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present tense endeth in eth, and of the DanoSaxon in es." Malone, we think, has rightly stated the principle upon which such idioms, which appear false concords to us, should be corrected, that is, "to substitute the modern idiom in all places except where either the metre or rhyme renders it impossible." But to those who can feel the value of a slight sprinkling of our antique phraseology, it is pleasant to drop upon the instances in which correction is impossible. We would not part with the exquisite bit of false concord, as we must now term it, in the last word of the four following lines, for all that Shakspere's grammar-correctors have ever written :

"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,

His steeds to water at those springs
On chalic'd flowers that lies."

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"Alas! who now shall grace my tournaments,

Or honour me with deeds of chivalrie?"

The tournaments and the chivalrie were then, however, but "an insubstantial pageant faded." Men had learnt to revenge their private wrongs, without the paraphernalia of heralds and warders. In the old chivalrous times they might suppress any outbreak of hatred or passion, and cherish their malice against each other until it could be legally gratified; so that, according to the phrase of Richard Courde-Lion in his ordinance for permitting tournaments, "the peace of our land be not broken, nor justice hindred, nor damage done to our forests." The private contest of two knights was a violation of the laws of chivalry. Chaueer has a remarkable exemplification of this in his 'Knight's Tale,' where the duke, coming to the plain, saw Arcité and Palamon fighting like two bulls :

"This duke his courser with his spurrés smote, And at a start he was betwixt them two, And pulled out a sword and cried,—' Ho! No more, up pain of losing of your head; By mighty Mars, he shall anon be dead That smiteth any stroke that I may seen! But telleth me what mistere men ye been, That be so hardy for to fighten here Withouten any judge or other officer, As though it were in listés really'" (royally). That duels were frequent in England in the reign of Elizabeth, we might collect, if there

were no other evidence, from Shakspere alone. The matter had been reduced to a science. Tybalt is the "courageous captain of compliments," a perfect master of punctilio, one who kills his adversary by rule-"one, two, and the third in your bosom." The gentleman of the "first and second cause" is a gentleman who will quarrel upon the very slightest offences. The degrees in quarrelling were called the causes; and these have been most happily ridiculed by Shakspere in 'As You Like It :'

"Jaques. But for the seventh cause; how did you find the quarrel on the seventh cause?

Touchstone. Upon a lie seven times removed; as thus, sir, I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier's beard; he sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in the mind it was: this is called the Retort courteous. If I sent him word again, it was not well cut, he would send me word he cut it to please himself: this is called the Quip modest. If, again, it was not well cut, he disabled my judgment: this is called the Reply churlish. If, again, it was not well cut, he would answer, I spake not true: this is called the Reproof valiant. If again, it was not well cut, he would say, I lie: this is called the Countercheck quarrelsome and so to the Lie circumstantial and the Lie direct."

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When Touchstone adds, "O sir! we quarrel in print by the book," he alludes to the works of Saviolo and Caranza, who laid down laws for the duello. The wit of Shakspere is the best commentary upon the philosophy of Montaigne : 'Inquire why that man hazards his life and honour upon the fortune of his rapier and dagger; let him acquaint you with the occasion of the quarrel, he cannot do it without blushing, 't is so idle and frivolous."-(Essays,' book iii. ch. 10.) But philosophy and wit were equally unavailing to put down the quarrelsome spirit of the times, and Henry IV. of France in vain declared all duellists guilty of lese-majesté, and punishable with death; and James I. of England as vainly denounced them in the Star-chamber.

The practice of duelling went on with us till the civil wars came to merge private quarrels in public ones. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy,' has a bitter satire against the nobility, when he says, they are modern Frenchmen, that had rather lose a pound of blood in a single combat, than a drop of sweat in any honest labour."

"like our

30 SCENE IV." What counterfeit did I give you? The slip, sir, the slip."

A counterfeit piece of money and a slip were synonymous; and in many old dramas we have the same play upon words as here. In Robert Green's Thieves falling out,' the word slip is

defined as in a dictionary: "and therefore he went and got him certain slips, which are counterfeit pieces of money, being brass, and covered over with silver, which the common people call slips."

