjecture, slack I Certainly, 
 had strain been in the old text we should have been well satis- 
 fied with it. But wliile regarding that as facile princeps among 
 the proposed substitutes, we hold it to be quite inferior to the 
 word of the folio. Compromise would be a dilution of stain, in 
 the sense we believe Shakespeare to have intended. Antony's 
 preparation was designed to effect a total change in Caesar's 
 purposes and plans, in fact to indue and subdue him to the 
 quality of Antony's mind — possibly even to overshadow Caesar, 
 and impress him with the weight of Antony's personal character.
 
 The Still Lion. 97 
 
 As it seems to us, we are losers by adopting any of the pro- 
 posed substitutes. Our bard eschewed, for the most part, weak 
 generahties, and, though his word stain ha\T2 a considerable 
 range of meaning, it is preserved from vagueness by its 
 anchorage in the world of sense. 
 
 12. Some passages present a cluster of difficulties — so 
 many, in fact, that it cannot be supposed that mere textual 
 corruption can have originated them all. Two salient examples 
 occur respectively in Measure for Measure, iii. i, and Cymbeline, 
 v. 4; both relating to death. The former runs thus: 
 
 I, but to die, and go we know not where, 
 
 To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot, 
 
 This sensible warm motion, to become 
 
 A kneaded clod ; And the delighted spirit 
 
 To bath in fierie floods, or to recide 
 
 In thrilling Region of thicke-ribbed Ice, 
 
 To be imprison'd in the viewlesse windes 
 
 And blowne with restlesse violence round about 
 
 The pendant world : or to be worse then worst 
 
 Of those, that lawlesse and incertaine thought, 
 
 Imagine howling, 'tis too horrible. (Folio 1623.) 
 
 The opening of this passage was specially selected by Mr. 
 J. M. D. Meiklejohn, in a paper read to the College of Preceptors, 
 as an illustration of his assertion, that the practice of calling 
 upon a student to write a paraphrase of poetry is useless and 
 absurd : here he pronounced a paraphrase to be impossible. 
 Now a paraphrase is only impossible through some inherent 
 obscurity in the text to be expounded : and surely the more 
 difficult a passage is, the more useful is the paraphrase. To us 
 
 o
 
 98 The Still Lion. 
 
 it appears plain that the practice of calHng for a paraphrase is 
 in the highest degree commendable: for it is the only means 
 by which the teacher can discover how far the pupil understands 
 the passage Avhich forms the subject of his study. Not that a 
 paraphrase can by any means convey the whole sense of the 
 original : no paraphrase was ever intended to do that : but it 
 can convey, by analysis and qualification, the greater part of 
 that sense ; and surely ' half a loaf is better than no bread.' 
 We do not ' halt particularly' to expound the meaning of 'cold 
 obstruction' or 'delighted spirit:' we would rather call attention 
 to Shakespeare's use of the abstract substantive, as ' Region ' 
 and ' thought.' Dyce's first edition thus remarks upon the 
 former word : ' The folio has " Region ": but the plural is 
 positively required here on account of '■^floods''' in the preceding 
 and " winds " in the following line.' And for the latter he 
 reads, after all the editors, save those of Oxford and Cambridge, 
 ' thoughts^ That note, if it mean anything, means that Shake- 
 speare employed Region [j] in the concrete, and in the modern 
 and ordinary sense : and we have no doubt that Dyce adopted 
 the plural thoughts as the nominative to ' imagine.' On the 
 contrary we contend that ' Region ' is used as an abstract, and 
 in the radical sense; and that it means restricted place, or con- 
 finement : * also, that ' thought ' is used as an abstract, and that 
 it is the objective governed by ' imagine.' The adjective ' incer- 
 
 * So Carlyle appears to have understood it : for in his Heroes and 
 Hero-worship, 1842, Lect. iii. p. 135, he quotes tlie passage d propos of 
 Dante's 'soft etherial soul, looking out so stern, implacable, grim -trenchant, 
 us from inipriso)iment of thick-ribbed ice!'' as expressed in Giotto's portrait. 
 He is perhaps also glancing at Uliifenio, Canto xxxiv.
 
 The Still LiojL 99 
 
 tain' is employed in a specialised sense, like the Latin incertiis: 
 certain like certtis, is elsewhere used by Shakespeare as opposed 
 to flawed or crazed: e. g.^ in A Midsummer Niglifs Dream. 
 i. I, Demetrius says, 
 
 Relent, sweet Hermia; And Lysander yield 
 Thy crazed title to my certain right; 
 
 and again in ii. 2, 
 
 That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
 
 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, &c. 
 
 In fact, certain and incertain are synonyms for settled and ////- 
 j-<f///^^, respectively. (See 'so muddy, so unsettled,' and 'settled 
 senses,' Wi?iter's Tale, i. 2 and v. 3 ; and ' unsettled fancy,' 
 Tempest, v. i.) Accordingly, as we read the passage, the last 
 three lines may be paraphrased thus: 
 
 ' or to be in an infinitely worse case than those who 
 body forth — or render objective — their own lawless and 
 distracted mind.' 
 
 The pendant from Cymbelitie, v. 4, is as follows : 
 
 Most welcome bondage ! For thou art a way, 
 
 I think, to liberty. Vet am I better 
 
 Than one that's sick o' the gout, since he had rather 
 
 Groan so in perpetuity, than be cured 
 
 By the sure physician, Death ; who is the key 
 
 To unbar these locks. My conscience ! thou art fettered 
 
 More than my shanks and wrists. You good gods give me 
 
 The penitent instrument to pick that bolt, 
 
 Then free for ever ! Is't enough I'm soriy ? 
 
 So children temporal fathers do appease:
 
 100 The Still Lion. 
 
 Gods are more full of mercy. Must I repent ? 
 
 I cannot do it better than in gyves 
 
 Desir'd more than constrain'd. To satisfy, 
 
 (If of my freedom 'tis the main part) take 
 
 No stricter render of me than my all. 
 
 I know you are more clement than viled men, 
 
 Who of their broken debtors take a third, 
 
 A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again 
 
 On their abatement; that's not my desire: 
 
 For Imogen's dear life take mine; and though 
 
 *Tis not so dear, yet 'tis a life: you coin'd it. 
 
 'Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; 
 
 Though light, take pieces for the figure's sake; 
 
 You rather, mine being yours: and so. Great Powers, 
 
 If you will take this audit, take this life. 
 
 And cancel these cold bonds. 
 
 Of the passage from ' Must I repent,' down to ' my all,' Mr. 
 Staunton writes, ' It is, we fear, hopelessly incurable.' To 
 which we can only answer, that we see in it no corruption 
 whatever ! Difficulty there is, but none that does not disappear 
 in the simple process of elucidation. In our judgment the 
 entire passage is one of those in which the bard displays at 
 once his wealth of knowledge and his fertility of language. 
 Its terseness, along with a certain technical and figurative use 
 of words, has misled all the critics : and, as the result of their 
 industry, we have nothing but laboured misprision and wanton 
 innovation. In Shakespeare-criticism we learn to be grateful 
 for negative virtues : and we are really thankful that Mr. 
 Staunton, warned by the example of Hanmer, presents the 
 passage intact and entire, and spares us the pain of conjectural 
 corruption. Posthumus rejoices in his bodily thraldom, because
 
 The Still Lion. lOi 
 
 its issue will be death, which will set him free: certainly from 
 bodily bondage, and possibly from spiritual bondage — the 
 worse of the twain . So he prays for ' the penitent instrument 
 to pick that bolt,' the bolt which fetters his conscience worse 
 than the cold gyves constrain his shanks and wrists: that is, 
 for the means of a repentance which may be efficacious for 
 pardon and absolution. He then enters into these means in 
 detail, following the order of the old Churchmen : viz., sorrow 
 for sin, or attrition : ' Is't enough I am sorry 1 ' &c. : then 
 penance, which was held to convert attrition into contrition : 
 'Must I repent?' «S:c.: then satisfaction for the wrong done. 
 As to this last he says, if the main condition of his s])iritual 
 freedom be that ('To satisfy'), let not the gods with that 
 object require a stricter render than his all — his life. These 
 are the three parts of absolution. The third he expands in 
 the last clause. He owns that his debt exceeds his all. He 
 says, in effect, 
 
 * Do not call me to a stricter account than the forfeiture 
 of my all towards payment. Take my all, and give me 
 a receipt, not on account, but in full of all demands. 
 Earthly creditors take of their debtors a fraction of their 
 debt and less than their all, " letting them thrive again 
 on their abatement ": but I do not desire that indulgence 
 of your clemency. Take life for life — myall: and though 
 it is not worth so much as Imogen's, yet 'tis a life, and 
 of the same divine origin: a coin from the same mint. 
 Between man and man light pieces are current for the
 
 102 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 sake of the figure stamped upon them: so much the 
 rather should the gods take my life, which is in their own 
 image, though it is not so dear, or precious, as Imogen's.'* 
 
 The old writers compared the hindrances of the body to 
 gyves: so Walkington in The Optick Glasse of Humors, 1607 
 (fo. 11), 'Our bodies were the prisons and bridewils of our 
 soules, wherein they lay manicled and fettered in Gives,' &c. :t 
 and when Posthumus says, ' Cancel these cold bonds,' he 
 means free the soul from the body, as in Macbeth^ iii. 2, 
 
 Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond, 
 Which keeps me pale ! 
 
 (where Mr. Staunton plausibly reads pakd) -. but the epithet 
 ' cold ' has reference to the material gyves, which were of iron : 
 cf. T/ie Two Noble Kinsmen, iii. i, where Palamon says, ' Quit 
 me of these cold gyves' — /. e., knock off my fetters. 
 
 Such passages as these two serve as admirable illustrations 
 of the novel position taken by a writer in the Times of Sept. 29, 
 1863, in a review of The Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare : 
 'There never was an author who required less note or comment 
 than Shakespeare.' It is quite true that the mass of readers are 
 content to take the text as they find it, and take in as much 
 of it as they can without trouble ; and that the mass of critics 
 and editors are impatient of the restraint which a thorough and 
 
 * For the keys to these two passages I am indebted to Mr. Hugh 
 Carleton of Auckland, N.Z., and to the late Rev. \V. \V. Berry, Prebendary 
 of St. Paul's. 
 
 t He is possibly thinking of the Pliacdo, 72 and 73.
 
 TJie Still Lion. 103 
 
 painstaking study of the text would impose upon their con- 
 jectural fertility — it is so much easier to 'regulate' the text, 
 or to shun the dark places in it, than to elucidate it. Mean- 
 while THE Still Lion is patient and longsuffering, and 
 
 'requires' neither note nor COMMENT: BUT IS READY TO 
 AVENGE HIMSELF ON SCIOLISTS AND MEDDLERS. 
 
 We now hold our hand: but passages upon passages crowd 
 upon us for advocacy and defense, which as yet are suffering 
 the crying wrongs of emendation. But we trust we have done 
 enough, both by way of warning and of criticism, to show that 
 ignorance of the spelUng, language, and customs of Shakespeare's 
 day, is an absolute disqualification for the serious work of verbal 
 criticism, even more so than the insensibiUty of such men as 
 Steevens and Johnson. 
 
 The text is beset with difficulties to the ordinary reader, 
 which are occasioned far more by the presence of obsolete 
 phraseology and of allusions to obsolete customs and forgotten 
 events than by the accidents of the press; so that to an ignorant 
 reader who is impatient of obscurity profuse emendation is a 
 positive necessity. But unhappily, ignorance, insensibility, and 
 literary ambition concur to convert a reader into a criticaster 
 of Shakespeare's text. The result is, that passages, eminent 
 for their sense and beauty, for the purity of their construction, 
 the selectness of their words, the dignity or fitness of their 
 thoughts, are defaced and marred by the meddling, clumsy 
 boor whose vanity has induced him to play the critic. Such 
 is the fate that has befallen, among many other passages of 
 faultless excellence, that, perhaps the most lovely of all that
 
 104 '^^^^ ^till Lion. 
 
 ever flowed from the great soul of the poet, in which Pericles 
 calls on Helicanus to wound him, lest he should be drowned 
 with the sweetness of ' the great sea of joys' that rushed upon 
 him : * till at length we are glad to find a fitting vent for our 
 grief and indignation in the words of Milton, 
 
 See with what haste these dogs of Hell advance 
 To waste and havoc yonder world, which thou 
 Hast made so fair! 
 
 * We had in mind the late Mr. Samuel Bailey's proposal to alter 
 'sweetness' into surges, for publishing which, in our judgment he deserved 
 to go woolward and to lie in the woollen, till he came to a better frame of 
 mind. When we saw his work On the Received Text of Shakespeare we 
 thought we had seen the worst possible of Shakespeare -criticism. We 
 found ourselves in error there, however, as soon as we saw the now late 
 Mr. Thomas Keightley's Shakespeare Expositor. In defense of Shakespeare's 
 expression, 'To drown me with their sweetness,' if, forsooth, defense were 
 needed, or let us say for its illustration, we might cite the following from 
 Stephen Gosson's Plays Confuted in Five Actiojis (n. d.), sig. B 4, 'because 
 we are . . . drunken with the sweetness of these vanities.' Here Mr. 
 Bailey's method of criticism would require us to turn ' sweetness ' into 
 siveet'cvort, as another critic actually did by ' sweet world ' in King John ! 
 
 We may add that in our selection of penances for critical offenses we 
 have an eye to two passages in Shakespeare which are not always understood. 
 Those penances are to wear a woollen shirt next the skin, and to sleep 
 (naked) between the blankets. Sheets served our ancestors for the modern 
 refinement of a night-dress.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ON THE CONJECTURAL EMENDATION OF SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 TEXT. 
 
