As to be cast forth in the common air, K. Rich. Return again, and take an oath with thee. 11 Compassionate is apparently here used in the sense of complaining, plaintive; but no other instance of the word in this sense has occurred to the commentators. May it not be an error of the press, for ' so passionate?" which would give the required meaning to the passage; passionate being frequently used for to express passion or grief, to complain. Now leave we this amorous hermit to passionate and playne his misfortune.'-Palace of Pleasure, vol. ii. Ll. 5. 'And cannot passionate our tenfold griefs.' Tit. Andron. Act iii. Sc. 2. Embrace each other's love in banishment; Nor never look upon each other's face; Nor never write, regreet, nor reconcile This lowering tempest of your home-bred hate; Nor never by advised 12 purpose meet, To plot, contrive, or complot any ill, 'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land. Boling. I swear. Nor. And I, to keep all this. Boling. Norfolk, so far as to mine enemy 13; Nor. No, Bolingbroke; if ever I were traitor, [Exit 14. K. Rich. Uncle, even in the glasses of thine eyes I see thy grieved heart: thy sad aspéct Hath from the number of his banish'd years Pluck'd four away;-Six frozen winters spent, Return [To BOLING.] with welcome home from Boling. How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs, End in a word; Such is the breath of kings. banishment. 12 Premeditated, deliberated. 13 The first folio reads 'So fare.' This line seems to be addressed by way of caution to Mowbray, lest he should think that Bolingbroke was about to conciliate him. 14 The duke of Norfolk went to Venice, 'where for thought and melancholy he deceased.'-Holinshed. Gaunt. I thank my liege, that, in regard of me, He shortens four years of my son's exíle : But little vantage shall I reap thereby; For, ere the six years, that he hath to spend, Can change their moons, and bring their times about, My oil-dried lamp, and time-bewasted light, Shall be extinct with age, and endless night; My inch of taper will be burnt and done, And blindfold death not let me see my son. K. Rich. Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live. Gaunt. But not a minute, king, that thou canst give: Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow, And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow 15 : Thou canst help time to furrow me with age, But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage; Thy word is current with him for my death; But, dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath. K. Rich. Thy son is banish'd upon good advice 16, Whereto thy tongue a party 17 verdict gave; Why at our justice seem'st thou then to lower? Gaunt. Things sweet to taste, prove in digestion sour. You urg'd me as a judge; but I had rather, 15 It is a matter of very melancholy consideration that all human advantages confer more power of doing evil than good. Alas, I look'd, when some of you should say, K. Rich. Cousin, farewell; and, uncle, bid him so; Six years we banish him, and he shall go. [Flourish. Exeunt K. RICH. and Train. Aum. Cousin, farewell; what presence must not know, From where you do remain, let paper show. Mar. My lord, no leave take I: for I will ride, As far as land will let me, by your side. Gaunt. O, to what purpose dost thou hoard thy words, That thou return'st no greeting to thy friends? Gaunt. Thy grief is but thy absence for a time. ten. Gaunt. Call it a travel that thou tak'st for pleasure. Which finds it an enforced pilgrimage. Gaunt. The sullen passage of thy weary steps Esteem a foil, wherein thou art to set The precious jewel of thy home-return. Boling. Nay, rather, every tedious stride I make 20 Will but remember me, what a deal of world I wander from the jewels that I love. Must I not serve a long apprenticehood To foreign passages; and in the end, Having my freedom, boast of nothing else, But that I was a journeyman to grief? 20 This speech and that which follows are not in the folio. Gaunt. All places that the eye of heaven 21 visits, Are to a wise man ports and happy havens: There is no virtue like necessity. Think not the king did banish thee; But thou the king: Woe doth the heavier sit, The grass whereon thou tread'st, the presence strew'd 23; 21 So Nonnus :-' αἰθέρος ὄμμα; i. e. the sun. Thus in the Rape of Lucrece : And in Spenser's Faerie Queene, b. i. c. iii. st. 4 : Her angel face As the great eye of heaven shyned bright.' 22 Shakspeare probably remembered Euphues' exhortation to Botonio to take his exile patiently. Nature hath given to man a country no more than she hath a house, or lands, or livings. Socrates would neither call himself an Athenian, neither a Grecian; but a citizen of the world. Plato would never accompt him banished, that had the sunne, fire, ayre, water, and earth, that he had before; where he felt the winter's blast, and the summer's blaze; where the same sunne and same moone shined : whereby he noted that every place was a country to a wise man, and all parts a palace to a quiet mind. When it was cast in Diogenes' teeth, that the Sinoponetes had banished him from Pontus; Yea, said he, I them of Diogenes.' 23 We have other allusions to the practice of strewing rushes over the floor of the presence chamber in Shakspeare. So in Cymbeline: ، Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes ere he waken'd The chastity he wounded.' See Hentzner's account of the presence chamber in the palace at Greenwich, 1598.-Itiner. p. 135. |