Tim. Commend me to my loving countrymen,1 Sen. These words become your lips as they pass through them.

2 Sen. And enter in our ears, like great triumphers

In their applauding gates.

Tim. Commend me to them; And tell them, that to ease them of their griefs, Their fears of hostile strokes, their aches, losses, Their pangs of love, with other incident throes That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain

In life's uncertain voyage, I will some kindness do them.

I'll teach them to prevent wild Alcibiades' wrath.
2 Sen. I like this well; he will return again.
Tim. I have a tree, which grows here in my
close,

That mine own use invites me to cut down,
And shortly must I fell it: tell my friends,
Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree,

From high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe,
And hang himself.-I pray you, do my greeting.
Flav. Trouble him no further; thus you still
shall find him.

Tim. Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Whom once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover: thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.-
Lips, let sour words go by, and language end:
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be men's works, and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams: Timon hath done his reign.
[Exit TIMON.

As full as thy report?

Mess.
I have spoke the least;
Besides, his expedition promises
Present approach.

2 Sen. We stand much hazard, if they bring not Timon.

Mess. I met a courier, one mine ancient friend, Whom, though in general part we were oppos'd, Yet our old love made a particular force,

And made us speak like friends:-this man was riding

From Alcibiades to Timon's cave,

With letters of entreaty, which imported
His fellowship i' the cause against your city,
In part for his sake mov'd.

SCENE V.-Before the Walls of Athens. Trumpets sound. Enter ALCIBIADES, and Forces. Alcib. Sound to this coward and lascivious town Our terrible approach. [A parley sounded.

Enter Senators on the walls.

Till now you have gone on, and fill'd the time
With all licentious measure, making your wills
The scope of justice: till now, myself, and such
As slept within the shadow of your power,
Have wander'd with our travers'd arms, and breath'd
Our sufferance vainly. Now the time is flush,
When crouching marrow, in the bearer strong,
Cries of itself, "No more :" now breathless wrong
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease;
And pursy insolence shall break his wind
With fear, and horrid flight.

1 Sen.
Noble, and young,
When thy first griefs were but a mere conceit,
Ere thou hadst power, or we had cause of fear,
We sent to thee; to give thy rages balm,
To wipe out our ingratitude with loves
Above their quantity.

2 Sen.

So did we woo

Transformed Timon to our city's love,

By humble message, and by promis'd means:

We were not all unkind, nor all deserve
The common stroke of war.
1 Sen.
These walls of ours
Were not erected by their hands, from whom
You have receiv'd your grief: nor are they such,
That these great towers, trophies, and schools
should fall
For private faults in them.
2 Sen.
Nor are they living,
Who were the motives that you first went out;
Shame, that they wanted cunning, in excess
Hath broke their hearts. March, noble lord,
Into our city with thy banners spread:

By decimation, and a tithed death,
(If thy revenges hunger for that food
Which nature loaths) take thou the destin'd

Set but thy foot Against our rampir'd gates, and they shall ope, So thou wilt send thy gentle heart before,

Το thou'lt enter friendly.

say,

2 Sen.

Throw thy glove, Or any token of thine honour else, That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress, And not as our confusion, all thy powers Shall make their harbour in our town, till we Have seal'd thy full desire.

Alcib. Then, there's my glove: Descend, and open your uncharged ports. Those enemies of Timon's, and mine own, Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof, Fall, and no more; and,-to atone your fears With my more noble meaning,-not a man Shall pass his quarter, or offend the stream Of regular justice in your city's bounds, But shall be rendered to your public laws At heaviest answer. Both. 'Tis most nobly spoken. Alcib. Descend, and keep your words. [The Senators descend, and open the gates.

Pass by, and curse thy fill; but pass, and stay not here thy gait."

These well express in thee thy latter spirits:
Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
Scorn'dst our brain's flow, and those our droplets
which

From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave on faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon; of whose memory
Hereafter more.-Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword:
Make war breed peace; make peace stint war;

make each

46

ACT I.-SCENE I.

BREATH'D, as it were"-" Breath'd" is inured by constant practice; so trained as not to be wearied. To breathe a horse, is to exercise him for the course. So in HAMLET:

It is the breathing time of day with me. "He PASSES"-As we now say-He surpasses. Thus, in the MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, we have-" Why this passes, Master Ford."

"When we for recompense have prais'd the vile"— "We must here suppose (says Warburton) the Poet busy in reading in his own work; and that these three lines are the introduction of the poem addressed to Timon, which he afterwards gives the Painter an account of."

"Our poesy is as a gum, which OOZES"-The reading of the original is :

Our poesie is as a gowne which uses
From whence 'tis nourisht.

Pope changed this to

Our poesie is as a gum which issues.

The reading "oozes" is Johnson's. Tieck maintains that the passage should stand as in the original. He says, "The act, the flattery of this poet of occasions, which is useful to those who pay for it. The expression is hard, forced, and obscure, but yet to be understood." We agree with Knight, that "we cannot see how the construction of the sentence can support this interpretation," and retain the reading of Pope and Johnson.