 APPY indeed shall we be if our remarks induce the 
 verbal critic to spare the works of Shakespeare as he 
 loves them. But, at the same time, we concede the 
 fact of textual corruption in many passages, and the probability 
 of corruption in many others. The truth is, that besides the 
 two classes of textual difficulties, called historical and gram- 
 matical, there is a third more formidable than either, viz., the 
 class of literal difficulties, which may very well be the result 
 of misprinting. Conjectural criticism being thus allowed, it 
 becomes expedient to assign the limits within which it should 
 be exercised. Something towards this end would be accom- 
 plished if a code of rules could be imposed upon all, as a 
 common basis of operations. Evidently, such a preliminary 
 would obviate a vast and useless expenditure of inventive 
 sagacity, and would spare the antiquarians a world of super- 
 fluous speculation. There are, indeed, certain considerations 
 which might assist the critics in the determination of that 
 basis ; and, with the object of setting forth these with some 
 
 p
 
 io6 The Still Lion. 
 
 approach to systematic treatment, we venture to propound three 
 provisional cations of emendation, which severally deal with the 
 three salient features of conjectural criticism: viz., the supposed 
 crux itself, the proposed method of emending it, and the par- 
 ticular tnatter which is designed to supplant it. In doing this, 
 we disclaim at the outset any overweening confidence in the 
 efficacy of such legislation ; for, as it seems to us, however 
 carefully the canons may be drawn up (and on the following 
 three no pains have been spared) there may at any time 
 arise singular cases which, despite the rigour of the canons, are 
 able to establish their right to exceptional treatment.* Still, 
 the code, on the whole, may have its value in checking the 
 licence of conjectural emendation. 
 
 In the first place, as a restriction, not disquahfication, of 
 the function of conjecture, we would insist upon the supreme 
 duty of deliberation, in lieu of that precipitancy which so often 
 condemns a word as a corruption which is only a difficulty, 
 and has no other fault than that of being strange, obscure, or 
 awkward, in the place where it stands. 
 
 (i) Evidently a word so unusual as to be unintelligible 
 
 * Perhaps the following are instances of such. 
 
 'Out of ordeaPd iron' (Z. Jackson) for 'Out of a great deal of old 
 iron.' — I Henry IV., i. 2. (Or t;;-(/tv?/-iron ?) 
 and 
 
 ' I stay but for my guidon : to the field ! ' (G. Thackeray and others) 
 for ' I stay but for my guard : On ! to the field !' — Henry V., iv. 2. 
 
 and, despite the great difference of trace, Mr. G. W. Clark's conjecture of 
 prospice ftinem for 'the prophecy,' in Tlie Comedy of Errors, iv. 4, may be 
 a third instance.
 
 The Still Lion. 107 
 
 may be a perfectly legitimate word : or if not, may be the 
 word intended by the dramatist: indeed it may be an idiasm 
 (see p. 40) — a restoration or a coinage of Shakespeare's: in 
 which case it might well be wholly unknown to his critics. 
 With that precipitancy, or disregard of facts, which seems to 
 us so unwise and injurious, a great number of words have been 
 emended for no other reason than their strangeness. 
 
 (2) An obscurity in the text may be wholly or partially 
 due to a defect in the critic ; as want of knowledge, thought, 
 or perception; and this obscurity may be so profound as to 
 drive him to take refuge in emendation. This has happened 
 in a vast multitude of cases : indeed the highways of criticism 
 are studded with such scarecrows : unhappy felicities of emend- 
 ation, hung in chains (as it were) for warning to intending 
 marauders. We have furnished several instances of such in 
 Chapter iv. The critical works of the late Mr. Samuel Bailey, 
 the late Mr. Thomas Keightley, and many other recent critics, 
 and the papers in the Athencenm* of the late Mr. Howard 
 Staunton, will be found to furnish a multitude of examples in 
 point. Similarly, an apparent awkwardness of expression, as 
 unfitness or uncouthness, may also be wholly or partially due 
 to the critic's want of imagination or to his insensibility : and 
 
 * These papers, entitled Unsuspected Corruptions of S/iakspcare''s 7\'xt, 
 appear in the numbers for Oct. 19 & 26; Nov. 2, 16, & 23; Dec. 14 & 28, 
 1872 : Jan. 25, March 29, April 12, June 14, Nov. 8, Dec. 6, 1873: Jan. 31, 
 March 14, April 4, June 27, 1874. He died on June 22; leaving behind 
 him nothing further than the paper which appeared on June 27, in the same 
 number of the Atheimnni as that which announced his death. He was our 
 friend of twenty years' standing. We may record that The Still Lion 
 provoked his animosity, but did not interrupt our friendship.
 
 io8 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 the latter may relate to phonetic or to linguistic beauty, or 
 to both. We may summarise these points in the following 
 negative formula. 
 
 I. The mere fact of the construction, or a word or words 
 
 occurring in it, appearing strange, obscure, or awkward, 
 shall not alone constitute a reason for treating the passage 
 as if it were corrupt. 
 
 This canon throws upon the critic the paramount duty — so 
 much more difficult than the task of emendation — of elucidating 
 and expoiindi7ig every troublesome passage which cannot be 
 proved, beyond question, to be absolute nonsense. The next 
 formula is affirmative, and will justify itself, viz.: 
 
 II. The correction of the text shall be attempted upon certain 
 
 simple hypotheses, framed to account for the supposed 
 misprint, before the adoption of a more sweeping or 
 more violent proceeding; regard being had to the leading 
 or central notion involved in the suspected passage, 
 taken together with its context, and to the phonetic 
 current of the Avords. 
 
 As to the order in which such hypotheses should be tried, 
 there will necessarily be considerable disagreement. We are 
 only stating the result of our own experience of printers' errata, 
 when we assert, that slight literal errors and small dislocations 
 constitute the largest classes; that cases in which letters (or 
 even syllables) are either retrenched or wrongly repeated, are 
 less common than the former; but far more frequent than 
 those in which a word is either omitted or wrongly inserted. 
 Such hypotheses, we think, should be exhausted before the
 
 The Still Lion. 109 
 
 critic has recourse to the supposition of a deleted line having 
 been retained in mistake: or of a lost line: and that before 
 entertaining either of those suppositions, it is his duty to con- 
 sider the possibilities of mishearing or misreading the copy. 
 
 A remarkable instance of a suspected line, which one critic 
 would cancel as a line deleted by the author, yet retained by 
 the printer, but another singles out for special eulogy, is in 
 Anthony and Cleopatra, v. 2. 
 
 If idle talk will once be necessary, 
 I'll not sleep neither. 
 
 Mr. F. J. Furnivall, on the one hand, is disposed to summarily 
 omit it: Mr. C J. Monro, in ignorance of such a proposal, 
 regards it as exceptionally felicitous: for he writes to me in 
 these terms of it: 'As to "idle talk" — an amateur is liable to 
 fall in love with particular passages, but I do think that a 
 singularly expressive line in its place :' and he paraphrases the 
 entire passage thus : ' If this gift of the gab, which Plutarch 
 will say (for I live before his time) was my particular charm, 
 consents for once to make its "idle talk" humbly useful, it 
 shall be employed in keeping me awake.' Between these two 
 extremes we have various hypotheses for meeting what has 
 been thought a great defect; the more serious of which are 
 Hanmer's and Ritson's proposals to supply a missing line; the 
 former proposing to insert, 
 
 I'll not so much as syllable a word, 
 
 the latter, more plausibly, if not more probably, the following 
 line:
 
 no TJie Still Lio7i. 
 
 I will not speak ; if sleep be necessary, 
 
 SO as to account for the compositor having skipt a hne ; while 
 Capell simply treats ' sleep ' in the text as a misprint for speak. 
 This wholesale method of treatment has been adopted in many- 
 other parts of the text in order to recover the whole or a part 
 of a line supposed to be lost through the compositor's eyes 
 wandering to a subsequent line. Here are two examples from 
 the same play (iv. lo): 
 
 order for sea is given ; 
 They have put forth the haven [ ] 
 
 Where their appointment we may best discover, 
 And look on their endeavour. 
 
 And again (v. i), 
 
 The breaking of so great a thing should make 
 A greater crack : the round world should have shook, 
 [ ] lions into civil streets, 
 
 And citizens to their dens. 
 
 The hiatus, in each case, has been variously filled up by Rowe, 
 Steevens, and Malone. The old text abounds with passages 
 shewing similar defects.* That whole lines are lost through the 
 compositor's eyes wandering from a word in one line to the 
 same word in a subsequent line, is proved by the known defects 
 of the folio text of 1623 supplied by the earlier quartos, and 
 of the quarto texts supplemented by the folio. In Troilus 
 and Cressida, iii. 3, the folios read, 
 
 * A notable one in Hamlet, v. I, is discussed in the Cambridge Edition 
 of S/ial-es/c'an; 1S66, vol. viii., p. 192, note xxiii.
 
 The Still Lion. 1 1 1 
 
 The beauty that is borne here in the face 
 The bearer knows not, but commends itself 
 Not going from itself; 
 
 the quartos supplying two lines omitted after the second; 
 
 To other's eyes : nor doth the eye itself, 
 Tliat most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, 
 
 and in Hamlet, ii. 2, the quartos read 
 
 I will leave him and my daughter 
 
 omitting the words after ' him,' 
 
 and suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him 
 
 which we obtain from the folio. It is fortunate that, in so 
 many plays, we are thus able to supply the defects of the folio 
 by the quartos, and the defects of the quartos by the folio. 
 
 Let us suppose now that both these canons are complied 
 with, and the recourse to emendation is justified, there remain 
 over certain considerations which ought to regulate the matter 
 to be substituted for that superseded. There are certain classes 
 of emendations which are not only objectionable, but, however 
 felicitous they may be, can never obtain an unquestioned right 
 to the place in the text : their very hopelessness puts them out 
 of court. This happens — 
 
 I. Where there is no close resemblance between the ductus 
 literarum of the word or words to be supplanted, and that of 
 the word or words to be supplied, regard being had either to 
 their written or to their printed form. For example : we cannot 
 expect that, in As You Like It, tributary streams will ever be
 
 112 The Still Lion, 
 
 accepted in lieu of ' wearie very means ' ; that in AWs Well 
 that Ends IVell, her own suit Joi/iing with her mother's grace, 
 will ever supplant ' Her insuite comming with her modern 
 grace'; nor yet does it appear likely that, in The Comedy of 
 Errors, prospicc funeni will ever permanently take the place of 
 ' the prophecy.' 
 
 2. Where the proposed word is unknown or very unusual 
 in the relative literature : for instance, in i Henry IV., tame 
 chetah for ' tame cheater'; in The Tempest, young chamals (i. e., 
 Angora goats) for 'young scamels': to which might be added 
 several of the proposed emendations of strachy in Twelfth 
 Night. At the same time it should be remembered that some 
 words can more readily substantiate their title than others : 
 e. g., rothcr for 'brother' in Tinion of Athens is a good word 
 enough, and that it was not wholly unknown to Shakespeare is 
 proved by Rother Street in the very town where he was born 
 and died, the name by which the street was known in his life- 
 time. Yet no example of the use of rother, an ox, without 
 the addition of beast, has ever been discovered in the literature 
 of his day.* 
 
 3. Where the proposed word owes its fitness to its possessing 
 a sense or usage which it probably had not so early as the 
 
 * In 1607 a master in Chancery reports that certain persons are alleged 
 to ' have time out of mind, etc. , had herbage and feeding for certain numbers 
 of their horse beasts and roother beasts,^ in respect of ' the Manor of Compton 
 Basset in Com. Wiltes.' (Sir John Tyndall's Report in Lawrence v. 
 Merwine, Easter Term, 1607; Record Office.) Roother beasts <:>cc\i.x'aor:\t 
 five times more ; roothers never ; but horse beasts does not occur again ; it 
 is always horses. I am indebted to Cecil Monro, Esq., for this extract.
 
 The Still Lion. 113 
 
 reign of James I : or where the word itself is probably of later 
 introduction. Very great difficulty besets many of these questions 
 of date. As a positive fact all the test-words proposed as a 
 royal road to the conviction of the infamous Perkins-imposture 
 have been traced to a date too early for that purpose. (See 
 A Complete Vie^a of the Shakespeare Controversy, 1861, Chap, vii.) 
 Wheedle, complaint (in the medical sense), and even cheer (in the 
 applauditory sense, singular number) were probably all in use 
 in the reign of Elizabeth.* 
 
 These considerations may be summed up in the following 
 canon. 
 
 III. The candidate for admission into the text shall be a 
 legitimate word, known to be in use at the relative time, 
 and otherwise meeting the requirements of the passage, 
 whether as to the leading or central notion, the gram- 
 matical construction, or the phonetic syzygy. 
 
 Criticism, like Commentary, has often fallen to the lot of 
 men whose abilities and training had not fitted them for that 
 kind of intellectual work. In the fifth of De Quincey's Letters 
 to a young ma7i whose education has been neglected, Dr. Nitsch, 
 the Commentator on Kant, affords a mark for the Opium- 
 Eater's fine irony. He fancies the learned doctor protesting 
 against the reasonableness of expecting a man, who has all this 
 commenting to do, to have thoroughly mastered his author. 
 
 * In Chapter vii. of our Complete View we did battle for the test-word 
 proposed by Mr. A. E. Brae. We had better have let it alone. Our 
 opponents did not destroy its credit ; but since 1861 we ourselves might 
 have done so. We are now convinced that the Perkins-Folio corrections 
 are too crafty an imposture to admit of such a refutation.
 
 114 ^-^^^ Still Lion. 
 
 The equitable division of labour demands that one man shall 
 master the system, and another write commentaries ! Criticism 
 offers almost as prominent a mark for ridicule. If a few really 
 intelligent and learned men have done much good work in 
 this department, assuredly the greater bulk of criticism has 
 proceeded from those who had few or none of the necessary 
 requirements. The least one might expect of them would be 
 a study of the context, and the reservation of their speculations 
 until some one conjecture can be shown to stain its rivals. 
 Nobody cares to be told that possibly a suspicious word in the 
 text is a misprint for this, that, or the other; as is the custom 
 with several critics of this day, to whom the great Becket 
 seems to have bequeathed the rags which served him for a 
 mantle. 
 
 The simple truth is, that successful emendation is the fruit 
 of severe study and research on the one hand, and of rare 
 sensibility and sense on the other. The number of really satis- 
 factory conjectures are comparatively few; and few are those 
 critics who have shown any remarkable sagacity in this kind 
 of speculation. The ensuing may be cited with unqualified 
 satisfaction : 
 
 1. Our Poesie is a Gowne, which uses 
 
 From whence 'tis nourisht. — Timon of Athens, i. I. 
 
