Cordelíá, Cordeliă, stay a little."

"If fortune brag of two she lov'd and
hated,

602. "

603.

Lear. "

Kent. "

"One of them we behold."

'Tis a dull sight."

"Are you not Kent ?"

The same, your servant Kent. "Where is your servant Caius, good, my liege ?"

"One of them we behold."

Kent here seems to refer to the king's enquiry, "Who are you?" intimating, at the same time, a similarity of fate to that of his royal master.

B. STRUTT.

604. "Ha! do you tell me so, I'll see that straight."

"Edmund is dead, my lord."

Alb." That's but a trifle."

607. "And thou no breath at all !-thou'lt come

609.

no more,

No, never, never, never, never, never."

"Do

you see this? Look on her—on her
lips."

610. "He but usurp'd his life."

This hemistic does not appear of worth enough to obtain the credit of authenticity.

HAMLET.

ACT I. SCENE I.

This whole scene appears unnecessary to the design and conduct of the play; and might, I believe, with advantage, be omitted. The hand of Shakspeare is visible in it occasionally, but it is a part of that undigested plan which is manifest throughout this play.

8.

Therefore I have entreated him along, "With us to watch the minutes of this night." This passage will admit of three different interpretations.

I have entreated him to watch along with us. I have entreated him onward, in order that with us he may watch.

I have, by entreaty, drawn him along with us, that we may together watch.

The first of these, I believe, is the meaning assigned to the speaker.

Assail our ears,

"That are so fortified against our story,
"That we two nights have seen.”

If this order of the text must stand, the ellision is very harsh. So fortified against the effect of our story, against the belief of the spectre that we have twice seen. I am persuaded we should adopt the regulation of Sir Thomas Hanmer, who gives the last line to Marcellus.

10.

It harrows me with fear, and wonder."

I do not think that "harrows," here, signifies subdues. Does Mr. Steevens suppose that to be the meaning of it in the following passage, in the last scene of this Act, on which there is no note?

"I would a tale unfold, whose lightest word
"Would harrow up thy soul."

If he does, what is the force of the particle up,
in this last quoted passage?

LORD CHEDWORTH.

This application of" to harrow" is, I believe, in reference, howsoever licentiously, to the agricultural implement, the harrow, and its rugged construction, although employed to compose the still more rugged operation of the plough.

It harrows me with fear and wonder."
Milton has a similar expression in Comus :
"Amaz'd I stood, harrow'd with grief and fear."
Is it not like the king?"

11.

Hor." As thou art to thyself.”

This vicious idiom occurs in The Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters:

"So like to me as I am to myself.

"'Tis strange."

This I take to be an interpolated exclamation. 12. "In what particular thought to work I know not,

"But, in the gross and scope of mine opinion,
"This bodes some strange eruption to our
state."

I know not how to adjust my thoughts, or form a systematic conclusion as to this wonderful event, but the preponderating influence of it, on

my mind, is, that it is the awful foreboder of some dreadful calamity.-This is sense and nature; yet I once saw a most eloquent and able man decried and hooted by a senatorial rabble, for an alleged inconsistency, in his having said, upon a deep and complicated question, that he, decidedly, condemned the principle, though he was not prepared, at the exigence of the moment, to enter into the detail.

13."

A most emulate pride."

Perhaps, emulant, but we find, in other places, the simple verb put for the participle.

15. "Shark'd up a list of landless resolutes, "For food and diet, to some enterprise

"That hath a stomach in't.”

The meaning of this passage is not very clear: by having a stomach in it, I suppose, is being prompt to excite or occasion war, eager for quarrel; and so having an appetite for the employment of those resolutes who are to be his food and diet. In K. Henry V. stomach is used to express liking, or relish:

-Proclaim it,—

"That he who has no stomach to this fight, May strait depart," &c.

Dr. Johnson says, that, in the present instance, stomach is constancy, resolution; but will this explain the passage?

17. "

The moist star,

"Upon whose influence Neptune's empire

stands."

As here the moon is called a star, so, perhaps, by "Day Star," in Lycidas, Milton means, not Hesperus, but the sun.

21.

Foreknowing may avoid."

"Avoid" for "prevent."

22.

It is, as the air, invulnerable, "And our vain blows malicious mockery." Howsoever hypercritical it may appear, I cannot help remarking the impropriety of impressing, thus, by means of a conjunction, the singular verb into the plural service." It" is invulnerable, and our blows "are," it should be, mockery.

"Strike her young bones, ye taking airs, with lameness."

"The memory be green; and that it us be

fitted.

The redundancy in this line must be removed by other means than what Mr. Steevens has recommended: no ellipsis will warrant his construction: the altered designation of the sentence after the conjunction, makes the pronoun "it" indispensible: we might, perhaps, read, with better conformity to grammar, in the first part of the line, and by a fair ellipsis in the latter part,

Though yet, &c.

"The memory's green; and it befitted us
"To bear," &c.

The particles "if" and "though" are continually misleading our writers, and their readers, to con