"Each bound it CHAFES"-It is doubtful whether the old copy has chafes, or chases; the long and f being not very distinguishable from each other, in ordinary Old-English printing. Either reading may be justified in the freedom of poetical diction, but "chafes"

appears more like the Shakespearian usage; as in Je LIUS CESAR:

The troubled Tiber chafing with its shores. And, in the same age, Drayton has precisely the phrase in question:

Like as the ocean chafing with his bounds, With raging billow flies against the rocks. Johnson thinks the whole so obscure that some line must have been lost in the manuscript. Yet we are not to take the Poet here as Shakespeare's own representative; on the contrary, as Henley well remarks:-"This jumble of incongruous images seems to have been designed, and put into the mouth of the poetaster, that the reader might appreciate his talents: his language, therefore, should not be considered in the abstract."

Look, when a painter would surpass the life, In limning out a well-proportion'd steed, His art with nature's workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living should exceed. The allusion was so frequent that it was probably sufficiently intelligible in this brief phrase. Ben Jonson. in his verses prefixed to the first folio, speaks of the head of Shakespeare there engraved as oneWherein the graver had a strife With nature to outdo the life.

"In a wide SEA OF WAX"-The practice of writing with an iron style, upon table-books covered with wax. prevailed at an early date in England, as well as in

Greece and Rome. But it had gone quite out of use two centuries before the date of this play, while the classic custom was well known to any reader of Golding's "Ovid," or North's “ Plutarch;" and this it is that the Poet refers to.

"—no LEVELL'D malice"-"To level is to aim; to point the shot at a mark. Shakespeare's meaning is, my poem is not a satire written with any particular view, or 'levell'd' at any single person: I fly, like an eagle, into a general expanse of life, and leave not, by any private mischief, the trace of my passage."-JOHN

"—even he drops down

The knee before him," etc. Stevens remarks upon this passage, that either Shakespeare meant to put a falsehood into the mouth of the Poet, or had not yet thoroughly planned the character of Apemantus; for, in the ensuing scenes, his behaviour is as cynical to Timon as to his followers. It is answered that the Poet, seeing that Apemantus paid frequent visits to Timon, naturally concluded that he was equally courteous with other guests.

"To PROPAGATE their states"-i. e. To advance or improve their various conditions of life.

"-conceiv'd to scOPE"-i. e. Properly imagined, appositely, to the purpose.

66

In our CONDITION"-" Condition" is here used for

art, or profession. The Painter has formed a picture in his mind according to the description of the Poet, and he says that it was a subject fitted for the painter as well as the poet.

"Follow his strides; his lobbies fill with tendance”"One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the Harlot's, and Rake's Progresses,' which, along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall, in an old-fashioned house in shire, and seemed the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment.

"Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to suppose that in their ruling charac ter they appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer satires, (for they are not so much comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine satires,) less mingled with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in TIMON OF ATHENS.

"I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered, SHAKESPEARE;' being asked which book he esteemed the next best, replied, Hogarth.' His graphic representations are indeed books; they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Others' pictures we look at-his prints we read.

"In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with comparing the TIMON OF ATHENS of Shakespeare (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Progress' together. The story, the moral, in both, is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude

of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The Levee of the Rake,' which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's Levee, in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both. The concluding scene in the 'Rake's Progress' is perhaps superior to the last scenes of Timon."-CH. LAMB.

"This delightful writer has not observed that, in another of Hogarth's admirable transcripts of human life, the Marriage à-la-Mode,' the painter has also exhibited an idea which is found in the TIMON OF ATHENS-the faithful steward vainly endeavouring to present a warning of the approach of debt and dishonour, in his neglected accounts:

O my good lord!

At many times I brought in my accounts,
Laid them before you; you would throw them off."
KNIGHT.

"DRINK the free air"-"To drink the air, like the haustus ætherios of Virgil, is merely a poetical phrase for draw the air, or breathe. To drink the free air,' therefore, through another, is to breathe freely at his will only."-G. WAKEFIELD.

"A thousand moral paintings I can show"-" Shakespeare seems to intend, in this dialogue, to express some competition between the two great arts of imitation. Whatever the Poet declares himself to have shown, the Painter thinks he could have shown better."-JOHNSON.

"His honesty rewards him in itself"- "The meaning of the first line the Poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. The man is honest.' 'True; and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself in cluding its own rewards.'"-COLERIDGE.

"UNCLEW me quite"-"To 'unclew' is to unwind a ball of thread. To unclew' a man, is to draw out the whole mass of his fortunes."-JOHNSON.

"That I had no angry wit to be a lord"-The meaning is so obscure, that I can offer no satisfactory expla nation; and the reader must take his choice of conjectural corrections. The best, I think, is that of Judge Blackstone, who supposes the common typographical error of a transposition-" Angry that I had no wit-to be a lord." Heath would read, "That I had so wrong'd my wit to be a lord;" and M. Mason, more plausibly, That I had an angry wish to be a lord."

"ACHES contract and starve your supple joints""Aches" is here, as in act v. scene 2, and in the TEMPEST, (act i. scene 2,) to be pronounced as a dissyllable.

“—no MEED, `but he repays”—i. e. No desert; a frequent old use of the word, though it generally signifies reward. In this, Shakespeare was not peculiar: it was the language of his time. T. Heywood, in his "Silver Age," (1613,) employs to meed as to deserve :— And yet thy body meeds a better grave.