 Our Poesie is a Gumme (Pope) which oozes (Johnson), &c. 
 
 2. It is the Pastour Lards, the Brother's sides, 
 The want that makes him leaue. — Ibid. iv. 3. 
 
 It is the Pasture (Rowe) lards the rother's (Singer) sides, 
 The want that makes him Icane (Rowe).
 
 TJie Still L ion. i i 5 
 
 3. for thou seest it will not coole my nature. — Tivelfth Night, i. 3. 
 for thou seest it will not curie by (Theobald) nature. 
 
 4. Her infuite comming with her moderne grace, 
 Subdu'd me to her rate. — AWs Well that Ends Well, v. 2. 
 Her infinite cunning (Walker) &c. 
 
 5. Till that the wearie verie meanes do ebbe. — As Yoti Like It, ii. 7. 
 Till that the wearer's (Singer), &c. 
 
 6. To you, our Swords have leaden points, Mark Antony : 
 Our Amies in strength of malice, and our Hearts 
 
 Of Brothers temper, do receive you in. — Julius Cirsar, iii. i. 
 Our Amies in strength of aniitie (Singer) &c.* 
 
 * Even the proposer of this palmarian emendation was not aware of 
 the corroboration it might receive from Shakespeare's language in other 
 places. We have in Antony and Cleopatra the very phrase in one 
 place, and almost the very phrase in another. In ii. 6 we read 'that 
 which is the strength of their amity shall prove the immediate author of 
 their variance': and in iii. 2, Antony says, 
 
 I'll wrestle with you in my strength of love. 
 
 Again in 2 Henry IV., 2, we have this parallel, 
 
 Let's drink together friendly, and embrace, 
 That all their eyes may bear these tokens home 
 Of our restored love and amity : 
 
 We may also strengthen Singer's emendation by the following from 
 Antony and Cleopatra : ii. 2, and Coriolanus : iv. 5, 
 
 To hold you in perpetual amity. 
 
 To make you brothers, and to knit your hearts 
 
 With an unslipping knot, &c. 
 
 Here I clip 
 The anvil of my sword ; and do contest. 
 As hotly and as nobly with thy love, 
 As ever in ambitious strength I did 
 Contend against thy valour.
 
 1 1 6 The Still L ion. 
 
 7. Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence. 
 
 Mercha7it of Venice, iii. 2. 
 Thy plainnesse (Warburton) moves me, &c. 
 
 8. For I do see the cruell pangs of death 
 Right in thine eye. — King John, iv. 4. 
 Riot (Brae) in thine eye. 
 
 9. 'Tis enough 
 That (Britaine) I have kill'd thy Mistris: Peace, 
 He give no wound to thee. — Cymbeline, v. i. 
 .... I have kill'd thy Mistris-piece (Staunton).* 
 
 * This masterpiece in emendation was communicated to us by Mr. 
 Staunton in the course of conversation, shortly after the completion of his 
 Edition of Shakespeare. He thought himself supported in this correction 
 by an expression in The Winter's Tale, i. 2 : 
 
 I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind 
 What lady she her lord. 
 
 where he reads lady-she. We marvel at Mr. Abbott's adoption of this reading 
 {Shakespearean Grammar, 1870, pp. 149, note, and 174: i.e., §§ 225 and 
 255); while his gloss, explaining a /rt(!^-j-/^£r to be 'a well-born woman' (as if 
 that were something more than a lady) seems to us to verge on the ridiculous. 
 On the contrary, a mistress-piece is chief lady, a lady who is mistress of all 
 ladyhood. In our opinion, 'behind what lady she her lord,' means 'less 
 than any lady whatsoever [loves] her lord.' cf. e. g.. 
 
 The King he takes the babe 
 To his protection. — Cy!?ibeline, i. i. 
 
 the chain 
 Which God he knows I saw not. — Comedy 0/ Errors, v. i. 
 
 Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. — Ps. xxiii, 4. 
 
 God he knowes how many men's lives it will cost, &c. 
 
 Powell's Art of Thriving. 1635. 
 
 But though the passage in 77^1? Winter's Tale affords no corroboration of 
 Mr. Staunton's emendation in Cymbeline, the following from Ford's Lady's 
 Trial, i. 2, does support it : 
 
 him we have beleaguer'd to accost 
 This she-piece.
 
 TJie Still Lion. 117 
 
 10. for his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields. 
 
 Hetuy v., ii. 3. 
 
 and a Babied (Theobald) of greene fields. 
 
 11. If every of your wishes had a wombe 
 
 And foretell every wish, a Million. — Antony and Cleopatra, i. 2. 
 And fertile every wish (Warburton). 
 
 12. Oh then we bring forth weeds, 
 When our quicke windes lye still. — Ibid. 
 
 When our quicke mi)ides, &c. (Warburton) 
 
 13. Then would thou hadst a paire of chaps, no more, 
 And throw betweene them all the food thou hast, 
 They'll grinde the other. Where's Antony? 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, iii. 5, 
 Then world, thou hast, &c. 
 They'll grinde the one the other (Johnson). 
 
 14. For his Bounty, 
 There was no winter in't. An Anthony it was. 
 
 That grew the more by reaping. — Antony and Cleopatra, v. 2. 
 
 an autunm 'twas (Theobald). 
 
 15. I have retyr'd me to a wastefull cocke. — Timon of Athens, ii. 2. 
 I have retyr'd me to a wakefull couche (Swynfen Jervis). 
 
 As to the last, a few remarks may be added in justification 
 of so valuable a correction. We do not touch the fitness or 
 the beauty of the emendation, which speak for themselves, 
 but we insist upon the probability of the misprint. We must 
 use the favourite resource of Zachary Jackson here. In the 
 ' upper case ' of the compositor, the 11 and k are in contiguous 
 ' boxes,' so that an fl would sometimes be dropped into the 
 
 k box by mistake: thus 11 | k ; whence it might very well
 
 I i8 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 happen that wakefidl was set up wajlefull. Not improbably, 
 wakefull in the 'copy' suggested cock to the mind of the 
 workman instead of couch, by the power of association ; the 
 barn-cock being often called the wakeful bird, or the wakeful 
 cock. As an illustration of this particular misprint, we may 
 cite these two instances: in one Birmingham newspaper we 
 observed the remarkable expression (of a remarkable phe- 
 nomenon) 'sermon without bosh,' which we were told was an 
 error for 'sermon without book;' and in another, 'genial break' 
 for 'genial breath;' and the blunder of 'break' for breath also 
 occurred in one of the proofs of our tractate entitled. Was 
 Thomas Lodge an Actor ? p. lo. 
 
 Of course, in order to appreciate the actual duty done 
 by each of these fifteen emendations, it is necessary to make 
 the passage to which it applies a special study. All that the 
 mere presentation of them to the eye can do, is to show the 
 reader that the ductus literarum of the conjecture is sufficiently 
 near to that of the text, which is also the case with the majority 
 of unsuccessful conjectures. 
 
 As in the substitution of ' wastefull ' for wakefull, in many 
 misprints the process is patent : we see, for instance (Ex. 6), 
 that the misprint ' malice ' arose from the compositor setting 
 up amitie awry, and transposing the ni and a. Again (Ex. 8 
 and 9), we see that ' Right ' and ' Peace ' probably arose from 
 mishearing the genuine word. In some cases, however, we see 
 the fatality under which certain classes of words were wrongly 
 set up, without being able to see why that fatality existed. Of 
 all classes pronouns (simply as such) were the most commonly
 
 The Still Lion. 1 19 
 
 misprinted.* Tlie first folio of Shakespeare and the first quarto 
 of the Sonnets teem with such errors. Some particular passages 
 seem to have suffered from a similar fatality. Again and again 
 has corruption disastered them, misprint being grafifed on 
 misprint. Here are two examples : 
 
 * A most important instance is t,nven on p. 72 ante. With the utmost 
 diffidence we suggest another, in Macbeth, ii. 2 : 
 
 no : this my Hand will rather 
 The multitudinous Seas incarnadine, 
 Making the Greene one. Red. {sic in fo. 1623.) 
 
 Read, nostra periculo, 
 
 ♦Making their Greene, one Red': /'. e., making the green of the midtitit- 
 dinoiis seas an universal red — ' total giiles.' This very slight change oblit- 
 erates the defect which Mr. Staunton found in the third line, viz., that 
 'the Greene' (apart from 'one') cannot be a substantive expression : which 
 was his excuse for a most violent and less satisfactory alteration. 
 
 The converse misprint of ' their' for ///(', occurs in Antony and Cleopatra, 
 ii. 2. 
 
 Her Gentlewomen, like the Nereides, 
 
 So many Mer-maides tended her i' th' eyes. 
 
 And made their bends adomings. At the Helme 
 
 A seeming Mer-maide steers : 
 
 Where we read, after Zachary Jackson, 'the bends' adornings.' Both 
 ' eyes ' and ' bends ' were parts of Cleopatra's barge. The eyes of a ship 
 are the hawseholes : the bends are the wales, or thickest planks in the 
 ship's sides. North has it : ' others tending the tackle and ropes of the 
 barge ;' which settles the question as to the meaning of eyes : and that once 
 fixed, the other part of the interpretation is inevitable. What could the 
 hardy soldier, Enobarbus, care for the curves of the mermaid's bodies ? To 
 us it is obvious that if the girls tended Cleopatra at the eyes, they would, 
 there, be the natural ornaments of the bends. Even Mr. Dyce, in his latest 
 edition, failed to see the obvious meaning of this passage.
 
 I20 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 I. In the Tempest, i. 2, it is beyond the shadow of a doubt 
 
 that Shakespeare wrote, 
 
 Urchins 
 Shall forth at vast of night, that they may worke 
 All exercise on thee. 
 
 Three morsels of knowledge, indeed, are requisite for the full 
 
 comprehension of the sense : to forth was a common phrase 
 
 for to go forth ; vast of night meant dead of flight; and exercise 
 
 meant chastisement or penance, as in Othello, iii. 4. Ignorance 
 
 of one or some of these things has hitherto hindered the 
 
 reception of Mr. Thomas White's restoration. It has been 
 
 argued by a very competent critic and editor, that exercise 
 
 must be a verb, because to work e:3iercise would, otherwise, 
 
 be a pleonasm which it would be impertinent to impute to 
 
 Shakespeare. Nothing can be more fallacious than that style 
 
 of argument. Pleonasms are the very stuff of the Elizabethan 
 
 and Jacobian writers. In our authorized version of the Holy 
 
 Scriptures, for instance, St. Paul is made to say (2 Cor. viii. 11), 
 
 ' Now therefore, perform ye the doing of it.' But nevertheless, 
 
 to work an exercise is not a pleonasm : it means to perform 
 
 a penal act: 'that they may worke all exercise on thee,' 
 
 therefore means, 'that they may perform on thee all the 
 
 penalties I have allotted them.' Unhappily in setting up the 
 
 text of the Tempest in 1622, the ' th ' of 'forth' got slightly 
 
 dislocated, so as to be too near the following word 'at.' 
 
 Accordingly, the lines stand there 
 
 Urchins 
 Shall for that vast of night, that they may worke 
 All exercise on thee.
 
 TJic Still Lion. 121 
 
 Then came the editors who, seeing in the line in question 
 an intimation of the awfully indefinite duration of tlie night 
 during which the urchins are permitted to exercise the infernal 
 arts on Caliban — as if, forsooth, their privilege were limited 
 to a single night, and to one which was longer than any 
 other — advanced the limitary comma from 'night' to 'worke.' 
 Then came Thomas Warton, who, requiring the line for the 
 illustration of one in Milton, gave it in a note thus : 
 
 Urchins 
 Shall for that want of night that they may work ; 
 
 thereby grafifing one misprint on another. * 
 
 2. In Timon of Athens, i. i, Shakespeare undoubtedly wrote. 
 
 Our poesie is as a gumme which oozes 
 From whence 'tis nourisht. 
 
 But in the edition of 1623 the passage was, as we have seen, 
 
 thus misprinted, 
 
 Our Poesie is as a Gowne which uses 
 From whence 'tis nourisht. 
 
 and Tieck, who set himself up as a critic on Shakespeare and 
 other English Dramatists, defended the nonsense, under the 
 impression, perhaps, that Shakespeare meant to compare poetry 
 to a worn-out robe ! Unhappy passage ! In a letter on 
 ' The influences of Newspapers on Education,' written by Mr. 
 Blanchard Jerrold, in the Daily News, he had intended to 
 
 * In the German edition of The Still Lion \.\\e line appears with a new 
 misprint, 
 
 Shall forth at %'ast of night, that they make worke. See ante, p. 39. 
 
 R
 
 122 The Still Lion. 
 
 quote the amended version ; but to his horror it appeared in 
 a totally new form, 
 
 Our poesy is as a queen that dozeth ; 
 
 and it now remains for some conceited foreigner of the future 
 to contend that the bard meant to signalize the drowsiness of 
 our poetry, by comparing it to a queen, who, despite the calls 
 of her high station, falls asleep on her throne ! 
 
 Let us now consider three selected passages, given in both 
 the quarto and folio editions of Hamlet. These will serve 
 as samples (additional to those on p. in) of the state of the 
 old text, and of the value of having more than one version 
 of a passage which has suffered from the blunder of copyist or 
 printer. In the first, the folio corrects the error of the quarto : 
 in the second, the quarto corrects the error of the folio : in 
 the third, the folio deserts us ; no quarto-reading can, in this 
 case, be allowed as the correction of another ; and conjecture 
 has not arrived at any satisfactory result. 
 
 I. In Hamlet, iv. 7, as given in the quartos of 1604 and 
 1605, we have, 
 
 so that my arrowes 
 Too slightly tymberd for so loued Arm'd, 
 Would have reuerted to my bowe againe, 
 But not where I haue [had] aym'd them. 
 
 The only variation in the words ' loued Arm'd ' given by the 
 early quartos is, that two read ' loued armes,' and one reads 
 ' loved armes. ' 
 
 Such a crux as that would have been ' larks ' or * nuts ' 
 to the critical taste. Happily the folio 1623 gives us the true
 
 The Siill Lion. 12:; 
 
 lection, viz., lotid a IVinde. So Ascham, in his Toxophilus, 
 book ii. (Arber's Reprint, p. 150-1), says, ' The greatest enemy 
 of Shootyng is the winde and wether, &c. Weak bowes, and 
 lyght shaftes can not stande in a rough wynde.' 
 
