349. Signed in thy spoil, and crimsoned in thy death. -Instead of death the First Folio has Lethee, the others Lethe ; and the passage is explained as meaning marked and distinguished by being arrayed in thy spoils (the power in the commonwealth which was thine), and made crimson by being as it were bathed in thy shed blood. But Steevens's note is entirely unsatisfactory : “ Lethe," he says, " is used by many of the old translators of novels for death ;” and then he gives as an example the following sentence from the Second Part of Heywood's Iron Age, printed in 1632 :

“The proudest nation that great Asia nursed

Is now extinct in lethe." Here lethe may plainly be taken in its proper and usual sense of forgetfulness, oblivion. No other example is produced either by the commentators or by Nares. Shakespeare, too, repeatedly uses lethe, and nowhere, unless it be in this passage, in any other than its proper sense. If, however, lethe and lethum (or letum), -which may, or may not, be connected, -were really sometimes confounded by the popular writers of the early part of the seventeenth century, they are kept in countenance by the commentators of the eighteenth. Steevens goes on to notice, as affording another proof that lethe sometimes signified death, the following line from Cupid's Whirligig, printed in 1616 :

“For vengeance' wings bring on thy lethal day;" and he adds :-“Dr. Farmer observes, that we meet with lethal for deadly in the Information for Mungo Campbell.” It is not easy to understand this. Who ever doubted that deadly was the proper meaning of

lethalis (from lethum) ? But what has that to do with the signification of lethe? I do not know what it is that may have led Nares to imagine that, when lethe meant death, it was pronounced as a monosyllable. Seeing, however, that the notion of its ever having that signification appears to be a mere delusion, I have followed Mr. Collier in supposing it to be here a misprint for death, which was the obvious conjecture of several of the editors of the last century, and is possibly sanctioned by the authority of his MS. annotator.

349. Strucken by many princes. It is stroken in the original edition.—In the preceding line, also, “ the heart of thee" is there misprinted" the hart of thee.” But the two words are repeatedly thus confounded in the spelling in that edition.—Mr. Collier strangely prefers making this exclamation, “How like a deer,'' etc., an interrogatory--as if Antony asked the dead body in how far, or to what precise degree, it resembled a deer, lying as it did stretched out before him.

351. The enemies of Cæsar shall say this.—Here again, as in “ This shall mark Our purpose necessary” of 187, we have a use of shall, which now only remains with

us, if at all, as an imitation of the archaic. Vid. 181. A singular consequence has arisen from the change that has taken place. By “shall say this” in the present passage Shakespeare meant no more than would now be expressed by “ will say this ;” yet to us the shall elevates the expression beyond its original import, giving it something, if not quite of a prophetic, yet of an impassioned, wrapt, and as it were vision-seeing character.

352. But what compact.- Compact has always, I believe, the accent upon the final syllable in Shake

P

speare, whether used as a substantive, as a verb, or as a participle.

352. Will you be pricked in number of our friends ? – To prick is to note or mark off. The Sheriffs 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.

353. Swayed from the point.-Borne away, as by a wave, from the point which I had in view and for which I was making.

353. Friends am I with you all.“ This grammatical impropriety," Henley very well remarks, “is still so prevalent, as that the omission of the anomalous : would give some uncouthness to the sound of an otherwise familiar expression.” We could not, in

“ Friend am I with you all;" we should have to turn the expression in some other way. 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.

354. Our reasons are so full of good regard.-So full of what is entitled to favourable regard. Compare“ many of the best respect” in 48.

354. 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.

355. Produce his body to the market-place.-We now say " produce to" with a person only.

355. Speak in the order of his funeral.-In the order

deed, say

is in the course of the ceremonial.—Compare “ That Antony speak in his funeral," in 357; and “Come I to speak in Cæsar's funeral," in 398.

357. The Aside here is not marked in the old copies.

358. By your pardon.-I will explain, by, or with, your pardon, leave, permission. “By your leave" is still occasionally used.

358. Have all true rites.—This is the reading of all the old copies. For true Pope substituted due, which is also the reading of Mr. Collier's one-volume edition.

358. 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.—Vid. 181.

359. I know not what may fall.—We now commonly say to fall out, rather than simply to fall, or to befall.

360. You shall not in your funeral speech blame us. -The sense and the prosody concur in demanding an emphasis on us.

360. And say you do’t.--We do not now in serious or elevated writing use this kind of contraction.

362. The original stage direction after this speech is, “Exeunt. Manet Antony."

363. 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; 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 subse

quent reprints, till the true reading was restored by Mr. Ķnight.

363. 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 forin of Zeit, the German word answering to our English time. Time, again, is the French tems, or temps, a corruption of 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, bv a difference of gender, and also otherwise written tempe).

363. A curse shall light upon the loins of men.Here is another astounding exemplification of the gross insufficiency of the account given by Mr. Collier of the corrections of his MS. annotator in his volume entitled Notes and Emendations ; for I presume that the reading which I have here adopted must be one of those for which we are indebted to that authority. And yet no notice is taken of it in the detailed account; we only find it in the text afterwards published, without so much as a word of explanation. It is one of the most satisfactory and valuable emendations which have ever been made. The old reading “ 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