friends?-To prick is to note or mark off. The Sheriff's [in England] are still so nominated by a puncture or mark being made at the selected names in the list of qualified persons, and this is the vox signata, or established word, for the operation. 352. Swayed from the point. - Borne away, as by a wave, from the point which I had in view and for which I was making. "This gram 352. Friends am I with you all. matical impropriety," Henley very well remarks, "is still so prevalent, as that the omission of the anomalous s would give some uncouthness to the sound of an otherwise familiar expression." We could not, indeed, say "Friend am I with you all;" we should have to turn the expression in some other way. In Troilus and Cressida, iv. 4, however, we have "And I'll grow friend with danger." Nor does the pluralism of friends depend upon that of you all: "I am friends with you is equally the phrase in addressing a single person. I with you am is felt to be equivalent to I and you are. 353. Our reasons are so full of good regard. So full of what is entitled to favorable regard. Compare "many of the best respect" in 48. 353. That, were you, Antony, the son of Cæsar. By all means to be thus pointed, so as to make Antony the vocative, the name addressed; not, as it sometimes ludicrously is, "were you Antony the son of Cæsar." Son, of course, is emphatic. 354. Produce his body to the market-place. We now say "produce to" with a person only. [But, as White suggests, Antony here uses produce in its radical sense, to bear forth.] 354. Speak in the order of his funeral. - In the order is in the course of the ceremonial. [Com pare the expression in the Prayer Book, "The Order for the Burial of the Dead."] Compare "That Antony speak in his funeral," in 356; and "Come I to speak in Cæsar's funeral," in 397. 356. The Aside here is not marked in the old copies. 357. By your pardon. with, your pardon, leave, leave is still used. - I will explain, by, or permission. "By your This is the reading of 357. Have all true rites. all the old copies. For true Pope substituted due, which is also the correction of Mr. Collier's MS. annotator. [But, as Collier says, "the change seems rather for the worse," and he does not adopt it.] 357. It shall advantage more than do us wrong. -This old verb, to advantage, is fast slipping out of our possession. Here again we have, according to the old grammar, simple futurity indicated by shall with the third person. See 181. 358. I know not what may fall. We now commonly say to fall out, rather than simply to fall, or to befall. 359. You shall not in your funeral speech blame The sense and the prosody concur in demanding an emphasis on us. us. 359. And say you do't. - We do not now in serious or elevated writing use this kind of contraction. 361. The original stage direction after this speech is, "Exeunt. Manet Antony." 362. O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. - So in all the early editions, and also in the greater number of those of the last century [and in Hudson's and White's]; but unaccountably altered into "thou piece of bleeding earth" in the Variorum edition of Malone and Boswell, the text of which was generally taken as the standard for subsequent reprints, till the true reading was restored by Mr. Knight. 362. That ever lived in the tide of times. This must mean, apparently, in the course or flow of times. Tide and time, however, properly mean the same thing. Tide is only another form of.Zeit, the German word answering to our English time. [Compare spring-tide, even-tide, etc.] Time, again, is the French tems, or temps, the Latin tempus (which has also in one of its senses, the part of the head where time is indicated to the touch by the pulsations of the blood, been strangely corrupted, both in French and English, into temple,- distinguished, however, in the former tongue from temple, a church, by a difference of gender, and also written tempe). [Time is Saxon (tima), not French.] 362. [Woe to the hand. So the Folio of 1623. Dyce and White read hands.] 362. A curse shall light upon the loins of men. This is one of the most remarkable of the new readings for which we are indebted to Mr. Collier's MS. annotator. The old printed text, "the limbs of men," was felt by every editor not enslaved to the First Folio to be in the highest degree suspicious. By most of them the limbs of men seems to have been understood to mean nothing more than the bodies or persons of men generally. Steevens, however, says, Antony means that a future curse shall commence in distempers seizing on the limbs of men, and be succeeded by commotion, cruelty, and desolation over Italy." A strangely precise style of prophecy! For limbs Warburton proposed to substitute line, Hanmer kind, and Johnson lives," unless," he adds, "we read these lymmes 66 of men, that is, these bloodhounds of men." The lymm, lym, lime, limer, or limehound was used in hunting the wild boar. The loins of men means, of course, the generations of men. Even if proposed as nothing more, this would have been one of the most plausible of conjectures, and would probably have at once commanded general acceptance. Warburton hit upon nearly what seems to have been the meaning of Shakespeare, with his line of men; but how much less Shakespearian the expression! [Hudson and White give limbs, but the latter considers it a very doubtful reading, and is "almost sure" that Shakespeare, wrote "the Sonnes of men." Staunton suggests "the tombs of men,” and quotes in illustration the common Oriental malediction, "Cursed be thy grave!"] 362. Quartered with the hands of war. - So afterwards, in 425, "Here is himself, marred, as you see, with traitors." See 124. We should now rather regard the hands as the agents, and say "by the hands of war." 362. With Ate by his side. This Homeric goddess had taken a strong hold of Shakespeare's imagination. In Much Ado About Nothing, ii. 1, Benedick, inveighing to Don Pedro against the Lady Beatrice, says, "You shall find her the infernal Ate in good apparel." In King John, iv. 1, John's mother, Queen Elinor, is described by Chatillon as "an Ate stirring him to blood and strife." And in Love's Labour's Lost, v. 2, Biron, at the representation of the Nine Worthies, calls out, "More Ates, more Ates; stir them on! stir them on!" Where did Shakespeare get acquainted with this divinity, whose name does not occur, I believe, even in any Latin author? 362. Cry Havoc !- Havoc is the Saxon hafoc, meaning waste, destruction; whence the hawk, so called as the bird of waste and ravage. Johnson states on the authority of a learned correspondent (known to be Sir William Blackstone), that “in the military operations of old times, havoc was the word by which declaration was made that no quarter should be given." Milton in one place makes a verb of this substantive: "To waste and havoc yonder world" (Par. Lost, x. 617). 362. Let slip the dogs of war. Notwithstanding the apparently considerable difference between schlüpfen and schlafen, by which they are severally represented in modern German, slip may possibly have been originally the same word with sleep. In the Anglo-Saxon, although the common form is slæpan for to sleep and slipan for to slip, we find indications of slepan having been used for both. To sleep, or fall asleep, may have been regarded as a gliding, or softly moving, away. To let slip a dog at a deer, etc., was, as Malone remarks, the technical phrase of Shakespeare's time. Hence the leash, out of which it was thus allowed to escape, was called the slips. The proper meaning, indeed, of leash (in French lesse, or laisse, from laisser), is that which lets go; and this is probably also the true meaning of the Spanish lasso; although, that which lets go, or from which we let go, being also necessarily that which has previously detained, lesse, lasso, leash, and also lease, have all, as well as slip, come to be regarded as involving rather the latter notion (of detention or tenure), that being really the principal or most important office which what is called a slip or leash seems to perform. It was perhaps in this way also that the verb to let acquired the sense |