 2. If, on the other hand, we had but the first foho, we 
 should be called upon to explaiii or amend the following passage 
 in Hamlet : 
 
 To his good Friends, thus wide He ope my Armes: 
 And like the kinde Life-rend'ring Politician, 
 Repast them with my blood. 
 
 Such a crux as ' Life-rend'ring Politician ' would have been 
 
 as appetising and entertaining as the last ; and the game would 
 
 naturally have been quickened by the fact, that when Hamlet 
 
 was first indited Politician, occurring once, however, in this 
 
 play ('the Pate of a Politician,' iv. i), was an insolens verbum, 
 
 which we now believe to have been first used by George 
 
 Puttenham in 1589, if he were the author (which he probably 
 
 was) of The Arte of Ejiglish Poesie. The misprint is an unusual 
 
 expansion of the original word. It is most unlikely that Pelican 
 
 (the word of the quarto editions) was (as some have asserted) a 
 
 difficulty with the old compositor : on the contrary, we may be 
 
 pretty sure that he set up Polician, and that a pedantic ' reader ' 
 
 of the house improved upon this, converting it into Politician. 
 
 3. Now for a case in which the old copies concur to 
 
 leave us at the mercy of conjecture. In the same quarto 
 
 editions of Hamlet we read. 
 
 For use almost can change the stamp of nature, 
 And either the devill, or throwe him out 
 With wonderous potency.
 
 124 The Still Lion. 
 
 Unhappily this passage, defective by one word (probably a 
 
 verb following on 'either' and governing 'the devill'), is not 
 
 in the first quarto, nor yet in any of the early folio editions. 
 
 The defect is so miserably supplied by the dateless quarto 
 
 (1607) that the modern editor is driven to the conclusion 
 
 that the word there given is a mere conjecture, and that the 
 
 defect must be anew conjecturally supplied. This quarto 
 
 reads : — 
 
 For use almost can change the stamp of nature, 
 And maister the devill, or throwe him out 
 With wonderous potency. 
 
 Here 'maister' is not only bad on the score of rhythm, 
 but still leaves the line short. Not improbably it was in- 
 tended to supply the word for which ' either ' was conceived 
 to be a misprint. Pope and Capell followed this lead, and 
 read ' And master even the devil — ' But all other editors have 
 wisely retained 'either': viz., 'And either curb the devil' — 
 Malone \ ' And either quell the devil ' — Singer : while the 
 late Mr. Bolton Corney proposed to read, 'And either aid the 
 devil ' — and Mr. Cartvvright, ' And either lay the devil.' A 
 correspondent of Notes and Queries (3rd S. x. 426) signing 
 himself F., proposed, 'And either house the devil'; conceiving 
 (like Mr. Corney) that the missing word should be antithetical 
 to throio out, and not perceiving that no very ' wondrous 
 potency ' would be required to house a demon, who was 
 already by nature in possession ! The Cambridge editors 
 favour couch and lodge; both words being found in Harsnet's 
 Declaration, c. 1 2, the former in the sense of subdue, the latter in
 
 The Still Lion. 125 
 
 the sense of confine. (Clarendon Press Edition of Hanilci, p. 
 
 189-190.) Two other conjectures privately communicated to 
 
 us deserve mention. Our valued friend, Professor Sylvester, 
 
 proposed to read, 'And €\\\\tx mask the devil' — conceiving that 
 
 'maister' might be a misprint for the true word. In this course 
 
 he is somewhat countenanced by a passage occurring in a prior 
 
 speech of Polonius (iii. i) : 
 
 We are oft to blame in this, — 
 'Tis too much proved, that with devotion's visage. 
 And pious action, we do sugar o'er 
 The devil himself. 
 
 Another valued friend, Mr. C. J. Monro, half-seriously 
 suggested, ' And entertain the devil ' — conceiving that ' either ' 
 might be a press error for entertain. All other conjectures 
 which I have seen are so utterly imbecile, that I will spare 
 their proposers the ordeal of criticism. It is not easy to 
 discover why the seven verbs, curb, quell, lay, aid, house, couch, 
 and lodge should find more favour than a score of others, 
 apparently as well suited to the sense and measure of the line 
 as any of those. How soon are the resources of the con- 
 jectural critics exhausted ! how meagre is the evidence adduced 
 in favour of any single conjecture ! Yet the requirements of 
 the passage are by no means severe, nor are the means for 
 complying with them either narrow or recherche. It is rather an 
 embarras des richcsses that hinders ours decision. To call over a 
 few of the candidates for admission into the text : curb suggests 
 rein, ntle, thrall, bind, chain, &c. ; quell, lay, and couch suggest 
 charm, worst, quench, foil, balk, cross, thwart, daunt, shame, cow.
 
 126 The Still Lion. 
 
 tame, &c. ; while aid suggests fire, rouse, stir, serve, feed, &c. 
 Besides which there are many dissyllables that would answer 
 the purposes of sense and measure, as abate, abase, &c. And 
 why not read, 'And over-maister the devil' — seeing that the 
 word overmaster occurs in a former scene of this play? We 
 are not now attempting the settlement of this question, but 
 merely pointing out what a wealth of suggestion has been 
 ignored by the self-complacent critics w^ho have so feebly 
 attempted it. But as a preliminary to its setdement, w^e venture 
 to call attention to the evident requirements of the passage. 
 * The stamp of nature ' is not new to us in this connection, 
 nor in this play; we have had it twice in the second ghost- 
 scene, viz., the ' vicious mole of nature,' and ' the stamp of one 
 defect.' Now Hamlet would say, ' Use almost can change, or 
 convert, this stamp of nature': so that an antithesis is not only 
 not required, but is impertinent. Use, he would say, can either 
 subdue 'habit's devil,' by following out his own prescription 
 of gradual tveaning from et.'il, or (if the worst come to the 
 worst and revolution be necessary) cast him out: and either 
 of these can such use, or change of habit, effect 'with wondrous 
 potency.' The key-note of the whole passage is ' Reformation, 
 by gradually subduing evil habits'; and so far from Hamlet's 
 advice, ' assume a virtue if you have it not,' being (as Charles 
 Knight understood it) a recommendation of hypocrisy, ' the 
 homage paid by vice to virtue,' it is given solely with the view 
 of facilitating inward amendment, and is therefore honest and 
 sincere. Very similar advice was given by Lewis Vives in a 
 book which, not improbably, may have been Shakespeare's
 
 The Still Lion. 127 
 
 closet-companion, viz., The Introdiidion to Wysedovi : Englished 
 by [Sir] Richarde Morysine : 1540, Sig. B ii. 
 
 ' Let every man desyre uprighte thinges, and flee the crooked : 
 chose the good, and refuse the evyll, this use and aistome 
 shall toiinie iccll doi?ige almost into nature, and so worke, 
 that none, but suche as are compelled, and suche as are 
 in stryfe, found the weaker, shall be brought to do evyll.' 
 
 Roger Ascham, too, in his Toxophilus, 1545, book ii. (Arber's 
 Reprint, p. 141), has the same proposition in somewhat different 
 words .... 
 
 ' And in stede of the fervent desyre, which provoketh a 
 chylde to be better than hys felowe, lette a man be as 
 muche stirred up with shamefastnes to be worse than all 
 other. ***** And hereby you may se that 
 that is true whiche Cicero sayeth, that a man by use, 
 may be broughte to a netve naturel 
 
 This, in fact, is exactly what is meant in Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds' Fifteenth Discourse, where we are recommended 'to 
 feign a relish till we find a relish come, and feel that what 
 began in fiction terminates in reality': and Sir Walter Scott, in 
 the Bride of Latninermoor, chapter vi., observes, ' that wlien a 
 man commences by acting a character, he frequently ends by 
 adopting it in good earnest.' 
 
 The missing word, then, must at least import the subduing 
 of the devil of habit. In the first quarto we have the expression, 
 
 'And win [/. c, wean] yourself by little as you may,'
 
 128 The Still Lion. 
 
 from the sin to which you [the queen] have habituated yourself. 
 Now, that weaning by Utile and little, or gradually weaning the 
 will and affections from the customary sin, ' recurring and 
 suggesting still,' is just what the missing word, were it recovered, 
 would assuredly be found to express or to imply. Lay and 
 sha^ne are equally accei^table in sense, and both afford a per- 
 fect rhythm. Perhaps shame is the finer reading of the two. 
 At the same time, it must be owned, that Hamlet's prescription 
 is calculated to do but little for the sinner : at best, we fear, 
 to 'skin and film the ulcerous place.' Kant well says : 
 
 * People usually set about this matter [/. e., the reformation 
 of character] otherwise, fighting against particular vices, 
 and leaving the common root whence they sprout un- 
 touched. And yet mankind * * * is just so much 
 the more readily awakened to a profounder reverence 
 for duty, the more he is taught to exclude therefrom all 
 foreign motives that self-love might foist into the maxims 
 of conduct.' 
 
 We can hardly say that conjecture has yet determined the 
 best reading here ; though it cannot be said that sufficient indi- 
 cations are wanting for its guidance. Unfortunately it is in 
 the very nature of the case, that some doubt should continue 
 to vex this passage, after conjecture has done its work. 
 
 Let us take a more striking case than this: a passage 'in 
 which there is no hiatus : merely a misprint ; which has never- 
 theless all the features of incurable corruption. We refer to 
 that famous Rope-scarre which occurs at the opening of the
 
 The Still Lion. 129 
 
 fifth act of Much Ado about Nothing. Leonato, refusing the 
 proffered consolations of his brother, says, 
 
 Bring me a father that so lov'd his childe, 
 Whose joy of her is overwhehn'd lil-ce mine, 
 And bid him speake of patience. 
 
 Ritson reads the last line, 
 
 And bid him speake to ine of patience, 
 
 and the late Mr. Barron Field independently suggested the 
 same unnecessary, if not impertinent, interpolation. Leonato 
 continues, after four lines which we omit here, 
 
 If such a one will smile and stroke his beard. 
 
 And sorrow, wagge, crie hem, when he should grone. 
 
 Patch grief with proverbs, make misfortune drunke, 
 
 With candle-wasters : bring him yet to me, 
 
 And I of him will gather patience: 
 
 But there is no such man, &c. (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 The line, 'And I of him will gather patience,' doubtless 
 suggested the conjecture of Ritson and Barron Field. The 
 argument is this : ' Find me a man who has suffered my 
 calamity ; -and if he will speak of patience, I, on my part, will 
 gather patience of him.' In the passage lately quoted there 
 are two difficulties. The first was plausibly bridged over by 
 Steevens by simply transposing ' And ' and ' crie,' ' wagge ' 
 meaning, according to this interpretation, as it does in so many 
 other places, budge. The objection to this is, that it hardly 
 comports with the bland and philosophic character of the person 
 whom Leonatus invests with his own wrongs and sorrows. The 
 second difficulty concerns the obsolete word * candle-wasters.' 
 
 s
 
 I30 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 Here, then, is a passage which demands both emendation and 
 exposition : but in order to deal with it successfully, we must 
 first cope with the second difficulty. Of all the commentators, 
 Zachary Jackson alone proposed an emendation for ' candle- 
 wasters': he conjectured caudle-waters ! What it means is hard 
 to say ; for no such word is known to have ever existed, though 
 caudle, a sort of posset, is familiar enough. We remember that 
 Eden Warwick (/. e., the late Mr. George Jabet, the accom- 
 plished editor of The Poefs Fleasaunce, 1847) proposed in 
 JVotes and Queries to substitute for Hamlet's pajock or paiocke 
 the strange word patokie, a word he had coined expressly for the 
 occasion, as a possible derivative of patacco or patoikoi. We 
 need not pause to consider the merit or demerit of such 
 singular suggestions, both being non-suited for something much 
 worse than insolentia. But, regarding ' candle-wasters ' as a 
 genuine word, what was its meaning % Mr. Staunton ( Ed. vol. 
 i., p. 730) says that it means 'Bacchanals, revellers.' Mr. Dyce 
 follows suit. I venture to think that these editors have gone 
 beyond the voucher of their authorities. We do not believe that 
 a single example can be adduced of candle-waster in that sense. 
 It is to us passing strange that the word ' drunk ' in this 
 passage should have been uniformly interpreted in its literal 
 sense, and ' candle-wasters ' understood to mean drunkards, 
 who spend the night in reveUing. There are few things more 
 painfully absurd than the attempt to literalize a metaphor. 
 Surely Shakespeare never meant Leonato to deny the possibility 
 of drowning trouble in drink; for that were the easiest as it 
 is the ordinary resource of a vulgar man in trouble. Nanty
 
 The Still Lion. i \\ 
 
 J 
 
 Ewart, in Rcdgauntlct, is such a man. Drunkenness was his 
 resource from the misery of haunting memories. * Here is 
 no lack of my best friend,' said Ewart, on taking out his 
 flask, after awakening an old sorrow, the remembrance of 
 which was too painful to be borne with patience. Whatever, 
 then, was meant by ' making misfortune drunk with candle- 
 wasters,' it must have been some achievement which in Leonato's 
 circumstances was very difficult of performance; so difficult 
 that he pronounced it impossible. Now, Whalley succeeded 
 in unearthing two examples of the use of candle-waster and 
 lamp-waster^ and one of candle-wasting, which throw consider- 
 able light on this passage; but which, from their rebutting the 
 ordinary interpretation, are usually suppressed by the editors. 
 Here they are : 
 
 Heart, was there ever so prosperous an invention thus unhickily prevented 
 and spoiled by a whoreson book-worm or ca)idle-wasfer? 
 
 Ben Johnson : Cynthia's Revtils, ill. 2. 
 
 He should more catch your delicate court-ear, than all your head- 
 scratchers, thumb-biters, tamp-ivasters of them all. 
 
 Shakerley Marmion : T/ie Antiquary, 1641, 4to. 
 
 I which have known you better and more inwardly than a thousand of 
 these candle-wasting book-worms. 
 
 The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles : Erected in English, as near the 
 first Italian modell and platforme, as the unskilful! hand of an igno- 
 rant Architect could devise. 1600, sm. 4to. Sig. H. 
 
