LOVER. Act I., Sc. 5.

"Your brother and his lover have embraced."

The word lover was not confined to the male. Shakspere's poem of 'The Lover's Complaint,' is the lament of a deserted mistress.

MEALED. Act IV., Sc. 2.

"Were he meal'd

With that which he corrects."

Compounded from the French mêler, to mix.

OPPOSITE. Act III., Sc. 2.

"You imagine me too unharmful an opposite."

An opposite is an adversary.

PASS ON. Act II., Sc. 1.

"What know the laws,

That thieves do pass on thieves."

Pass on is to condemn, to adjudicate. A contemporary play
A jury of brokers, impanelled,

has a similar expression.

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and deeply sworn to pass on all villains."

PASSES. Act V., Sc. 1.

"Hath look'd upon my passes."

This word has been explained as meaning here devices; pass had the meaning of state or condition, and we yet say "things have come to such a pass." It is, however, more likely that the word is used as synonymous with passage, which has the somewhat obsolete meaning of transactions.

PLANCHED. Act IV., Sc. 1.

"And to that vineyard is a planched gate."

A gate made of boards, planked.

POSSESSED. Act IV., Sc. 1.

'I have possess'd him."

I have put him in possession of the fact, informed him.

PRACTICE.

Act V., Sc. 1.

"Suborn'd against his honour

In hateful practice."

Practice is intrigue, device, craft. The word is again used in a similar sense, a few lines further on.

PROMPTURE. Act II., Sc. 4.

Though he hath fallen by prompture of his blood.".
By the prompting-the suggestion-of his blood.

PRONE. Act I., Sc. 3.

"In her youth

There is a prone and speechless dialect."

The word prone is here used in the sense of humble.

PUT TO KNOW. Act I., Sc. 1.

The phrase is equivalent to "since I cannot avoid knowing." PUTTING ON. Act IV., Sc. 2.

"Awakens me with this unwonted putting on."

Urging, incitement.

QUALIFY. Act IV., Sc. 2.

"To qualify in others."

To modify, to moderate.

QUESTS. Act IV., Sc. 1.

"Run with these false and most contrarious quests." Inquisitions, inquests; the "crowner's quest" of 'Hamlet.' QUITS. Act V., Sc. 1. Requites.

RAVIN. Act I., Sc. 3.

"Like rats that ravin down their proper bane."

To ravin is to devour or eat greedily.

REFELLED. Act V., Sc. 1.

"How he refell'd me."

Confuted, refuted, argued against me.

SCALED. Act III., Sc. 1.

"The corrupt deputy scaled."

To scale is to weigh. In 'Coriolanus' the same word is used twice, and in both instances it bears the same sense. In the Scriptures we have the same idea-"weighed in the balance, and found wanting."

SEASON. Act II., Sc. 2.

"Even for our kitchens

We kill the fowl of season."

That is, we kill the fowl only when in season.

SECURITY. Act III., Sc. 2.

"Security enough to make fellowship accursed." Surety, bond, legal security.

"When it lies starkly in the traveller's bones."

Stiffly, strongly.

STRICTURE. Act I., Sc. 4.

"A man of stricture and firm abstinence."

A man of strictness.

SUBJECT. Act III., Sc. 2.

"The greater file of the subject held the duke to be wise." The greater number of the people, the commonalty.

TERMS. Act I., Sc. 1.

"The terms

For common justice, you are as pregnant in."

Blackstone explains terms to mean the technical language of the law courts. He says, "An old book, called 'Les Termes de la Ley,' (written in the reign of Henry VIII.,) was in Shakspere's day, and is now, the accidence of young students of the law."

THOMAS TAPSTER. Act I., Sc. 2.

"What's to do here, Thomas Tapster?"

The clown's name was Pompey; but Thomas or Tom, was the common name for a Tapster. Greene, according to Mr. Dyce, uses the term "Tom Tapster."

TRICK. Act V., Sc. 1.