31 SCENE IV." The wild-goose chase." Horse racing, and the wild-goose chase, were amongst the "disports of great men" in the time of Elizabeth. It is scarcely necessary to describe a sport, if sport it can be called, which is still used amongst us. When the "wits run the wild-goose chase," we have a type of its folly; as the "switch and spurs, switch and spurs," is descriptive of its brutality.

consistent with such a division of time as this.

35 SCENE IV.-" Saucy merchant." Steevens pointed out that the term merchant was anciently used in contradistinction to gentleman; as we still use the word chap as an abbreviation of chapman. Douce has quoted a passage from Whetstone's Mirour for Magestrates of Cyties' (1584), in which he speaks of the usurious practices of the citizens of London, which is conclusive upon this point:The extremity of these men's dealings hath been and is so cruell as there is a natural malice generally impressed in the hearts of the gentlemen of England towards the citizens of

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32 SCENE IV." Why, is not this better now than London, insomuch as if they odiously name a

groaning for love?"

Coleridge invites us to compare, in this scene, "Romeo's half-excited, and half-real ease of mind, with his first manner when in love with Rosaline! His will had come to the clenching point." Romeo had not only recovered the natural tone of his mind, but he had come back to the conventional gaiety - the fives-play of witty words which was the tone of the best society in Shakspere's time. "Now art thou what thou art," says Mercutio, "by art as well as by nature."

33 SCENE IV.-" My fan, Peter."

The fan which Peter had to bear was of preposterous dimensions. It does not appear quite so ridiculous, therefore, when we look at the size of the machine, to believe the Nurse should have a servant to bear it. Shakspere has given the same office to Armado in 'Love's Labour's Lost:'

"Oh! a most dainty man,
To see him walk before a lady, and to bear her fan."

34 SCENE IV.-" Is it good den ?" According to Mercutio's answer, the time was noon when the evening salutation "good den" began. But Shakspere had here English manners in his eye. The Italian custom of commencing the day half an hour after sunset, and reckoning through the twenty-four hours, is in

man, they forthwith call him atrimme merchaunt. In like despight the citizen calleth every rascal a joly gentleman.”

"SCENE IV.-" R is for the dog."

R was called the dog's letter. In his 'English Grammar,' Ben Jonson says, "R is the dog's letter and hirreth in the sound." In our old writers we have a verb formed from the noise of a dog. Thus in Nashe (1600),

"They arre and bark at night against the moon ;" and in Holland's translation of Plutarch's Morals,' "A dog is, by nature, fell and quarrelsome, given to arre and war upon a very small occasion." Erasmus has a meaning for R being the dog's letter, which is not derived from the sound :-"R, litera quæ in Rixando prima est, canina vocatur."

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ACT III.

SCENE L.-" Affection makes him false." THERE is a slight particle of untruth in Benvolio's statement, which, to a certain degree, justifies this charge of Lady Capulet. Tybalt was bent upon quarrelling with Romeo, but Mercutio forced on his own quarrel with Tybalt. Dr. Johnson's remark upon this circumstance is worthy his character as a moralist :-"The charge of falsehood on Benvolio, though produced at hazard, is very just. The author, who seems to intend the character of Benvolio as good, meant, perhaps, to show how the best minds, in a state of faction and discord, are detorted to criminal partiality."

SCENE II.-"God save the mark!" This expression occurs in the First Part of Henry IV.,' in Hotspur's celebrated speech defending the denial of his prisoners. In 'Othello' we have God bless the mark. In these cases, as in the instance before us, the commentators leave the expression in its original obscurity. May we venture a conjecture? The mark which persons who are unable to write are required to make, instead of their signature, is in the form of a cross; but anciently the use of this mark was not confined to illiterate persons, for, amongst the Saxons, the mark of the cross, as an attestation of the good faith of the person signing, was required to be attached to the signature of those who could write, and to stand in the place of the signature of those who could not write. (See 'Blackstone's Commentaries.') The ancient use of the mark was universal; and the word mark was, we believe, thus taken to signify the cross. God save the mark was, therefore, a form of ejaculation approaching to the character of an oath; in the same manner as assertions were made emphatic by the addition of "by the rood," or "by the holy rood."