 From these extracts we gather that a candle-waster is a 
 book-worm ; literally, a consumer of 'the midnight oil,' a noc- 
 turnal student; and the term (like 'Grub-street' of a century 
 later) was always applied contemptuously, and the work of such
 
 132 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 a writer was said, after the Latin phrase, to smell of the lamp* 
 Not improbably the term meant also a lucubration. The con- 
 clusion is, that to make 7nisfortune drunk tuith candle-wasters, is 
 to drown one's troubles in study ; and what fitter pendant could 
 be found to the preceding phrase to 'patch grief with proverbs'1 
 So far, then, all is clear and indisputable. We may now 
 recur to the former part of Leonato's speech, in which the real 
 crux lies: 
 
 If such a one will smile and stroke his beard, 
 
 And sorrow, wagge, crie hem, when he should grone, &c. 
 
 To stroke the beard and cry hem ! (what the French call faire 
 le serieux) is the very picture of a sententious pedant who 
 would talk down or scold down the first gush of natural feeling, 
 whether of grief or of rage. Such was Achilles' epitome of 
 Nestor in Troilus-and Cressida, i. 3, where that chief is described 
 as amusing himself with Patroclus' mimicry of the Greeks : 
 
 Now play me Nestor; hem and stroke thy beard ! 
 
 And if any doubt still remained that Shakespeare, by the ex- 
 pression ' stroke his beard,' meant to describe a philosophic 
 character, the following, from a comedy of the time, would 
 remove it: viz., 
 
 * Lucernam olet. Again, Oleum perdere is to lose one's labour in 
 writing, to be an oil-waster. Dryden, in his Preface to Troilus and Cressida, 
 1679, 8vo, falls foul of Shakespeare for catachresis ; and in the same breath 
 speaks of certain dramas smelling of the buskin ! As buskins are not 
 remarkable for their offensive odour, the phrase is a worse catachresis than 
 is to be found in Sliakespeare. By the way, ' drunk with candle-wasting,' 
 would be a more natural expression.
 
 The Still Lion. 133 
 
 Yes, thou shah now see me stroke my beard, and speake sentenliously. 
 
 Chapman's !\Iay Day, ii. I. 
 
 It seems to follow, then, that the words, 'And sorrow wagge,' 
 must be an error for some phrase expressive of choking, smoth- 
 ering, or suppressing sorrow. Hence we venture to think, that, 
 supposing there has been no dislocation of the text, Tyrwhitt's 
 conjecture of gagge for ' wagge ' at least preserves the conti- 
 nuity of the thought, and the integrity of the image, as well as 
 the ductus literanim. Such a metaphor, too, is not more extra- 
 ordinary than Shakespeare's use of strangle in several passages: 
 
 e.g-, 
 
 Strangle such thoughts in thee. — The Wintei's Tale, iv. 3. 
 
 To attempt to settle the question definitely in favour of this or 
 that conjecture would at present be mere waste of time. The 
 interpretation we have given to the purport of the passage 
 cannot, we are assured, be successfully assailed ; and that may 
 help the critic to a solution of the textual difficulty. 
 
 Mr. Staunton, who found, as we have said, a bacchanial 
 allusion in the phrase, to viake misfortune drunk with candle- 
 wasters, persuaded himself that the former part of the speech 
 bore out that view. He contended that to ' cry hem ' here 
 means, to sing the burden of a roystering song.* To all which 
 
 * Possibly ' Hem, boys ! ' in 2 Henry IV. , iii. 2, is part of such a refrain. 
 But fo hem also meant to feign indifference : e. g., 
 
 Ros. I could shake them off my coat ; these burs are in my heart. 
 
 Cel. Hem them away. 
 
 Ros. I would try ; if I could cry hetJi, and have him. 
 
 As You Like It, i. 3.
 
 134 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 we say, (i) that no example of either the one or the other 
 phrase, employed in those senses has ever been adduced; (2) 
 that if a dozen examples in point were found, the case would 
 be in no wise mended; for the interpretation in question is 
 logically inconsistent with the context. The counsel Leonato 
 is rejecting, is that he should seek to restrain and assuage his 
 grief, rather than indulge it. To reply, as we contend he is 
 intended to do, ' Show me a man who has my weight of sorrow 
 and wrong, and is yet an example of stoical or cheerful endur- 
 ance, and I will follow your counsel,' is logical and ad rem : 
 but to reply, ' Show me a man who, having as great a sorrow 
 or wrong as I have, drowns the remembrance of it in drunken 
 revelry,' &c., would be wholly irrelevant : and this for four 
 reasons, which are here set forth at length : 
 
 i. Because it would imply that Antonio had been recom- 
 mending drunkenness to his brother, as an infallible specific 
 for grief: for it would make Leonato's words imply that if a 
 man could be produced who had succeeded in that feat, he 
 would accede to his brother's suggestion, and make such a 
 man his model : only ' patience ' would be an outstanding 
 difficulty. 
 
 ii. Because it would make Leonato say, ' Show me a man 
 who has so little patience and self-control as to rush to the 
 tap-room for the solace of his troubles, and I will make him 
 my model, and gather patience of him,' which would be an 
 impossible task. 
 
 iii. Because it would make him assert that there is no such 
 man : that no man could be found who, having Leonato's
 
 TJie Still Lion. 135 
 
 sorrow or wrong, could succeed in forgetting it in drinking- 
 bouts : whereas drink is, as we have seen, the common resource 
 of common men in trouble. 
 
 iv. Because it would confound the intellectual man with 
 him who lacks intellect, industry, and moral feeling. As Mrs. 
 Beecher-Stowe so well puts it in Dred (chap, x.), ' Every one 
 [who is 'uncomfortable and gloomy'] naturally inchnes towards 
 some source of consolation. He who is intellectual reads and 
 studies ; he who is industrious flies to business; he who is affec- 
 tionate seeks friends ; he who is pious, religion ; but he who is 
 none of these — what has he hut his whiskey V It is thus that 
 the common sense of our time throws light upon the dark or 
 doubtful passages in Shakespeare. But this particular crux is, 
 in our opinion, one of the least doubtful in drift., though it 
 has been so persistently perverted by commentators of the 
 hteralizing school. 
 
 We may here cite a few other instances of the supreme 
 value of modern illustration, as an aid to emendation and 
 interpretation (we gave several at pp. 82, 98, 127 and 131). We 
 have already noted the plausibility of bed as an emendation of 
 ' bone ' in that famous speech of Alcibiades, which Mr. Dyce 
 printed without an attempt to defend or explain it. Addressing 
 the doting senators (behind their backs), the general exclaims. 
 
 Now the Gods keepe you old enough, 
 
 That you may live 
 
 Onely in bone, that none may looke on you. 
 
 T/Hion, iii. 5. (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 That the one in ' bone ' was caught by the compositor from
 
 136 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 the one in ' onely,' is probable, regard being had to the prox- 
 imity of ' none.' Surely, their fitting place was bed, where the 
 ailments of their advanced age might receive all needful minis- 
 trations, and where they would also be safe from bringing 
 disgrace on the government of Athens. In this reading we 
 are supported by a passage in Mr. George Dawson's address to 
 his congregation, on the occasion of celebrating the twenty-fifth 
 anniversary of ' The Church of the Saviour ' at Birmingham, 
 delivered there on August 5, 1872. He said, in reference to 
 his own late illness, 
 
 ' To be patient with a man who has always something the 
 matter with him is one of the grandest kinds of patience. 
 People always ailing are tiresome, there is no denying 
 it. I have a great dread of becoming an invalid. I have 
 a great respect for invalids in bed — out of sight.'' 
 
 i. e., 'Only in bed, that none may look on [them].' Can a 
 more light-giving illustration be conceived ? 
 
 Then, apart from emendation, how 'express and admirable' 
 is the following from a modem novelist, now deceased, as deter- 
 mining the sense of an obscure phrase in Hamlet, i. i. Bernardo 
 
 asks, 
 
 'What, is Horatio there?' 
 
 To which Horatio replies, 
 
 'A piece of him.' 
 
 The late Charles Knight speaks of this as Horatio's ' familiar 
 pleasantry': but what is its meaning? The simple answer is — 
 Horatio calls his hand, as he touches that of the soldier— a
 
 The Still Lion. 137 
 
 piece of himself, because he could not be distinctly seen in 
 the dark shade of the battlement: /. e., a piece, as implying 
 that the rest was there, though not revealed to Hamlet's sense 
 at once. Now all this is suggested by a passage in the 
 penultimate chapter of Jane Eyre. She has come upon the 
 blind Rochester, and placed her hand in his : 
 
 ' Her very fingers,' he cried, ' her small, slight fingers ! If 
 so, there must be j/iore of her.'' 
 
 Of course, neither Charlotte Bronte nor Mr. George Dawson 
 had the faintest notion of illustrating Shakespeare, when these 
 things were uttered. If either of them had, some of the force 
 of the illustration would be lost. As it is, we here see the 
 power of common sense, even in this day, to do the great 
 playwright yeoman's service. 
 
 Just so does a fine passage in Mr. Caird's sermon, entitled 
 Religion iti Cotntnon Life, p. 24, afford a guiding light for all who 
 care to determine the exact thought which was in Shakespeare's 
 mind when he wrote that passage in the Tempest, iii. i, which 
 is so corruptly given in the folio 1623 : 
 
 I forget ; 
 But these sweet thoughts, doe even refresh my labours, 
 Most busie lest, when I doe it. 
 
 Mr, Caird says, 
 
 ' The thought of all this may dwell, a latent joy, a hidden 
 motive, deep down in his heart of hearts, may come rushing 
 in, a sweet solace, at every pause of exertion, and act like a 
 
 T
 
 138 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 secret oil to smooth the wheels of labour.' Certainly Shakespeare 
 meant to say that the sweet thoughts 7vell up in the pauses of 
 exertion. Had not Dr. Wellesley overlooked this, he would 
 not have applied 'most' to 'refresh,' and 'busy' to Ferdinand 
 {Stray Notes, 1865, p. 2), making him say that his sweet thoughts 
 refresh him by their presence during his labours. We would 
 adopt Mr. Bullock's reading, busiliest for ' busie lest,' and regu- 
 late the passage thus : 
 
 I forget [/. e., I am forgetting my injunction], 
 But these sweet thoughts doe even refresh my labours 
 Most busiliest when 1 doe it. f/. e., do forget it.] 
 
 Busiliest may have been written busielest (we note that easiliest 
 is printed easilest in Cynibeline, iv. 2, fo. 1623): and if so the 
 only error in the folio is a slight dislocation in that word. 
 We observe, too, that this play presents several instances of 
 comparatives so formed from adverbs: e. g., 
 
 You have taken it wiselier than I meant you should. — Tempest, iii, 2. 
 
 * * * and shall not myself 
 
 * * * be kindlier moved than thou art? — Ibid., v. I. 
 
 But here, as in the crux from Much Ado about Nothing, the 
 question does not admit of a final decision. In such, and 
 the like, we must be content to suspend our judgment, and 
 exercise patience. 
 
 Once more, in that sublime passage in the Tempest, iv. i, 
 on the instability of the sensible universe, three or four 
 injurious and impertinent alterations have been unsuccess-
 
 The Still Lion. 139 
 
 fully attempted: as zvrack and track for 'rack': brittle for 
 ' little 'j &c. : and Warburton's gloss on a misprint of the 
 second folio (viz., t/iair for their, as 'this' appeared in 1632). 
 Besides which M. Frangois V. Hugo renders the phrase 'all 
 which it inherit' (where 'it' is the objective to 'inherit') tout ce 
 quit co?itient, thus converting 'inherit' into inherits. Meanwhile 
 it is absolutely certain that the entire passage is absolutely 
 fleckless and flawless, as it stands in the first foHo. Hardly 
 in all Shakespeare can two or three successive lines be found 
 more touchingly beautiful than these (we are disposed to accept 
 Steevens' alteration of ' on ' into of) : 
 
 We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep. 
 
 To seize the central or leading notion here is not difficult. 
 Jean Paul — a man worthy to be Shakespeare's unconscious 
 interpreter — was certainly not thinking of this fine passage 
 when he wrote the following in Flower, Fruit, and Thorn-pieces, 
 chapter xv. : which I quote from Mr. E. H. Noel's admirable 
 version. 
 
 'And he thought of the clouds, the cold and the night, 
 that reigned around the poles of life — the birth and deatli 
 of man — as round the poles of the earth.' 
 
 What does this mean, but that our life is rounded by the sleep 
 of birth and death: as if they were its poles? And ours is but 
 a little life : but little is included between those poles, so little,
 
 140 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 that we thank God that the later pole is but a sleep. The 
 accomplished author of Lorna Doom thus freely (and legiti- 
 mately) employs Shakespeare's image : only there is one word 
 which one might wish expunged : viz., ' off ' before ' of.' 
 
 ' In the farthest and darkest nook overgrown with grass, 
 and overhung by a weeping tree, a little bank of earth 
 betokened the 7'oiinding off of a hapless life.^ — Lorna 
 Doofie, chap. Ivii. 
 
