an age, in which it is possible to refer such a practise to the want of a knowledge of the common rules of grammar. Such then, from whatever cause arising, being the actual indifference to the application of this rule, even where the verb immediately follows the nominative case, and Shakespeare, as his ear guided, giving occasionally into a practise into which he had been led, and has been followed, by scholars and princes, this departure from rule, or, more properly, such exceptions to it as the present, whatever may be pretended by modern refinement, were then at least warranted; and in familiar dialogue may yet be admitted as judicious. In this case, where, after a genitive plural preceded by a nominative singular, a plural verb, immediately following the genitive plural, forms the sentence, the ear does not only not feel this use of the verb as any way offensive, but, on the contrary, seems to call for it: the sound of the plural s misleads and occasions the ear to refer itself to the plural genitive, as if it were the legitimate nominative case: at the same time it is urged to this expedient for the purpose of avoiding an offensive accumulation and clashing of ss; as the plural genitive and verb singular, thus brought so near together invariably produce this consequence. To the ear, therefore, it belongs altogether to decide; there can be no question of grammar: or, if such were raised, it ought to be in the plain and common case; as in the quotation from Queen Elizabeth, and the second instance from King James, where the verbs immediately follow the nominative cases; or where, as is frequent in Shakespeare, and is found in the Bible and our best writers of that day, only other members of sentences, not plural nouns, are interposed. But Mr. Malone tells us here (and elsewhere, L. L. L. "Make Heav'n drowsy with the harmony." that it should be otherwise, and that it is Shakespeare that is in error; although he has there pointed out an instance ("The number of the names together were about an hundred and twenty." Acts I. 15.), where there is no clashing of consonants. And this is also the use of Shakespeare, where another branch of a sentence is interposed between the plural genitive and verbs. "The venom of such looks, we fairly hope, "Have lost their quality." H. V. Isab. V. 2. And, where other branches of sentences are also interposed, closing with plural nouns in contact with the verb, (as in "How oft the sight of means, to do ill deeds, "Make ill deeds done." K. John, IV. 2, K. John), there seems additional reason to insist upon this exception. Under these combinations then, this course must have been thought consistent with good taste and good writing; and, as is conceived, is called for more particularly in poetry, where the music of numbers ought to make a part of the consideration: at that day the want of agreement between noun and verb, even where nothing was interposed, was not thought by scholars an indispensable rule of grammar, or barbarous or offensive even to the ear of courtiers; and this violation of it would frequently escape even their ear, though their eye might detect it. The courtly Puttenham and the poet Daniel, each of them giving lessons on the subject of their art, afford such examples: “Three causes moves us to this figure." Arte of English Poesie, 1589, p. 149; and "The distribution of giftes are universall, and all seasons hath them in some sort." Daniel's Apologie for Ryme, 1603, in answer to Campion's Observations in the Arte of English Poesie, 1602; and "Superfluous humours destroyeth naturall hete." Vulgaria Hormanni 4to. 1530. Signat. I. 1. Closing these instances with a reading of our author, which after the severest scrutiny has been approved as the true one by every critic, except Steevens, from Warburton to Ritson, "Masters of passion sways it to the mood," &c. M. of V. IV. 1. Shylock, we shall add, that this usage of a plural for the purpose of giving effect, is carried much further in Macbeth, where it is taken up from the general impression of the dialogue. The Doctor, speaking of Lady Macbeth, says, " You see her eyes are open?" Gent. "Ay, but their sense are shut." V. 1. Their sense, i. e. the sense of her eyes, here carried along with that word (which is no more than a pronoun possessive, and wanting that termination of plural nouns that usually affects the ear) a plural image; and the loose grammar of the age allowed the annexation of a plural verb. Mr. Malone, in the close of the first scene of the Tempest, where Ariel enters invisible, Reed's edition, IV. 78, says, "The plural noun, joined to a verb in the singular number, is to be met with in almost every page of the first folio." Such has been shewn to be the case in the pages of his contemporaries. A playwright, bound to copy the manners, has full warrant, without laying any particular ground for it, to use the familiar language of his time and the poet, who must not neglect the flow and harmony of his numbers, is, for that reason, wherever it shall : answer his purpose, called upon to employ it. (37) A little more than kin, and less than kind] More than a common relation, having a confusedly accumulated title of relationship, you have less than benevolent, or less than even natural feeling by a play upon this last word, kind, in its double use. and double sense; its use as an adjective and importing benevolent, and its sense as a substantive and signifying nature: the sense in which he presently afterwards uses it adjectively; "Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless, villain!" II. 2, Haml. where kindless means unnatural. And in this last sense of nature it is used, associated with kin, in the tragedy of Gorboduc, 1561. "Traitor to kin and kind, to sire and me." IV. 1. A similar idea more than once occurs again. Donalbain says, "The near in blood, the nearer bloody." Macb. II. 3. and "Nearer in bloody thoughts and not in blood." Rich. III. Glost. II. 1. Mr. Steevens has supplied several apt instances of the joint use of these ideas and words: "The nearer we are in blood, the further we must be from love; the greater the kindred is, the less the kindness must be."