And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual, well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way; and be no more oppos'd
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies:
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,
No more shall cut his master. Therefore, friends,
As far as to the sepulchre of Christ',

thirsty is not a very suitable epithet to be applied to invaders. Mr. Malone seems to think that the reading of the old copies, entrance, presents a broken metaphor. I should wish to adopt Mr. Douce's conjecture, and read-entrails, and the meaning will then be: "No more the thirsty entrails of this soil shall cause her to daub her lips with her own children's blood." It is not, I apprehend, an uncommon licence in language to represent the cause of a thing as actually doing it. So, in Antonio and Mellida: "Now lions half-clem'd entrails roar for food."

Here surely it is not meant that the entrails roared, which would suggest a ludicrous image; but that the lion, whose entrails were half-clem'd with hunger, roared for food. BOSWELL.

4- like the METEORS OF A TROUBLED HEAVEN,] Namely, long streaks of red, which represent the lines of armies; the appearance of which, and their likeness to such lines, gave occasion to all the superstition of the common people concerning armies in the air, &c. WARBURTON.

5 As far as to the sepulchre, &c.] The lawfulness and justice of the holy wars have been much disputed; but perhaps there is a principle on which the question may be easily determined. If it be part of the religion of the Mahometans to extirpate by the sword all other religions, it is, by the laws of self-defence, lawful for men of every other religion, and for Christians among others, to make war upon Mahometans, simply as Mahometans, as men obliged by their own principles to make war upon Christians, and only lying in wait till opportunity shall promise them success.

JOHNSON.

Upon this note Mr. Gibbon makes the following observation : "If the reader will turn to the first scene of The First Part of King Henry IV. he will see in the text of Shakspeare, the natural feelings of enthusiasm; and in the notes of Dr. Johnson, the workings of a bigotted, though vigorous mind, greedy of every pretence to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed." Gibbon's History, vol. vi. 9, 4to. edit. REED. Mr. Gibbon's petulant remark was a gross misrepresentation of Johnson's meaning. He does not say that Mahometans may be persecuted because their creed is false; but, that we are justified,

6

(Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engag'd to fight,)
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy';
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb
To chase these pagans, in those holy fields,
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet,
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.
But this our purpose is a twelve-month old,
And bootless 'tis to tell you-we will go;
Therefore we meet not now':-Then let me hear
Of you, my gentle cousin Westmoreland,
What yesternight our council did decree,
In forwarding this dear expedience".

WEST. My liege, this haste was hot in question, And many limits of the charge set down

9

upon the ground of self-defence, in making war upon those who are taught by their creed that it is their duty to attack us.

BOSWELL.

6 shall we LEVY ;] To levy a power of English as far as to the sepulchre of Christ, is an expression quite unexampled, if not corrupt. We might propose lead, without violence to the sense, or too wide a deviation from the traces of the letters. In Pericles, however, the same verb is used in a mode as uncommon :

"Never did thought of mine levy offence." STEEVENS. "The expression-" As far as to the sepulchre," &c. does not, as I conceive, signify-to the distance of, &c. but―" so far only as regards the sepulchre," &c. DOUCE.

"The expression, (says Mr. Gifford in his Ben Jonson, vol. v. p. 138,) is neither unexampled nor corrupt; but good authorized English. One instance of it is before me: Scipio, before he levied his force to the walles of Carthage, gave his soldiers the print of the citie on a cake to be devoured.' Gosson's School of Abuse, 1587, 1. 4. BOSWELL.

7 Therefore we meet not now:] i. e. not on that account do we now meet ;—we are not now assembled, to acquaint you with our intended expedition. MALONE.

8- this dear EXPEDIENCE.] For expedition.

So, in Antony and Cleopatra:

WARBURTON.

"The cause of our expedience to the queen." STEEVENS. And many LIMITS] Limits, for estimates. Warburton.

But yesternight: when, all athwart, there came
A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news;
Whose worst was,—that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower,
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
A* thousand of his people butchered:

Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly, shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done', as may not be,
Without much shame, re-told or spoken of.

K. HEN. It seems then, that the tidings of this broil

Brake off our business for the Holy land.

WEST. This, match'd with other, did, my gracious lord;

For more uneven and unwelcome news

Came from the north, and thus it did import,
On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there,
Young Harry Percy 2, and brave Archibald 3,
That ever-valiant and approved Scot,

* Folio, And a.

3

Limits, as Mr. Heath observes, may mean, outlines, rough sketches, or calculations. STEEVENS

Limits may mean the regulated and appointed times for the conduct of the business in hand.' So, in Measure for Measure :"between the time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea." Again, in Macbeth:

1

I'll make so bold to call,

"For 'tis my limited service." MALONE.

