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irregularity in Fare (that is, go) thee well. [Verbs of motion in Saxon are followed by the dative: sit thee is nothing more than a case of this dative, perhaps; or if a reflective verb, it is nothing strange.] -The marginal "Whispering" at this speech is modern; and so is the "Whispers him” at 764.

770. That it runs over. So that, as in 15.

773. Here in Philippi fields.-A common enough form of expression; as Chelsea Fields, Kensington Gardens. There is no need of an no need of an apostrophe to Philippi. [North's Plutarch has "Philippian fields."]

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See 725.

775. Hold thou my sword hilts. 777. There is no tarrying here. So in Macbeth, v. 5, "There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here.” The expression is from North's Plutarch: " Volumnius denied his request, and so did many others. And, amongst the rest, one of them said, there was no tarrying for them there, but that they must neels fly."

778. Farewell to you;· etc. Mr. Collier appends the stage direction, "Shaking hands severally."

778. Farewell to thee too, Strato. In all the Folios this stands, "Farewell to thee, to Strato." The correction is one of the many made by Theobald which have been universally acquiesced in. It appears to have escaped Mr. Collier's MS. annotator. 780. Hence; I will follow. - This is the reading of all the old copies. Pope adds thee, in order to make a complete line of the two hemistichs. — The "Exeunt Clitus," etc., is modern.

780. Thou art a fellow of a good respect. See 48.

780. Thy life hath had some smatch of honor

in it.

meaning taste.

Smatch is only another form of smack, Smack is the word which Shakespeare commonly uses, both as noun and verb. [White has "smack."]

In the early editions, the stage direction after the last speech of Brutus (782) is, simply, "Dies;" and in the Entry that follows Antony is placed before Octavius, and "their Army” is “the Army.”

787. I will entertain them. Receive them into my service.

787. Wilt thou bestow thy time with me? Here is another sense of bestow, in addition to that in 139, which is now lost. Bestow thy time with me means give up thy time to me.

"To

788. If Messala will prefer me to you. prefer," Reed observes, "seems to have been the established phrase for recommending a servant.” And he quotes from The Merchant of Venice, ii. 2, what Bassanio says to Launcelot, ·

-

Shylock, thy master, spoke with me this day,
And hath preferred thee.

But to prefer was more than merely to recommend. It was rather to transfer, or hand over; as might be inferred even from what Octavius here rejoins, "Do so, good Messala." That it had come usually to imply also something of promotion may be seen from what Bassanio goes on to say:

if it be preferment

To leave a rich Jew's service, to become
The follower of so poor a gentleman.

The sense of the verb to prefer that we have in
Shakespeare continued current down to a consid-
erably later date. Thus Clarendon writes of Lord
Cottington, "His mother was
"His mother was a Stafford, nearly

...

allied to Sir Edward Stafford ; by whom this gentleman was brought up, and by him recommended to Sir Robert Cecil...; who preferred him to Sir Charles Cornwallis, when he went ambassador into Spain; where he remained for the space of eleven or twelve years in the condition of Secretary or Agent, without ever returning into England in all that time" (Hist., Book xiii.).

At an earlier date, again, we have Bacon, in the Dedication of the first edition of his Essays to his brother Anthony, thus writing: "Since they would not stay with their master, but would needs travail abroad, I have preferred them to you, that are next myself, dedicating them, such as they are, to our love," etc.

790. How died my master, Strato? So the First Folio. The Second, by a misprint, omits master. The Third and Fourth have "my lord."

792. Octavius, then take him, etc. - That is, accept or receive him from me. It is not, I request you to allow him to enter your service; but I give him to you. See 788.

793. He only, in a generous honest thought Of common good, etc. We are indebted for this reading to Mr. Collier's MS. annotator. It is surely a great improvement upon the old text,

He only in a general honest thought,

And common good to all, made one of them.

To act in a general honest thought" is perhaps intelligible, though barely so; but, besides the tautology which must be admitted on the common interpretation, what is to act "in a common good to all"? [Dyce, Hudson, and White follow the old text, which is hardly so bad as Collier and Craik would make it.]

793. Made one of them. - In this still familiar idiom made is equivalent to formed, constituted, and one must be considered as the accusative governed by it. Fecit unum ex eis, or eorum (by joining himself to them).

Here is the prose of Plutarch, as translated by North, out of which this poetry has been wrought: "For it was said that Antonius spake it openly divers times, that he thought, that, of all them that had slain Cæsar, there was none but Brutus only that was moved to it as thinking the act commendable of itself; but that all the other conspirators did conspire his death for some private malice or envy that they otherwise did bear unto him.”

793. His life was gentle; and the elements, etc. This passage is remarkable from its resemblance to a passage in Drayton's poem of The Barons' Wars. Drayton's poem was originally published some years before the close of the sixteenth century (according to Ritson, Bibl. Poet., under the title of "Mortemeriados. . . Printed by J. R. for Matthew Lownes, 1596," 4to); but there is, it seems, no trace of the passage in question in that edition. The first edition in which it is found is that of 1603, in which it stands thus:

Such one he was (of him we boldly say)

In whose rich soul all sovereign powers did suit,

In whom in peace the elements all lay

So mixt, as none could sovereignty impute;

As all did govern, yet all did obey:

His lively temper was so absolute,

That 't seemed, when heaven his model first began,

In him it showed perfection in a man.

[And the stanza remained thus in the editions of 1605, 1607, 1608, 1610, and 1613.]

In a subsequent edition published in 1619 it is

remodelled as follows:

He was a man (then boldly dare to say)

In whose rich soul the virtues well did suit;

In whom so mixt the elements all lay

That none to one could sovereignty impute;
As all did govern, so did all obey:

He of a temper was so absolute,

As that it seemed, when nature him began,
She meant to show all that might be in man.

Malone is inclined to think that Drayton was the copyist, even as his verses originally stood. "In the altered stanza," he adds, "he certainly was." Steevens, in the mistaken notion that Drayton's stanza as found in the edition of his Barons' Wars published in 1619 had appeared in the original poem, published, as he conceives, in 1598, had supposed that Shakespeare had in this instance deigned to imitate or borrow from his contemporary.

[White remarks, "But this resemblance implies no imitation on either side. For the notion that man was composed of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and that the well-balanced mixture of these produced the prefection of humanity, was commonly held during the sixteenth, and the first half, at least, of the seventeenth century, the writers of which period worked it up in all manner of forms. Malone himself pointed out the following passage in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (ii. 3), which was acted in 1600, three years before the publication of the recast Barons' Wars: A creature of a most perfect and divine temper, one in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met, without emulation of precedency. And see the Mirror for Magistrates, Part I., 1575: —

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