 In a multitude of cases, however, the correction of the text 
 is certain ; and in some, where the remedy is still somewhat 
 doubtful, a particular emendation which has met with all but 
 universal acceptance by the editors has been now and then 
 pronounced too good for the place ! It is an exceptional 
 honour for the conjectural critic to be esteemed almost equal 
 to his author. Such was the approbation bestowed by Dr. 
 Johnson on Warburton for his emendation of God, vice ' good,' 
 in ILa/nlct, ii. 2: 'being a good kissing carrion'; but surely 
 approbation was never so extravagant as in this opinion ; for, 
 as Mr. Corson points out, 'a good kissing carrion' is simply 
 a carrion that is good for kissing ! The highest honour, how- 
 ever, attainable by the author of an emendation was actually 
 attained by Theobald, viz., that of being confounded with his 
 author, and that by no ordinary critic. In our opinion he fully 
 deserved that honour, and s\.2,uds facile princeps among the host 
 of conjectural critics. Holding that opinion, we indignantly 
 repel Dr. Johnson's censure on Theobald; whom he calls ' a 
 man of narrow comprehension and small acquisitions, with no
 
 The Still Lion. 141 
 
 native and intrinsic splendour of genius, with little of the arti- 
 ficial light of learning, but zealous for minute accuracy, and 
 not negligent in pursuing it.' But, as if grudging Theobald 
 this small concession, he adds that Theobald was weak and 
 ignorant,' ' mean and faithless,' ' petulant and ostentatious.' 
 De Quincey, echoing Johnson, calls Theobald 'painstaking but 
 dull' {Works, Black, vol. vi. p. 126, note); and yet, on another 
 occasion, when De Quincey is insisting on ' the gratitude of 
 our veneration for Shakespeare,' he actually adduces, as a re- 
 markable display of Shakespeare's dramatic art, the famous 
 vi^ords, ' and a babied of green fields,' from Mrs. Quickly's 
 description of Falstaff's death, in Henry F., ii. 3. Those words, 
 he thinks, 'must have been read by many a thousand with tears 
 and smiles at the same instant'; ' I mean,' he adds, 'connecting 
 them with a previous knowledge of Falstaff and of Mrs. Quickly.' 
 {Works, Black, vol. xiii. p. 119.) Just so: that is precisely 
 where lies the marvel of this piece of work, which we owe to 
 Theobald rather than to Shakespeare. We are far from denying 
 that those words are what Shakespeare wrote : indeed it is 
 the peculiar merit of that emendation that most probably it 
 exactly restores the original work of the bard : but Theobald 
 had to work upon the corrupt text, 'and a Table of greene 
 fields,' which seems to promise so little poetry or knowledge 
 of human nature, that one critic is satisfied that they are a 
 stage direction, incorporated, by mistake, with the text of Mrs. 
 Quickly's speech ; another supposes the reference to be to a 
 pen lying on a table-book of green fell ; while Mr. Collier's 
 pseudo-old Corrector alters the words into ' on a table of
 
 142 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 green frieze.'* Hopeless indeed must the prosaic corruption 
 appear to most men — to all who have not caught the infection 
 of Shakespeare's genius, and have not a like knowledge of 
 human nature. Theobald however, proved himself to have 
 had both. He knew precisely how Falstaff would talk, when 
 he lay picking the bed-clothes, and smiling on his fingers' ends ; 
 and he knew exactly what part of his babbling talk would be 
 remembered and repeated by IMrs. Quickly. Moreover, he 
 had faith in Shakespeare, and believed that he would reproduce 
 all this ; and he had moreover the necessary knowledge of 
 Elizabethan orthography, such as this, that babbled was ordi- 
 narily spelt babied. Thus was he led to an emendation which 
 has covered Shakespeare with glory and been identified with his 
 text. (^Q.t Notes and Queries, ist S. viii. 314, for an eloquent 
 commentary on this scene, written in the vein of Dr. John 
 Brown; and also The Granutiar of Assent, pp. 264 — 270, 
 where Dr. Newman takes the corrupt passage of the folio, with 
 its various emendations^ as the concrete example of complex 
 inference.) 
 
 No amount of sagacity or ingenuity in the critic can com- 
 pensate the want of appropriate learning and scholarship. In 
 some instances, indeed, if he have sagacity to catch the hidden 
 sense of a corrupt passage, and ingenuity in conjecture, a great 
 step may be made towards its restoration. But success in any 
 case presupposes the appropriate knowledge. Dr. E. A. Abbott's 
 elaborate but still imperfect Shakespearian Grammar wall at 
 
 * He must have been reading Brewster's Optics, 1831, p. 296, where 
 the autlior proposes an observation, on 'a pen lying upon a green clotli.'
 
 TJie Still Lion. 143 
 
 least serve to testify to the fact that the grammar of Shakespeare 
 and his contemporaries is not at all that of our written tongue, 
 and Dyce's Glossary, and Dr. Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare- 
 Lexicon^ will afford abundant evidence of the fact that there 
 was a treasury of words open to an Elizabethan writer, which 
 are now obsolete, or else current in senses more or less 
 different from those which the words imported in the fourteenth 
 and fifteenth centuries. 
 
 For other aids to conjecture in the vindication or the 
 restoration of the text, one of the most valuable is the collation 
 of passages more or less parallel, occurring in Shakespeare's 
 plays and poems. For example : in AWs Well that Ends Well, 
 ii. 3, is an equivocal construction which has misled many an 
 editor. Lafeu says. 
 
 They say miracles are past, and we have our Philosophical! persons, to 
 make moderne and familiar things supernaturall and causelesse. (Fo. 1623.) 
 
 Some editors insert a comma after ' things,' so as to force the 
 construction into discord with what follows : 
 
 Hence is it, that we make trifles of terrours, ensconcing our selves into 
 seeming knowledge, when we should submit our selves to an unknowne 
 feare. 
 
 This ought to settle the matter for every one : but if any doubt 
 should linger over the phrase ' to make modern and familiar, 
 things supernatural and causeless,' the following parallel would 
 remove it : 
 
 Thou dost make possible, things not so \\q\^. — Winter'' s Tale, i. 2.
 
 144 1^^^^ Still Lion. 
 
 As here things not held possible are made so, so in the former 
 passage, things supernatural and causeless are made modern 
 and familiar. To take a far more difficult passage; in Timon 
 of Athens, iii. 3, Sempronius exclaims, 
 
 How ? Have they deny'de him ? 
 Has Ventidgius and Lucullus deny'de him, 
 And does he send to me ? Three ? Humh ? 
 It showes but little love, or judgment in him. 
 Must I be his last Refuge? His Friends (like Physitians) 
 Thrive, give him over : Must I take th' Cure upon me ? 
 
 The mention of Lucius, Lucullus, and Ventidius (explaining 
 the ejaculation 'Three') has been thought to favour Johnson's 
 conjecture, that 'thrive' is a misprint for thrice: q. d. these 
 three friends have one after another given him over, just as 
 physicians give over their patient. But a parallel passage in 
 the fourth act of the same play, seems to us quite sufficient 
 to justify the text as it stands in the folio. Timon addressing 
 the banditti, says, 
 
 Trust not the physitian, 
 His Antidotes are poyson, and he slayes 
 More then you Rob : Take wealth and lives together, &c. 
 
 i. e., he advises the robbers to take the physicians as their 
 examples, who thrive by their patients' wealth first, and leave 
 them to die of their drugs afterwards. We maintain, then, 
 that in the former place Sempronius is intended to say, that 
 Timon's friends act by him as physicians do by their patients, 
 thrive by him, and then give hi/n over. Till the singular force
 
 TJic Still Lion. 145 
 
 of this parallel can be explained away, it is an impertinence 
 to treat the suspected passage as corrupt. 
 
 Another case, where a passage ought to help us to restore 
 an undoubtedly corrupt text, is in Measure for Measure, ii. i, 
 Escalus says, 
 
 Well, heaven forgive him ; and forgive us all : 
 Some rise by sinne, and some by vertue fallt 
 Some run from brakes of Ice, and answer none, 
 And some condemned for a fault alone. 
 
 The second line being in italics in the folio 1623, we may 
 safely regard these three lines as the vestiges of an older play, 
 or as an interpolation by an inferior hand: but certainly they 
 must have had sense once ; while at present the line following 
 that in italics is quite innocent of meaning. Apparently ' and 
 answer none ' means, and are not called to account ; since in the 
 last line we are told that judgment is passed on others for 
 a single fault — a mere fault. Accordingly one would expect 
 to find the corrupt line signifying, that some run through a 
 course of increasing zvickedness, ivithout being called to account. 
 Now there is a passage in Cymbelifie, v. i, which is of good 
 service to us at this pinch. Posthumus says, addressing the 
 
 Gods, 
 
 But alacke, 
 You snatch some hence for little faults ; that's love 
 To have them fall no more : you some permit 
 To second illes with illes, each elder worse, &c. 
 
 We have here the same counter-assertions, but in the reverse 
 order : reading them thus, 
 
 u
 
 146 The Still Lion. 
 
 You some permit 
 To second illes with illes, each elder worse, 
 You snatch some hence for little faults ; 
 
 and comparing this with the passage from Measure for Measure, 
 we can hardly help beHeving that the Hne 
 
 Some run from brakes of Ice, and answer none, 
 
 ought to assert, that some nm through a long career of sin 
 going on ever from bad to worse, without being called to 
 account. Without some further datum it is hardly possible to 
 propose a satisfactory emendation of the passage. ' Ice ' can 
 hardly be an error for Vice, as Rowe suggested ; for it is from 
 the ' brakes,' or restraints, of virtue (of justzV^, in fact) that the 
 delinquents run. It has occurred to us that the text, as it 
 stands, may admit of an unstrained interpretation, which, how- 
 ever, would fix upon the suspected line a very awkward and 
 unusual metaphor. We have observed that Chapman affords 
 several examples of brake, used in a peculiar sense : 
 
 Or (like a stmmpet) learne to set my lookes 
 
 In an eternall Brake, or practise juggling, 
 
 To keepe my face still fast, my hart still loose; 
 
 Biissy D^Atnbois, i. i. 
 Evidently, these two phrases are equivalent : 
 
 To set my looks in an eternal brake 
 
 is just 
 
 to keep my face still fast : 
 
 and omitting ' eternal ' from the one, and * still ' from the other, 
 it follows that to set anything in a brake is to keep it fast and 
 fixed. The word, indeed, was technically used for a horse's 
 bit. But the phrase 'to set ?iiy looks in an eternal brake'
 
 TJic Still Lion. 147 
 
 means something more than restraint : brake is here a fixed 
 form. We have the word again, in Byron's Tragedie, iv. i. 
 We must quote the dialogue to understand the metaphor : 
 
 U Auvergnc. See, see, not one of them will cast a glaunce 
 
 At our eclipsed faces; 
 Byron. they keepe all 
 
 To cast in admiration on the King : 
 
 For from his face are all their faces tnoidded. 
 D\4h. But when a change comes ; we shall see them all 
 
 Chaiig''d into water, that will instantly 
 
 Give looke for looke, &c. 
 Byr. Is't not an easie losse to lose theyr lookes, 
 
 Whose hearts so soone are melted t 
 
 '9^ t(" ^p t^ fl* 
 
 See in how grave a Brake he sets his vizard: [/. e., visage] 
 Passion of nothing ; &c. 
 
 Here we have the people's faces set in brakes, which, as soon 
 as their hearts are me/ted, thaw too, and change into water. 
 What are these but ' brakes of Ice ' ? What do such faces, 
 but ' run from brakes of ice,' and turn to water which can take 
 any shape 1 Now Shakespeare, as we would read him, in the 
 crux in /Measure for Measure, is asserting (voce Eschyli) that 
 some, whose characters are set in brakes of ice, /. e., with no 
 shew of passion whatever, do run from them, under the heat 
 of lust, and are not called to account ('answer none') while 
 others are condemned for a single fault.* Be this as it may, it 
 
 * Cleopatra {Antony and Cleopatra, v. 2) had set herself in an ice- 
 brake, from which she would never more run, when she exclaimed : 
 
 My resolution's plact, and I have nothing 
 Of woman in me : now from head to foot 
 I'm marble constant ; &c.
 
 148 TJic Still Lion. 
 
 is remarkable that the passage in Cyinbeline should afford an 
 
 exact analogue to the line which in the folio is printed in 
 
 italics, 
 
 Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. 
 
 The line following ' each elder worse ' is probably corrupt, viz., 
 
 To make them dread it, to the doer's thrift ; 
 
 but we know well enough what it ought to ineaii, though we 
 have not yet discovered what it ought to say : it should mean, 
 that the Gods allow the sinner to run his course, that, in the 
 event, like the prodigal son, his stomach may rise against the 
 husks and wash, and that he may voluntarily return to a 
 cleanly life. Such rise by si?i, while those who fall by virtue 
 are snatched away that they may fall no more. It is, we think, 
 quite probable that by the aid of this analogy the line, if 
 corrupt, may be some day restored. At present it must remain 
 a case of doubtful interpretation or of inchoate restoration, like 
 the sorrozv-wagge and hisie-lest passages, which demands patient 
 consideration, not immediate decision. 
 
 Here, however, is one from Coriolanits, ii. i, which contains 
 two probable corruptions, the former admits of an easy and 
 seemingly a conclusive remedy. Let us premise that 'him' here 
 means Marcius, not the baby. 
 
 Your prattling Nurse 
 Into a rapture lets her Baby crie,^ 
 While she chats him. 
 
 ' Chats him ' is, we think, corrupt ; and many conjectures 
 have been made, all alike inadmissible. Perhaps ' claps him '
 
 The Still Lion. 149 
 
 is the best, but the metre halts for it. As to the other place, 
 Mr. Justice Blackstone ( Shakespeat-e Society's Papers, i. 99 ) 
 remarks, ' A Rapture is an odd effect of crying in Babies. 
 Dr. * * * would read it Rupture. Only Qu. If crying 
 ever produces this Effect % ' To which he adds, ' I have since 
 enquired, and am told that it is usual.' Probably most fathers 
 and mothers know that such is the fact. But Blackstone 
 might have learned it from a sixteenth century work, viz., 
 Phioravaiiti s Secrets, 1582, p. 5, where we read, 
 
 'To helpe yong Children of the Rupture. 
 
 The Rupture is caused two waies, the one through weaknesse 
 of the place, and the other through much criyng.' 
 
 This emendation was independently proposed by two other 
 critics (see the Cambridge Edition of Shakespeare, vi. 316): 
 and it seems as good as an emendation can be; yet it has never 
 been adopted, because it was conceived that the word in the 
 text admitted of explanation and defense. Certainly ' rapture ' 
 is just seizure: cf. Chapman's Iliad, xxii. (Taylor's ed. ii. ; 
 192); and Pericles, ii. i, where 'rupture' is, as was pointed out 
 by Dr. Sewell, an error of the press for 7-apture: 
 
 And spite of all the nipture of the sea, 
 This jewel holds his biding on my arm. 
 