By those Welshwomen done,] Thus Holinshed, p. 528: "-such shameful villanie executed upon the carcasses of the dead men by the Welshwomen; as the like (I doo-beleeve) hath never or sildome beene practised." See T. Walsingham, p. 557. STEEVENS.

Young HARRY PERCY,] Holinshed's History of Scotland, p. 240, says: "This Harry Percy was surnamed, for his often pricking, Henry Hotspur, as one that seldom times rested, if

there were anie service to be done abroad." TOLLET.

· Archibald,] Archibald Douglas, earl Douglas. STEEVENS.

At Holmedon met,

Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour;
As by discharge of their artillery,

And shape of likelihood, the news was told;
For he that brought them, in the very heat
And pride of their contention did take horse,
Uncertain of the issue any way.

K. HEN. Here is a dear and true-industrious
friend,

Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse,
Stain'd with the variation of each soil *

4

Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours;
And he hath brought us smooth and welcome news.
The earl of Douglas is discomfited;

Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights,
Balk'd in their own blood3, did sir Walter see

4 Stain'd with the variation of each soil-] No circumstance could have been better chosen to mark the expedition of Sir Walter. It is used by Falstaff in a similar manner: "As it were to ride day and night, and not to deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to shift me, but to stand stained with travel."

HENLEY.

5 BALK'D in their own blood,] I should suppose, that the author might have written either bath'd, or bak'd, i. e. encrusted over with blood dried upon them. A passage in Heywood's Iron Age, 1632, may countenance the latter of these conjectures : "Troilus lies embak'd

"In his cold blood."

Again, in Hamlet :

horribly trick'd

"With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
"Bak'd and impasted," &c.

Again, in Heywood's Iron Age:

66

Again, ibid. :

66

bak'd in blood and dust."

as bak'd in blood." STEEVENS.

Balk is a ridge; and particularly, a ridge of land: here is therefore a metaphor; and perhaps the poet means, in his bold and careless manner of expression: "Ten thousand bloody carcasses piled up together in a long heap."-"A ridge of dead bodies piled up in blood." If this be the meaning of balked, for the greater exactness of construction, we might add to the pointing, viz.

On Holmedon's plains: Of prisoners, Hotspur took Mordake earl of Fife, and eldest son

To beaten Douglas ; and the earls of Athol,

"Balk'd, in their own blood," &c.

"Piled up in a ridge, and in their own blood," &c. But without this punctuation, as at present, the context is more poetical, and presents a stronger image.

A balk, in the sense here mentioned, is a common expression în Warwickshire, and the northern counties. It is used in the same signification in Chaucer's Plowman's Tale, p. 182, edit. Urr. v. 2428. WARTON.

Balk'd in their own blood, I believe, means, laid in heaps or hillocks, in their own blood. Blithe's England's Improvement, p. 118, observes: "The mole raiseth balks in meads and pastures." In Leland's Itinerary, vol. v. p. 16 and 118, vol. vii. p. 10, a balk signifies a bank or hill. Mr. Pope, in the Iliad, has the same thought:

"On heaps the Greeks, on heaps the Trojans bled,
"And thick'ning round them rise the hills of dead."
TOLLET.

In Chapman's Translation of the Shield of Achilles, 4to. 1598, the word balk also occurs:

"Amongst all these all silent stood their king,

Upon a balk, his scepter in his hand." STEEVEns. 6 Mordake THE earl of Fife, and eldest son

To beaten Douglas ;] The article the, which is wanting in the old copies, was supplied by Mr. Pope. Mr. Malone, however, thinks it needless, and says "the word earl is here used as a dissyllable."

Mordake earl of Fife, who was son to the duke of Albany, regent of Scotland, is here called the son of earl Douglas, through a mistake into which the poet was led by the omission of a comma in the passage of Holinshed from whence he took this account of the Scottish prisoners. It stands thus in the historian: "— and of prisoners, Mordacke earl of Fife, son to the gouvernour Archembald earle Dowglas," &c. The want of a comma after gouvernour, makes these words appear to be the description of one and the same person, and so the poet understood them; but by putting the stop in the proper place, it will then be manifest that in this list Mordake, who was son to the governor of Scotland, was the first prisoner, and that Archibald earl of Douglas was the second, and so on. STEEVENS.

Without reading earl as a dissyllable, the line will not be more defective than many which occur in our poet and his contemporaries. See the Essay on Shakspeare's Versification. BOSWELL