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action" (Wedgwood). For other examples of the word, see Chaucer, C. T. 84, and 15422 (deliverly), and T. of Melib. (delivernesse); Gower, Conf. Am. 177, b., etc. The word clever has been supposed by some to be a corruption of this deliver, but it is more probably from the Saxon gleúw, gleawferdh, sagacious (Webster, 1865). For another etymology see Wedgwood, s. v.]

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347. When I struck him. In the original printed text it is "strooke him."

348. Let each man render me his bloody hand.. Give me back in return for mine. Here, according to the stage direction of Mr. Collier's MS. annotator, Antony" takes one after another of the conspirators by the hand, and turns to the body, and bends over it, while he says, 'That I did love thee, Cæsar, O! 'tis true,' ," etc.

348. Will I shake with you. — It is not to be supposed that there was anything undignified in this phraseology in Shakespeare's age.

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348. Though last, not least. So in King Lear, i. 1, “Although the last, not least in our dear love; as is noted by Malone, who adds that "the same expression occurs more than once in Plays exhibited before the time of Shakespeare." We have it also in the passage of Spenser's Colin Clout's Come Home Again, in which Shakespeare has been supposed to be referred to :—

And there, though last, not least, is Ætion;
A gentler shepherd may no where be found;
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound.

This poem was published in 1595.

348. You must conceit me.

See 142.

348. Shall it not grieve thee dearer than thy

death? Of this use of dear we have several other instances in Shakespeare. One of the most remarkable is in Hamlet, i. 2, where Hamlet exclaims, —

Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven

Ere I had seen that day!

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Horne Tooke (Div. of Purley, 612, etc.) makes a plausible case in favor of dear being derived from the ancient verb derian, to hurt, to annoy, and of its proper meaning being, therefore, injurious or hateful. His notion seems to be that from this derian we have dearth, meaning properly that sort of injury which is done by the weather, and that, a usual consequence of dearth being to make the produce of the earth high-priced, the adjective dear has thence taken its common meaning of precious. This is not all distinctly asserted; but what of it may not be explicitly set forth is supposed and implied. It is, however, against an explanation which has been generally accepted, that there is no appearance of connection between derian and the contemporary word answering to dear in the sense of high-priced, precious, beloved, which is deore, dúre, or dýre, and is evidently from the same root, not with derian, but with deóran, or dýran, to hold dear, to love. There is no doubt about the existence of an old English verb dere, meaning to hurt, the unquestionable representative of the original derian: thus in Chaucer (C. T. 1824) Theseus says to Palamon and Arcite, in the Knight's Tale,

And ye shul bothe anon unto me swere
That never mo ye shul my contree dere,
Ne maken werre upon me night ne day,
But ben my frendes in alle that ye may.

But perhaps we may get most easily and naturally at the sense which dear sometimes assumes by sup

posing that the notion properly involved in it of love, having first become generalized into that of a strong affection of any kind, had thence passed. on into that of such an emotion the very reverse of love. We seem to have it in the intermediate sense in such instances as the following:

Some dear cause

Will in concealment wrap me up a while. - Lear, iv. 3.
A precious ring; a ring that I must use

In dear employment. ― Romeo and Juliet, v. 3.

And even when Hamlet speaks of his "dearest foe,” or when Celia remarks to Rosalind, in As You Like It, i. 3, "My father hated his father dearly," the word need not be understood as implying more than strong or passionate emotion.

348. Here wast thou bayed. So afterwards, in 497, "We are at the stake, And bayed about with many enemies." It is not clear, however, in what sense the verb to be bayed is used in these passages. Does it mean to be embayed, or enclosed? or to be barked at? or to be made to stand, as it is phrased, at bay? The bays in these expressions appear to be all different words. [See Webster, and Marsh's Wedgwood.] In The Taming of the Shrew, v. 2, we have the unusual form at a bay - " 'Tis thought your deer does hold you at a bay."

348. 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 sanctioned by the authority

of his MS. annotator. [Collier in his Second Edition restores Lethe, which is the reading given by Hudson, Staunton, and White. The last says, "I have always understood this to mean, crimsoned in the stream which bears thee to oblivion. . . . No instance has been produced of the use of lethe in any other sense than that of oblivion, actual or figurative."]

348. 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 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.

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350. 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. See 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, rapt, and as it were vision-seeing character.

351. But what compact.-Compact has always, I believe, the accent upon the final syllable in Shakespeare, whether used as a substantive, as a verb, or as a participle.

351. Will you be pricked in number of our

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