10 SCENE III.-" Like powder in a skill-less
soldier's flask."

The force and propriety of this comparison are manifest; but, fully to understand it, we must know how the soldier of Shakspere's time was accoutred. His heavy gun was fired with a match, his powder was carried in a flask; and the match and the powder, in unskilful hands, were doubtless sometimes productive of acci

dents; so that the man-at-arms was, like Romeo in his passion, "dismembered with his own defence."

41 SCENE V.-"Juliet's Chamber."

The stage direction in the folio edition of 1623 is, "Enter Romeo and Juliet aloft." In the first quarto, 1597, the direction is, "Enter Romeo and Juliet at the window." To understand these directions, we must refer to the construction of the old theatres. "Towards the rear of the stage," says Malone, "there appears to have been a balcony or upper stage; the platform of which was probably eight or nine feet from the ground. I suppose it to have been supported by pillars. From hence, in many of our old plays, part of the dialogue was spoken; and in the front of it curtains likewise were hung, so as occasionally to conceal the persons in it from the view of the audience. At each side of this balcony was a box very inconveniently situated, which was sometimes called the private box. In these boxes, which were at a lower price, some persons sate, either from economy or singularity." The balcony probably served a variety of purposes.

Malone says,

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leap from the battlements, I suppose our ancestors were contented with seeing them in the balcony already described; or, perhaps, a few boards tacked together, and painted so as to resemble the rude discoloured walls of an old town, behind which a platform might have been placed near the top, on which the citizens stood." It appears to us probable that even in these cases the balcony served for the platform, and that a few painted boards in front supplied the illusion of wall and tower. There was still

another use of the balcony. According to Malone, when a play was exhibited within a play, as in 'Hamlet,' the court, or audience, before whom the interlude was performed, sate in the balcony. To Malone's historical account of the English stage, and to Mr. Collier's valuable details regarding theatres ('Annals of the Stage,' vol. iii.), the reader is referred for fuller details upon this and other points which bear upon the economy of our ancient drama. We prefix a representation of the old stage, with its balcony, which we have been fortunate in finding engraved in the title-page to Dr. William Alabaster's Latin tragedy of Roxana,' 1632.

42 SCENE V.-" Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree."

In the description of the garden in Chaucer's translation of the 'Romaunt of the Rose,' the pomegranate is first mentioned amongst the fruit-trees:

"There were (and that wot I full well)
Of pomegranates a full great deal."

us that throughout his journeys in the East he never heard such a choir of nightingales as in a row of pomegranate-trees that skirt the road from Smyrna to Boudjia. In the truth of details such as these the genius of Shakspere is as much exhibited as in his wonderful powers of generalization.

43 SCENE V.-"It was the lark, the herald of the morn."

Shakspere's power of describing natural objects is unequalled in this beautiful scene, which, as we think, was amongst his very early productions. The 'Venus and Adonis,' published in 1593, is also full of this power. Compare the following passage with the description of morning in the scene before us :—

"Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty;

Who doth the world so gloriously behold,
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."

44 SCENE V.-" Hunting thee hence with huntsup to the day."

There was one Gray, a maker of "certain merry ballads," who, according to Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy' (1589), grew into good estimation with Henry VIII., and the Protector Somerset, for the said merry ballads, "whereof one chiefly was, "The hunte is up, the hunte is up."" Douce thinks he has recovered the identical song, which he reprints. One stanza will, perhaps, satisfy our readers :The hunt is up, the hunt is up, Sing merrily wee, the hunt is up; The birds they sing, The dear they fling,

"Chorus

Hey, nony nony-no:
The hounds they crye,
The hunters flye,

Hey trolilo, trololilo.
The hunt is up, the hunt is up."