 Mr. J. P. Collier {Fa?-ther Particulars, 1839, p. 41) quotes 
 the parallel passage from the novel on which Shakespeare's 
 play was founded : the hero says he got to land 'with a jewell 
 whom all the raptures of the sea could not bereave from 
 his arme.' But there seems no sufficient authority for the
 
 150 TJie Still Lion. 
 
 employment of 7-aptu7-e in the sense oifit or convulsion: and that 
 being so, we adhere to Blackstone's emendation, and beheve 
 that just as rapture in Pericles was misprinted rupture, so 
 rupture in Coriolanus was misprinted rapture. At the same 
 time we must bear in mind that Steevens adduced, in support 
 of the old text, the following quotation, which at least must 
 'give us pause ': 
 
 ' Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you do not 
 take heed.' — The Hospitall f&r London Follies, 1602. 
 
 We conclude this essay with a restoration which is not due 
 to conjectural ingenuity, but to the contemporary authority of 
 Ben Jonson. According to him, Shakespeare, in his Julius 
 Ccesar, iii. i , wrote as follows : 
 
 Casar. Thy brother by decree is banished : 
 
 If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him, 
 I spurn thee Hke a cur out of my way. 
 
 Metellus. Caesar, thou dost me wrong, 
 
 CcEsar. Cassar did never wrong but with just cause, 
 Nor without cause will he be satisfied. 
 
 Mdcllus. Is there no voice more worthy than my own, &c. ; 
 
 and somewhater later (iii. 2) we read. 
 
 Second Citizen. If thou consider rightly of the matter, 
 
 Caesar has had great wrong. 
 TJiird Citizen. Has he, master ? 
 
 But the folio, our only authority for Julius Caesar, does not 
 give Metellus' remark, but continues Caesar's address thus, 
 
 Know, Ccesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
 Will he be satisfied.
 
 The Still Lion. 151 
 
 Now this is a propos of nothing. There is nothing in Caesar's 
 speech preceding these two lines to lead to the denial, ' Caesar 
 doth not wrong' (for Metellus does not provoke it); and besides, 
 the second line is unfinished. 
 
 To Ben Jonson's Timber or Discoveries ; inade upon men and 
 matter: &c. (Works, 1640-1, fol., vol. ii., p. 97), we are indebted 
 for the preservation of the original text in iii. i, as we have 
 given it. But the editors, deeming its adoption an act of un- 
 faithfulness to the folio, will not have it. Mr. Halliwell indeed 
 says {Life of Shakespeare, 1848, p. 185), 'Take Jonson's words 
 as literally true, and the whole becomes clear,' &c. ; and he has 
 a like note on the text, in his magnificent Folio Edition of 
 Shakespeare: but he had not the courage to act on his con- 
 viction, and regulate the text on Jonson's authority. Pope had 
 the temerity to propose substituting for the reply of the Third 
 Citizen, in iii. 2, the altered line, 
 
 Cccsar had never wrong, but with just cause, 
 
 thus making the plebeian a sympathiser with Brutus. The text 
 in iii. i, as we have first given it, was charged upon Shakespeare 
 as a bull; but Ben Jonson does not tell us that Shakespeare 
 changed it in consequence; nor have we any reason for believing 
 that he would have cared for the laughter of his censors. 
 Nostra judicio Ben's critique is captious. The justice of the 
 cause is not inconsistent with wrong. Mr. Halliwell rightly 
 observes, ' If wrong is taken in the sense of injury* or harm, 
 
 * I/iJurj', here, is an instance of the same ambiguity.
 
 152 The Still Lion. 
 
 as Shakespeare sometimes uses it, there is no absurdity in the 
 line, " He shall have wrong," 2 Henry VI., v. i.' {Life of 
 Shakespeare, 1848, p. 185.) Again, in A Winter's Tale, v. i, 
 Paulina, speaking of the hapless Queen, says. 
 
 Had she such power, 
 She had just cause. 
 Leojites. She had, and would incense me 
 
 To murther her I married. 
 
 (/. e., her whom he might take as his second wife). Clearly, 
 then, the Queen has, in Leontes' judgment, just cause to 
 incense him to do another a grievous wrong. This is even 
 more amenable to Jonson's censure than the line which fell 
 under it. The Cambridge editors most absurdly charge Jonson 
 with a lapse of memory; and this, too, in the face of the 
 additional facts, that the folio reading is defective both in sense 
 and in measure, and that Jonson reverts to the same censure 
 in the Induction to his Staple of News. 
 
 Where then was the blunder ? We say it was Jonson's, and 
 his fellow censors': that the line they laughed at was and is 
 unimpeachable good sense, and that it is the editor's duty to 
 use Jonson's censure for the purpose of correcting the folio 
 reading, and restoring the passage to that form in which, as 
 we believe, it flowed from the pen of Shakespeare, 
 
 With anything but pleasing auguries we bring this somewhat 
 desultory essay to a close. Though wishing to treat our oppo- 
 nents with all the ceremony prescribed by the law of arms, we 
 have not been loath to strike in earnest, in support and vindi- 
 cation of a literary heritage which is, in our eyes, far too
 
 The Still Lion. 153 
 
 precious to be made the sport of every ingenious guesser, 
 whose vanity impels him to turn critic or editor. There are 
 early dramatic works enough for such men to try their 'prentice- 
 hands upon, without intruding into that paradise ' where angels 
 fear to tread.' For the fashion of this day in dealing with the 
 text of Shakespeare we have no kind of respect, scarcely any 
 tolerance. We have yet to learn what right a combination of 
 dulness, ignorance, arrogance, and bad taste has to respectful 
 usage; and of such stuff are most of the later critics on 
 Shakespeare made, with a few honourable exceptions. Of 
 the bulk of their 'criticism we have taken no kind of note in 
 the foregoing discussions. In a few select cases we have 
 endeavoured, with such knowledge and ability as we possess, 
 to show how superior is the old text to the readings by which 
 it has been proposed to supersede it; and where we may have 
 failed in the performance of our task, we have sufficient faith 
 in that text to charge ourselves with the whole blame of the 
 failure. 
 
 Reluctant as we are to subject any part of the old text 
 to the crucible of conjecture, we have given ample justifi- 
 cation of its use, and indicated the limits within which this 
 kind of criticism may be fruitful ; but on this subject the 
 ablest critics may differ, and on the issues involved we cannot 
 always anticipate as the reward of study those final decisions 
 which will assuredly be conferred by time.
 
 ^ujjpkmcntarp ^otc$f. 
 
 -0 — 
 
 On reviewing the foregoing chapters we find a few points on 
 which something we have said calls for correction, explanation, 
 or addition. Had these notes occurred to us in time, some 
 would have been incorporated with the text, and some would 
 have been appended as foot-notes. 
 
 P. 17. Chapman too has swowniiigs in The Widdcnve's Tea res, v. i. 
 
 P. 33. Possibly land-damn may not long remain unreduced. In Notes 
 and Queries, 5th S., iii. 464, the following explanation is given of the word: 
 
 Forty years ago an old custom was still in use in this district [i. c, 
 Buxton]. When any slanderer was detected, or any parties discovered in 
 adultery, it was usual to Ian-dan them. This was done by the rustics 
 traversing from house to house along the 'country side,' blowing trumpets 
 and beating drums or pans and kettles. When an audience was assembled, 
 the delinquents' names were proclaimed, and they were thus land- 
 damned. 
 
 This is plausible; but Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, in Azotes and Queries, 
 5th S., iv. 3, points out that landan, like randan, is 'a mere represen- 
 tation of continued noise.' Land-damning might mean the 'drier death 
 ashore' mentioned by Proteus in The Tiao Gentlemen of Verona, i. i, and 
 referred to with infinite humour by Gonzalo in The Tempest, i. I. All other 
 interpretations may, we think, be firmly put aside. 
 
 P. 35. In contending that Shakespeare's cyme means what we call 
 Brussels sprouts, Mr. H. A. J. Munro identifies it, not with Holland's cyme 
 (singular), but with Pliny's cymae (plural): /. e., he accents the 'e.'
 
 156 Tlie Still Lion. 
 
 P. 44. There is yet another instance in Shakespeare of the 'relative 
 absolute,' viz., in King 'John, ii. 2. 
 
 maids, 
 Who having no external thing to lose 
 But the word maid, [he] cheats the poor maid of that ; &c. 
 
 P. 61. Another instance of the expression /^////'j' of war, occurs in the 
 Preface to Sadducismiis Trmniphatus, by the Rev. Joseph Glanvil : 
 
 For an hour together it would beat ' Round-Heads and Cuckolds,' the 
 'Tattoo,' and several other poi?its 0/ war, as well as any drummer. 
 
 P. 67. 'Hold and occnpie a rocke:' cf., 
 
 Judges, xvi, 11. If they bind me fast with new ropes that never were 
 occupied, then I shall be weak, and be as another man. 
 
 St. Jerome bade Paula hold and make use of a distaff. 
 
 V. 72. We have followed Steevens' quotation: but in the edition reprinted 
 by Mr. J. P. Collier in 1844, and by Mr. Charles Hindley in 1871, the title 
 is differently spelt, and Jalowsy says, 
 
 She that is fayre, lusty and yonge 
 And can comon in termes wyth fyled tonge 
 And wyll ahyde whysperynge in the eare 
 Thynke ye her tayle is not lyght of the scare. 
 
 P. 78 (note). 'The Palais de Luxembourg' is, we are afraid, a slip for 
 the Hotel Cluny. Doubtless many of our i^eaders will remember the ivory- 
 fetter preserved there ( Silvio's was of gold) ; and also the effigy of a lady 
 over one of the doorways in the Castle of Heidelberg. 
 
 P. 80, § 8. We should have included in this class that well-known crux 
 
 in The IVinler's Tale, iii. 2 
 
 I ne'er heard yet 
 That any of these bolder vices wanted 
 Less impudence to gainsay what they did 
 Than to perform it first. 
 
 The central notion once seized, we are led to take ' less ' as an adjective 
 qualifying 'impudence,' not as an adverb qualifying 'wanted,' as Johnson 
 and others have mistaken it. Having impudence enough to perform those
 
 The Still Lion. 157 
 
 vices, the depraved would not be likely to want the less impudence necessary 
 to repudiate them and to deny their performance. A parallel case in 
 Antony and Cleopatra, iv. I2, is familiar to all students of the text. 
 
 P. 81. After tliis was printed we witnessed at the Brentwood dog-show 
 (July 13, 1875), the most perfect exemplification of the ridicule which is 
 provoked by the secondary awkwardness of dissimulation. A visitor, who 
 was evidently no scholar, was endeavouring to decipher the warning over 
 the first dog in the show — a huge mastiff of the Lyme breed. He had got as 
 far as D.A.N when, approaching the stand to get a better view of the word, 
 the dog instantly seized him by the arm. This gentleman evidently thought 
 tliat indifference was the wiser part of valour; for, even while he turned 
 white with fear, he ejaculated— ' Oh ! I don't mind it at all: I'm used to 
 the bite of dogs.' 
 
 P. 85. Just as we required a basis for the pun on 'wax,' so we do for 
 that on 'laughter' in IVic Tempest, ii. i. 
 
 Sebastian. Done : The wager ? 
 Antonio. A laughter. 
 Sebastian. A match. 
 
 Laughter may be the cant name for some small coin (a doit or a denier) 
 commonly laid in betting. At present the only meaning of the word 
 {'aughter, lafter, lawter) is a setting of eggs laid at one time. The word is 
 in Brockett, and is still in provincial use : a gamekeeper at Yoxford, Suffolk, 
 told us that he found he had better luck with the second lawter (of 
 pheasants' eggs) than with the first. 
 
 ' Laughter' in yiilius Cicsar ('I am no common laughter') is just a broker, 
 in the bad sense : but its history is at present shrouded in obscurity. 
 
 P. 86. A propos of this soliloquy we may add, to obviate a misconcep- 
 tion which we know to exist, that the line 
 
 There's the respect 
 That makes calamity of so long life : 
 means just this : 
 
 There [we see] the reason why we put up with calamity so long, 
 [instead of ending it by suicide]. 
 
 This is a good instance of the virtue of paraphrase, pace Mr. Meiklejohn.
 
 158 The Still Lion. 
 
 P. 87. We might have quoted from Ki)ig yoJin, ii. 2, 
 
 John * * * hath willingly departed with a part, 
 and from Love's Labour'' s Lost, ii. i, 
 
 Which we much rather had depart withal. 
 
 and from Every Woman in her Iliiinour, 1609 (a passage quoted by 
 
 Steevens), 
 
 She'll serve under him till death us depart. 
 
 also from the Co/nedy of Errors, iii. i : 
 
 In debating which was best, we shall part with neither, 
 
 'where,' says Monk Mason, ^ pari means to depart, to go away.' 
 
 P. 94. On the varying prosody of such words see Shepherd's History 
 of the English Language (New York, Hale and Son), p. 170. 
 
 P. 97. A curious illustration of the lines 
 
 And blowne with restlesse violence round about 
 The pendant world 
 
 occurs at the end of Cicero's Vision of Sci/'io, thus rendered by Mr. C. E. 
 
 Edmonds : 
 
 For the soules of those men who are devoted to corporeal pleasures, 
 and who having yielded themselves as it were as servants to them, 
 enslaved to pleasures under the impulse of their passions, have violated 
 the laws of Gods and men ; such souls, having escaped from their bodies, 
 hover round the eartJi, nor do they return to this place, ;*/// tliey have 
 been tossed about /or many ages. 
 
 P. 117. To this list miglit, we think, be added the following: 
 
 Or I shall shew the cynders of my spirits 
 
 Through th' Ashes of my chance. — Antony and Cleopatra, v. 2. 
 
 Through the Ashes of my glatice. — (Ingleby.) 
 
 This, like most good emendations, requires support and illustration. First: 
 'the ashes of my chance' is nonsense. Ilanmer's miscliance (for 'my 
 chance') is no better. Warburton's my cheeks was a weak conjecture, which 
 he never adopted. Sidney Walker's change is unsatisfactory. Secondly: 
 note that Cleopatra has just said,
 
 The Still Lion. 159 
 
 What goest tliou back? thou shall 
 Go backe I warrant thee : but lie catch thine eyes 
 Though they had wings. 
 
 She would burn him up with her glance— what Milton calls 'the charm of 
 Beauty's powerful glance' {Paradise Lost, viii. 533) — and though the fire 
 had almost faded out, the very cinders would smite him. Thirdly : for 
 illustration let us recur once more to Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who thus describes 
 Cassy's glance, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1S53 (Routledge), p. 382. 
 