-Mother Bombie, 1594, and in Gorboduc, "In kinde a father, but not kindelynesse." "Traitor to kinne and kinde."-Battle of Alcasar, 1594. We have also, in his Venus and Adonis, "O had thy mother borne as bad a minde, "Shee had not brought forth thee, but died unkind.” 4to. 1594. And Puttenham, in his Arte of Engl. Poesie, 4to. 1589, has "Whose kinne were never kinde, nor never good." p. 189. See M. ado, &c. IV. 1. Claud. (38) I am too much i' the sun.] By a quibble, as Dr. Farmer ingeniously has suggested, between sun and son, it must mean, it is conceived, "I have too much about me of the character of expectancy, at the same time that I am prematurely torn from my sorrows, and thrown into the broad glare of the sun and day: have too much of the son and successor and public staging, without possession of my rights, and without a due interval to assuage my grief." (39) all that lives] Such is the reading of the quartos and folio. That of 1632 gives live. All may be used for every thing: "the scope, &c. allow," supra, p. 14. but see (40) Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,] 66 Thy eyes are dim'd with tears, thy cheeks are wan, This play is not always ridiculed: neither does it so deserve. (41) But I have that within, which passeth show; These, but the trappings and the suits of woe.] (42) my grief lies all within; "And these external manners of lament "Are merely shadows to the unseen grief, "That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul." R. II. with no less nobility of love, Than that which dearest father bears his son, MALONE. Do I impart toward you.]. With a degree no less high. Not to be better explained than by reference, as Mr. Steevens observes, to the character of the Ghost's passion for the queen. "To me, whose love was of that dignity." Impart is dispense, hold out. Impart, I say; give him twenty pieces." Shak. Marmyon's Fine Companion. (43) No jocund health, that Denmark drinks to-day] "A lively French traveller being asked what he had seen in Denmark, replied, Rien de singulier, sinon qu'on y chante tous les jours, le roi boit;' alluding to the French mode of celebrating Twelfth-day." See De Brieux, Origines de quelques coutumes, p. 56. Heywood, in his Philocothonista, or The Drunkard opened, dissected, and anatomized, 1635, 4to. speaking of what he calls the vinosity of nations, says of the Danes, that "they have made a profession thereof from antiquity, and are the first upon record that brought their wassell-bowles and elbowe-deep healthes into this land."-Douce's Illustrat. 8vo. 1807. II. 219. The priest, in like manner, is to be excused, who, having taken his preparatives over evening, when all men cry (as the manner is) The king drinketh, chanting his masse the next morning, fell asleepe in his memento; and when he awoke, added, with a loude voice, The king drinketh."-R. C.'s H. Stephens's Apology for Herodotus, fo. 1608. p. 189. (44) And the king's rouse the heaven shall bruit again] Bruit is spread abroad. See bruited, Macb. V. 6. Macb. Bailey in his dictionary derives the Fr. carouser, from carausz, Teut. i. e. "fill it all out: and Minshieu, carouse, from gar, altogether, and ausz, out, Germ.: ut sit quasi exinanitio sive evaporatio poculi: the sense also in which it seems to be used by Greene. "Now time proffers the full cup; and the devill take me, if I carouse it not." Orpharion, 4to. 1599, p. 25. Mr. Douce says, “ Though the original word is lost, it remains in the German rausch. The Greeks, too, had their καρωσις, nimia ebrietas." Illustr. II. 205. From the following passage in Dekker's Gul's Hornbook, 1609, Mr. Steevens conceives the word rouse may be of Danish extraction: "Teach me, thou sovereigne skinker, how to take the German's upsy freeze, the Danish rousa, the Switzer's stoop of rhenish." (45) too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself] "To thaw or resolve that, which is frozen. regelo." Baret's Alv. It has nearly the sense of dissolve; that which resolver and resolution, or analysis in science, yet retain. Our author has the same sentiment in II. H. IV. “And the Continent, "Weary of solid firmness, melt itself "Into the sea." III. 1. K. Hen. This use of the word was very common. Mr. Todd instances Bale's Br. Chron. of Lord Cobham. "He commended his soul into the hands of God; and so departed hence most cristenlye; his body resolved into ashes." (46) His cannon 'gainst self-slaughter] Cannon is the reading of all the old copies: and cannon and canon (xavwv) norma, regula, appear to be the same word. Certainly no different origin has distinctly been assigned them. On the contrary, in modern French the word in each of its senses is written canon. Minshieu spells both cannon; and, speaking of the piece of ordnance, says, "Canna muralis is a warlike engine to batter walls, and so called because cast long after the manner of great reeds; and the terms, applied to it as a rule or line, are so much in common to both, as in some degree to identify them. On Milton's candlelight visiting us, "With its long levell'd rule of streaming light," Com. V. 340. Dr. Hurd observes, that in Euripides a ray of the sun is called ŋedis navwv; to which Mr. Warton adds, that in P. Lost, 543, the sun is said to " level his evening rays." (47) Hyperion to a satyr] In this, as in almost every other character, represented as a model of beauty. Dr. Farmer says that Spenser uses this word with the same error in quantity. The fact is, not only did our old poets totally disregard it, but the moderns also have in this instance made it altogether subservient to their convenience. Shakespeare accents the same word, Posthumus, differently in the same play, Cymbeline and Mr. Mitford says, "that Spenser has Iōle, Pylādes, Caphǎreus, Rotean: Gascoygne, in his Ultimum Vale: "Kind Erato and wanton Thalia." Turberville, in the Ventrous Lover, St. 1. "If so Leander durst from Abydon to Sest." Lord Sterline in his Third Hour, St. 13, p. 50. "Then Pleiades, Arcturus, Orion, all." and, p. 87, "Which carrying Orton safely on the shore." And in Sir P. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella instances "In cadence to the tunes, which Amphyon's lyre did yield." Gray's Works, 4to. 1816. I. 36. |