"I spoke it but according to the trick."

In the spirit of banter or exaggeration, a fashionable and easy sort of wit in Shakspere's times, as well as in our own.

To vail is to lower. Let your regard descend upon.

VULGARLY. Act V., Sc. 1.

"So vulgarly and personally accus'd."

Accused before the public, the vulgar.

WEIGHT. Act I., Sc. 3.

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Make us pay down for our offence by weight."

To pay down by weight, is to pay the full price or penalty. WILDERNESS. Act III., Sc. 1.

"Not such a warped slip of wilderness."

Wilderness is wildness.

PLOT AND CHARACTERS.

THERE never was in real life a stronger contrast between any series of events, any set of characters, and any code of principles by which actions and passions are to be judged, than is shown in the two stories of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor,' and 'Measure for Measure.' The one presents that good-natured view of human affairs in which vice is treated as folly. The other, the severe view, in which vice is exhibited in its madness, its subtlety, and its grossness; and the poet sits apart, like an inflexible judge, to have no tolerance for crime, and no pity for ignorance. But, throughout this drama, which Coleridge, with much truth, designates as the only painful part of Shakspere's genuine works, we have magical touches of poetry, which have entered deeply into the national mind, and there will abide for all time. Even the grosser comic scenes are not like the grossnesses of Massinger and Dekker, brought in to make a vulgar audience laugh. They show the tainted atmosphere in which the whole action of the play moves on. They come before us like the revolting incidents of the real dramas of courts of justice, which are absolutely necessary to make the truth which is sought for clear and consistent. Let the reader skip these scenes, if he so please; but let him not think that they are here for the promotion of licentiousness.

There is a story which may, or not, be historically true— a story whose truth may be doubted, because it is told of different persons, and its scene laid in various times and countries—but which is consistent with probability, and is of universal interest. It is the story of an unhappy woman who sacrifices her honour to a scoundrel in authority, to save the life of one she loves. Her sacrifice is disregarded; the life is not spared. The story is told of Colonel Kirke, a ferocious officer employed by James II. after the insurrection of Monmouth. Mr. Macaulay says "This tale an impartial

judge must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority for it is a poem written by Pomfret." Mr. Macaulay adds—“The story is one which, long before Kirke was born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a favourite theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of the fifteenth century, Rhynsault, the favourite of Charles the Bold, and Oliver le Dain, the favourite of Louis the Eleventh, had been accused of the same crime. Cintio had taken it for the subject of a romance: Whetstone had made, out of Cintio's narrative, the rude play of Promos and Cassandra; and Shakspere had borrowed from Whetstone the plot of the noble tragi-comedy of 'Measure for Measure."" It was scarcely necessary for the eloquent historian to point out the essential difference in the two plots. Cassandra yielded to Promos, upon the condition that he should afterwards marry her. Isabella rejects with holy indignation every advance of the base viceroy. The leading idea of the character of Isabella is that of one who abides the direst temptation which can be presented to an unsuspecting and loving woman-the temptation of saving the life of one most dear, by submitting to a shame which the sophistry of self-love might represent as scarcely criminal. She never doubts of her proper course. She has a great sustaining principle. The foundation of her character is religion. Out of that sacred source spring her humility—her purity, which cannot understand oblique purposes and suggestions-her courage her passionate indignation at the selfishness of her brother, who would have sacrificed her to attain his own safety. It is in the conception of such a character that we see the transcendant superiority of Shakspere over other dramatists. The "thing enskied and sainted" was not for any of his greatest contemporaries to conceive and delineate.

The German critic, Ulrici, has sketched the character of Angelo vigorously and truly:-"Angelo, who makes profession of a rigorous moral purity, boasts continually of his virtue, urges chastisement and severity, and inexorably persecutes sin and weakness-who, in fact, has also the will to be what he seems,—even he falls from his arrogant height, in a far worse manner, into the same crime that, contrary to his pledged word, he would punish with the full severity of