 A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly flashed from those black eyes ; 
 and, facing about, with quivering lip and dilated nostrils, she drew herself 
 up, and fixed a glance, blazing with rage and scorn, on the driver. 
 
 (We suppose when the 'glance' became 'fixed,' it was no longer a glance 
 but ?Lgaze.) Compare also the description of Cassy's feelings on p. 399 : 
 
 When Legree brought Emmeline to the house, all the smouldering 
 embers of womanly feeling Jlaslied up in the worn heart of Cassy, and 
 she took part with the girl. 
 
 Cleopatra just says, she will shew the still smouldering embers of her spirits 
 through the ashes of her faded glance, just as we see the hot gleads through 
 the ashes of an expiring fire. 
 
 r. 120. In a proof of this very Essay, we observe a parallel misprint, 
 vi^., 'there formation of character,' for 'the reformation of character,' &c. 
 
 P. 140, Was Hamlet reading St. Augustine? Be that as it may, the 
 following passage is a curious illustration of Hamlet's simile between the 
 operation of the sun in breeding maggots in carrion, and that of a king [e. g. , 
 Cophetua) in loving a beggar maid, or himself in wooing the chancellor's 
 daughter. I am indebted to Mr. C. J. Monro for this illustration : it is 
 from St. Augustine, De fide et symbolo, § lO. (Vol. xi, p. 512, of the 3rd 
 Venetian edition [1797] of the Benedictine labours.) 
 
 Nee nobis fidem istam minuat cogitatio muliebrium viscerum, ut prop- 
 terea recusanda videatur talis Domini nostri generatio, quod eam sordidi 
 sordidam putant. Quia et stultum Dei sapientius esse homiuibus, et 
 omnia munda mundis, verissime apostolus dicit. Debent igitur intueri 
 qui hoc putant, solis huius radios, quem certe non tanquam creaturam 
 Dei laudant sed tatiqitam Deuvt adorant, per cloacarum foetores et
 
 i6o TJic Still Lion. 
 
 quaecumque horribilia usquequaque diffundi et in his operari secundion 
 }iatu7-a>n sitam, nee tamen inde aliqua contaminantione sordescere, cum 
 visibilis lux visibilibus sordibus sit natura coniunctior ; quanto minus 
 igitur poterat pollui Verbum Dei non corporeum neque visibile de femineo 
 corpore ubi humanam carnem suscepit cum anima et spiritu, quibus 
 intervenientibus habitat maiestas Verbi ab humani corporis fragilitate 
 secretius. 
 
 If Shakespeare had St. Augustine in nnnd wlien lie wrote lliis scene, what 
 English book did he u-e ?
 
 PASSAGES IN SHAKESPEARE 
 
 DISCUSSED IN 
 
 THE STILL LION. 
 
 — — 
 
 PAGE 
 
 List of crucial words in Shakespeare (Ullorxals) - - . - 33 
 
 Remarks on Aroint, Barlet, cyme, Artn-gaiint, charge-house, scamels, 
 
 Esil, empirickqutick, skaiiis-mafes, Yatighan, and Diicdame - 34 — 37 
 
 List of crucial phrases in Shakespeare (Rope-scarres) ... 45 
 
 This un-heard sawcinesse and boyish Troopes, 
 
 The king doth smile at. .... King yohn, v. 2 21 
 
 All the contagion of the South light on you, 
 
 You shames of Rome : you Heard of Byles and Plagues 
 
 Plaister you ore, &c. ..... Coriolanus, i. 4 22 
 
 Your prattling Nurse 
 Into a rapture lets her Baby crie, 
 While she chats him. ...... Ibid., ii. i 148 
 
 holpe to reape the Fame 
 Which he did end all his; &c. .... Ibid., v. 5 61 
 
 To seek thy help by beneficial help. - Comedy of Errors, i. i 26 
 
 Spred thy close Curtaine Love-performing night, 
 
 That run-awayes eyes may wincke, and Ro7neo 
 
 Leape to these armes, untalkt of and unseene. Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2 54 
 
 will you sterner be 
 Then he that dies and lives by bloody drops ? As You Like It, ii. 5 59 
 
 Y
 
 1 62 The Still Lion. 
 
 Hee that a Foole doth very wisely hit, 
 
 Doth very foolishly, although he smart 
 
 Seeme senselesse of the bob. If not, 
 
 The Wise-man's folly is anathomiz'd 
 
 Even by the squandering glances of the foole. - - Ibid., W. 6 8i 
 
 One inch of delay more, is a South-sea of discoverie. - Ibid., iii. 2 80 
 
 Who might be your mother, 
 That you insult, exult, and all at once, 
 Over the wretched ? ------- Ibid., iii. 5 79 
 
 Turning your Bookes to Graves, your Inke to Blood, 
 
 Your Pennes to Launces, and your Tongue divine 
 
 To a lowd Trumpet, and a Point of Warre. 2 HeiD-y VI, iv. i 60 
 
 Ye shall have hempen caudle then, and the helpe of hatchet. 
 
 Ibid., iv. 7 29 
 
 And yet the spacious bredth of this division 
 Admits no Orifex for a point as subtle 
 As Ariachnc's broken woofe to enter : Troihis and Cressida, v. 2 64 
 
 I do beseech thee, remember thy courtesy; I beseech thee, apparel 
 
 thy head. ----- Love's Labour'' s Lost, v. i 74 
 
 I will bring thee where Mistris Anne Page is, at a Farm-house a 
 Feasting : and thou shalt wooe her : Cride-game, said I well ? 
 
 77;,? Mer>y Wives of Windsor, ii. 3 75 
 
 my free drift 
 Halts not particularly, but moves itself 
 In a wide sea of wax : &c. - - - Timon of Athens, i. i 83 
 
 How ? Have they deny'de him ? 
 Has Ventidgius and LucuUus deny'de him, 
 And does he send to me ? Three ? Humh ? 
 It showes but little love, or judgment in him. 
 Must I be his last Refuge ? His Friends (like Physitians) 
 Thrive, give him over : Must I take th' Cure upon me ? 
 
 Ibid., iii. 3 144
 
 TJie Still Lion. 163 
 
 Now the Gods keepe you old enough, 
 
 That you may Hve 
 
 Ouely in bone, that none may looke on you. - - Ibid., iii. 5 135 
 
 we must all part 
 Into this sea of air. Ibid.,'\v. 2 S7 
 
 Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames, 
 
 Myself would on the rearward of reproaches 
 
 Strike at thy life. - - Much Ado About Nothing, iv. 1 93 
 
 Bring me a fatlier that so lov'd his childe. 
 
 Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine, 
 
 And bid him speake of patience. 
 
 If such a one will smile and stroke his beard. 
 
 And sorrowe, wagge, crie hem, when he should grone, &c. 
 
 Ibid., V. I 129 
 
 I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind 
 
 What lady she her lord. - - - The Winter's Tale, \. i 116 
 
 If it prove 
 Shee's otherwise. He keep my Stables where 
 I lodge my Wife, He goe in couples with her: 
 Then when I feele, and see her, no farther trust her. Ibid., ii. i 76 
 
 I ne'er heard yet 
 That any of these bolder vices wanted 
 Less impudence to gainsay what they did 
 Than to perform it first. - - - - - Ihid., iii. 2 1^7 
 
 no : this my Hand will rather 
 The multitudinous Seas incarnadine. 
 Making the Greene one. Red. - . . . Macbeth, ii. 2 119 
 
 Her Gentlewomen, like the Nereides, * 
 
 So many Mer-maides tended her i' th' eyes. 
 
 And made their bends adornings. At the Helme 
 
 A seeming Mer-maide steers. - Antony and Cleopatra, \\. z 119 
 
 The mean time, lady, 
 I'll raise the preparation of a war 
 Shall stain your brother ..... Ibid., iii. 4 96
 
 164 
 
 TJie Still Lioii. 
 
 If idle talk will once be necessary, 
 
 I'll not sleep neither. ..... 
 
 Prithee go hence ; 
 Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits 
 Through the ashes of my chance. - 
 
 Urchins 
 Shall for that vast of night, that they may worke 
 All exercise on thee. 
 
 Done : The wager ? A laughter. - 
 
 Ibid., V. 2 
 
 The Tempest, i. 2 
 Ibid., ii. I 
 
 I forget; 
 But these sweet thoughts, doe even refresh my labours, 
 Most busie lest, when I doe it. - - - - 
 
 We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep. ..... 
 
 A solemne Ayre, and the best comforter. 
 
 To an unsettled fancie, Cure thy braines 
 
 (Now uselesse) boile within thy skull : there stand 
 
 For you are Spell-stopt ..... 
 
 A piece of him. ...... 
 
 Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason. 
 And draw you into madness. 
 
 Ibid., v. I 
 Hamlet, \. i 
 
 Ibid., i. 4 
 
 The clowne shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled a tlie 
 sere. 
 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 And by opposing end them. ... - 
 
 The undiscovered country from whose bourn 
 No traveller returns. ..... 
 
 For use almost can change the stamp of nature. 
 And either the devill, or throwe him out 
 With wonderous potency. .... 
 
 109 
 
 Ibid., V. 2 158 
 
 120 
 
 157 
 
 Ibid., iii. i 137 
 
 Ibid., iv. I 139 
 
 68 
 136 
 
 92 
 
 Ibid 
 
 , 11. 2 
 
 71 
 
 Ibid. 
 
 iii. I 
 
 86 
 
 Ibid. 
 
 iii. I 
 
 9« 
 
 /bid., iii. 4 123
 
 TJic Still Lion. 165 
 
 They say miracles are past, and we have our Philosophical! persons, 
 to make moderne and familiar things supernatural! and cause- 
 lesse. All's Well that Ends Well, \\. I 143 
 
 Well, heaven forgive him ; and forgive us all : 
 
 Sotne rise by sinne, and some by vertue fall: 
 
 Some run from braltes of Ice, and answer none. 
 
 And some condemned for a fault alone. Measure for Measure, ii. i 145 
 
 Two passages on death : 
 
 I, but to die, and go we Ivnow not where, &c. - Ibid, iii. i 97 
 
 Most welcome bondage ! &c. - - - Cymbeline, v. 4 99 
 
 Were I a common Laughter, and did use 
 
 To stale with ordinary Oathes my love 
 
 To every new Protestor. .... yuliiis Ccesar, i. 2 157 
 
 Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
 
 Will he be satisfied. Ibid., iii. i 150 
 
 To you, our Swords have leaden points, Mark Antony: 
 
 Our Armes in strengtli of malice, and our Hearts 
 
 Of Brothers temper, do receive you in. - - - Ibid.,\\\. i 115
 
 AUTHORS QUOTED. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 .(^Han - 89, 91 
 
 Aristotle .......--.- go 
 
 Arrowsmith, Rev. W. R. ------- - 62 
 
 Ascham, Roger .------. 123, 127 
 
 Augustine, St. ---------- 159 
 
 Bailey, S. ---------- - 89 
 
 Barret, R. ----- - 73 
 
 Beecher-Stowe, Mrs. H. 135, 159 
 
 Blackmore, R. D. ( Lonia Doojic) ------ 140 
 
 Blackstone, Justice -..----.. i^g 
 
 Brewster, Sir D. - - - - - - - - - 141 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte ---------- 137 
 
 Caird, Rev. J. - - - - 137 
 
 Caldicott, T. .-------.. gg 
 
 Cambridge Editors, The --..-.-. y^j 
 
 Carlyle, T. - - 98 
 
 Chapman, G. 7°. 7'- 77. '33. H^ 
 
 Chettle, H. - - 69 
 
 Cicero - - jjg 
 
 Cook, J. 26 
 
 Corson, H. ---------- - 140 
 
 Dale, Sir T. 93 
 
 Dawson, G. 136 
 
 Day, J. - - . 65 
 
 De Quincey, T. - 1, 82, 113, 141 
 
 Drayton, M. 87
 
 The Still Lion. 167 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Edmonds, C. E. - • - - - - - - - - 158 
 
 Fleay, Rev. F. G. - 16 
 
 Fletcher, J. - - - - - - - - • - -70, 102 
 
 Ford, J. 116 
 
 Furnivall, F. J. 57 
 
 Garnett, R. 87 
 
 Giffard, G. ---------- - 42 
 
 Glanvil, Rev. J. 156 
 
 Goethe 8 
 
 Gosson, S. ----------- 104 
 
 Greene, R. 78 
 
 Hall, Dr. J. - - - - - 26 
 
 Halliwell, J. O. 151 
 
 Hyrd, R. - 18, 19, 42, 43, 67 
 
 Holland, Ph. 35 
 
 Howard, H. (Earl of Northampton) ------ 72 
 
 Johnson, Dr. S. - - - 140, 141 
 
 Jonson, Ben 70, 85, 131 
 
 Kant, I. ----- - 128 
 
 Knight, C. - - - 126, 136 
 
 Lavaterus, L. -...-..-.. 42, 43 
 
 Lupton, T. 42, 51 
 
 Macaulay, Lord --..---.-. 61 
 
 Marmion, S. --....... 42, 131 
 
 Meiklejohn, J. M. D. 97 
 
 Milton - - 25, 65, 104 
 
 Monro, C. J. 109 
 
 Morysine, Sir R. 127 
 
 Munro, H. A. J. 34, 155 
 
 Newman, Dr. J. H. -------- - 142 
 
 North, Sir T. - - 119 
 
 Pickering, B. M. 4 
 
 Plutarch ........... ng 
 
 Powell, T. .- 116 
 
 Racster, J, ------..-- - 42
 
 1 68 The Still Lion. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Richter, J. P. 139 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua --....-.. 127 
 
 Schmidt, Dr. A. - - - 62 
 
 Scott, Sir W. 34, 61, 127, 131 
 
 Spenser, E. ---------- - 65 
 
 Sterne, L. 78 
 
 Tylney, Glomond 65 
 
 Vives, L. 18, 19, 42, 67, 127 
 
 Walkington, T. --------- - 102 
 
 Wilkins, G. (Pericles) 149 
 
 CORRECTION. 
 P. 61, 1. 12. For In read It. 
 
 '^?S^S^ 
 
 Printed by JosiAH Allen, Birmingham.
 
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