45 SCENE V.-"O God! I have an ill-divining soul."

The "orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits" was one of the beautiful objects described by Solomon in his Canticles. Amongst the fruit-bearing trees, the pomegranate is in some respects the most beautiful; and, therefore, in the south of Europe and in the East it has become the chief ornament of the garden. But where did Shakspere find that the nightingale haunted the pomegranate-tree, pouring forth her song from the same bough, week after week? Doubtless in some of the old travels with which he was familiar. Chaucer puts his nightingale "in a fresh green laurel-tree;" but the prefer-saysence of the nightingale for the pomegranate is unquestionable. "The nightingale sings from the pomegranate-groves in the day-time," says Russel in his account of Aleppo. A friend, whose observations as a traveller are as acute as his descriptions are graphic and forcible, informs

Coleridge has some remarks upon that beautiful passage in 'Richard II.,' where the queen

"Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb,

Is coming toward me;"

which we may properly quote here: "Mark in this scene Shakspere's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the terræ incognitæ of presentiments, in the human mind; and how

sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be

taken, once for all, as the truth, that Shakspere, in the absolute universality of his genius, always

reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind."—(Literary Remains,' vol. ii. page 174.) -Shakspere has himself given us the key to his philosophy of presentiments. Venus, dreading the death of Adonis by the boar, says—

"The thought of it doth make my faint heart bleed; And fear doth teach it divination; I prophesy thy death." Such presentiments, which may or may not be realized, appertain to the imagination when in a highly-excited state. Our poet has exhibited the feeling under three different aspects in 'Romeo and Juliet:' when Romeo, before going to the masquerade, exclaims

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he is under the influence of his habitual melancolours all his imagination with a gloomy forecholy, the sentiment of unrequited love, which shadowing of coming events. In the passage before us, when Juliet sees her husband

"As one dead in the bottom of a tomb," we have "the fear" which doth "teach" her heart "divination." But Romeo, in the fifth Act, has a presentiment directly contrary to the approaching catastrophe: and this arises out of his "unaccustomed" animal spirits:

"My bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne." All these states of mind are common to the imagination deeply stirred by passionate emotions. Nothing, in all Shakspere's philosophy, appears to us finer than the deceiving nature of Romeo's presages in the last Act, as compared with the true-divining fears of Juliet.

ACT IV.

** SCENE I.—“In thy best robes, uncover'd, on the cumstances. Juliet was carried to her tomb as

bier."

In the adaptation of Bandello's tale, in 'Painter's Palace of Pleasure,' we have, "they will judge you to be dead, and, according to the custom of our city, you shall be carried to the churchyard hard by our church." The Italian mode of interment is given in the poem of 'Romeus and Juliet':

"Another use there is, that whosoever dyes,

Borne to their church with open face upon the beere he lyes

In wonted weede attyrde, not wrapt in winding-sheet." Painter has no description of this custom; but Shakspere saw how beautifully it accorded with the conduct of his story, and he therefore emphatically repeats it in the directions of the Friar, after Juliet's supposed death :

"Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary
On this fair corse; and, as the custom is,
In all her best array bear her to church."

Ancient customs survive when they are built upon the unaltering parts of national character, and have connection with unalterable local cir

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A dull and dismal noise assail'd the ear,
A wail, a chant, louder and louder yet;
And now a strange fantastic troop appear'd!
Thronging, they came-as from the shades below;
All of a ghostly white! Oh! say,' I cried,
'Do not the living here bury the dead?
Do spirits come and fetch them? What are these,
That seem not of this world, and mock the day;
Each with a burning taper in his hand?'
'It is an ancient brotherhood thou seest.
Such their apparel. Through the long, long line,
Look where thou wilt, no likeness of a man;
The living mask'd, the dead alone uncover'd.
But mark'-And, lying on her funeral couch,
Like one asleep, her eyelids closed, her hands
Folded together on her modest breast,
As 't were her nightly posture, through the crowd
She came at last—and richly, gaily clad,
As for a birthday feast!"

47 SCENE II.-" Sirrah, go hire me twenty
cunning cooks."

The "cunning cook," in the time of Shakspere, was, as he is at present, a great personage.

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