It has been suggested, however, that there may be an allusion to the process of decimation. 177. Than secret Romans.-Romans bound to secrecy. 177. And will not palter.-To palter (perhaps etymologically connected with falter) means to shuffle, to equivocate, to act or speak unsteadily or dubiously with the intention to deceive. It is best explained by the well-known passage in Macbeth (v. 7) :— "And be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, 177. Or we will fall for it.-Will die for it. 177. Men cautelous.-Cautelous is given to cautels, full of cautels. A cautel, from the Roman law-term cautela (a caution, or security), is mostly used in a discreditable sense by our old English writers. The caution has passed into cunning in their acceptation of the word;-it was natural that caution should be popularly so estimated;-and by cautels they commonly mean craftinesses, deceits. Thus we have in Hamlet (i. 3); "And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch The virtue of his will." And in the passage before us cautelous is cautious and wary at least to the point of cowardice, if not to that of insidiousness and trickery. 177. Old feeble carrions.-Carrions, properly masses of dead and putrefying flesh, is a favourite term of contempt with Shakespeare. 177. Such suffering souls, etc.-See the note on that gentleness as in 44. In the present speech we have both the old and the new phraseology ;—such . . . that in one line, and such . . . as in the next.-Suffering souls are patient, all-enduring souls. 177. The even virtue of our enterprise.-The even virtue is the firm and steady virtue. The our is emphatic. 177. Nor the insuppressive mettle.-The keenness and ardour incapable of being suppressed (however illegitimate such an application of the word may be). For mettle see 102. 177. To think that.-The easiest supplement, or filling up of the ellipsis, is, so as to think. 177. Is guilty of a several bastardy.-The etymology of the word bastard is uncertain. Shakespeare probably took his notion of what it radically expressed from the convertible phrase base-born. By a several bastardy here is meant a special or distinct act of baseness, or of treason against ancestry and honourable birth. 178. But what of Cicero? etc.-Both the prosody and the sense direct us to lay the emphasis on him. 178. He will stand very strong.-He will take part with us decidedly and warmly. 181. It shall be said, his judgment, etc.-Mr. Guest, in the paper" On English Verbs," in the Second Volume of the Proceedings of the Philological Society, which has been already referred to, adduces some examples to show that the primary sense of shall is to Hence the use of should which is still common in the sense of ought. "The use of shall to denote future time," Mr. Guest continues, "may be traced to a remote antiquity in our language; that of will is owe. of much later origin, and prevailed chiefly in our northern dialects.-Writers, however, who paid much attention to their style generally used these terms with greater precision. The assertion of will or of duty seems to have been considered by them as implying to a certain extent the power to will or to impose a duty. As a man has power to will for himself only, it was only in the first person that the verb will could be used with this signification; and in the other persons it was left free to take that latitude of meaning which popular usage had given to it. Again, the power which overrides the will to impose a duty must proceed from some external agency; and consequently shall could not be employed to denote such power in the first person. In the first person, therefore, it was left free to follow the popular meaning, but in the other two was tied to its original and more precise signification. These distinctions still continue a shibboleth for the natives of the two sister kingdoms. Walter Scott, as is well known to his readers, could never thoroughly master the difficulty." In the Third Edition of Dr. Latham's English Language, pp. 470-474, may be found two other explanations; the first by the late Archdeacon Julius Charles Hare (from the Cambridge Philological Museum, II. 203), the second by Professor De Morgan (from the Proceedings of the Philological Society, IV. 185; No. 90, read 25th Jan. 1850). The manner of using shall and will which is now so completely established in England, and which throughout the greater part of the country is so perfectly uniform among all classes, was as yet only growing up in the early part of the seventeenth century. This was very clearly shown some years ago by a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, by comparing many passages of the authorized version of the Scriptures, published in 1611, with the same passages in the preceding translation, called the Bishops' Bible, which had appeared in 1568. The old use of shall, instead of will, to indicate simple futurity, with the 2nd and 3rd persons, as well as with the 1st, is still not uncommon with Shakespeare. Here, in this and the next line, are two instances-"It shall be said," "shall no whit appear." So afterwards we have, in 187, "This shall mark our purpose necessary;" in 238, "Cæsar should be a beast without a heart;" in 351, "The enemies of Cæsar shall say this;" in 620, “The enemy, marching along by them, By them shall make a fuller number up." 181. Shall no whit appear.-Whit is the A. Saxon wiht, any thing that exists, a creature. It is the same word with wight, which we now use only for a man, in the same manner as we have come in the language of the present day to understand creature almost exclusively in the sense of a living creature, although it was formerly used freely for every thing created,—as when Bacon says (Advance. of Learning, B. i.), “The wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby;" or as it is written in our authorized version of the Scriptures (1 Tim. iv. 4), "Every creature of God (Tây κтíσμа cov) is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving." No whit is not anything, nowhat, not at all. 182. Let us not break with him.--That is, Let us not break the matter to him. This is the sense in which the idiom to break with is most frequently found in Shakespeare. Thus, in Much Ado About Nothing (i. 1), the Prince, Don Pedro, says to his favourite Don Claudio, "If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it; and I will break with her;" that is, I will open the matter to her. And again, in the same scene; "Then after to her father will I break." So in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (iii. 1), “I am to break with thee of some affairs." But when in The Merry Wives of Windsor (iii. 2), Slender says to Ford, in answer to his invitation to dinner, "We have appointed to dine with Mistress Anne, and I would not break with her for more money than I'll speak of," he means he would not break his engagement with her. The phrase is nowhere, I believe, used by Shakespeare in the only sense which it now bears, namely, to quarrel with. 186. A shrewd contriver.—The adjective shrewd is generally admitted to be connected with the substantive shrew; and according to Horne Tooke (Div. of Purley, 457-9), both are formations from the A.S. verb syrwan, syrewan, or syrewian, meaning to vex, to molest, to cause mischief to, from which he also deduces sorrow, sorry, sore, and sour. Bosworth (who gives the additional forms syrwian, syrwyan, searwian, searwan, searian, serian), interprets the A.S. verb as meaning to prepare, endeavour, strive, arm, to lay snares, entrap, take, bruise. A shrew, according to this notion, might be inferred to be one who vexes or molests; and shrewd will mean endowed with the qualities or disposition of a shrew. Shrew, as Tooke remarks, was formerly applied to a male as well as to a female. So, on the other hand, paramour and lover, |