D. PEDRO. May be, she doth but counterfeit.
CLAUD. 'Faith, like enough.

LEON. O God! counterfeit! There never was counterfeit of passion came so near the life of passion, as she discovers it.

D. PEDRO. Why, what effects of passion shows she?

CLAUD. Bait the hook well; this fish will bite.

[Aside. LEON. What effects, my lord! She will sit you,You heard my daughter tell you how.

CLAUD. She did, indeed.

D. PEDRO. How, how, I pray you? You amaze me: I would have thought her spirit had been invincible against all assaults of affection.

LEON. I would have sworn it had, my lord; especially against Benedick.

BENE. [Aside.] I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it: knavery cannot, sure, hide itself in such reverence.

CLAUD. He hath ta'en the infection; hold it up.

[Aside. D. PEDRO. Hath she made her affection known to Benedick?

LEON. No; and swears she never will: that's her torment.

CLAUD. "Tis true, indeed; so your daughter says:

fection) is past the infinite of thought.' Here are no abrupt stops, or imperfect sentences. Infinite may well enough stand; it is used by more careful writers for indefinite: and the speaker only means, that thought, though in itself unbounded, cannot reach or estimate the degree of her passion. JOHNSON.

The meaning, I think, is, but with what an enraged affection she loves him, it is beyond the power of thought to conceive." MALONE.

Shakspeare has a similar expression in King John: "Beyond the infinite and boundless reach "Of mercy." STEEVENS.

Shall I, says she, that have so oft encountered him with scorn, write to him that I love him?

LEON. This says she now when she is beginning to write to him: for she'll be up twenty times a night; and there will she sit in her smock, till she have writ a sheet of paper 2 :-my daughter tells us all.

CLAUD. Now you talk of a sheet of paper, I remember a pretty jest your daughter told us of.

2 This says she now when she is beginning to write to him: for she'll be up twenty times a night; and there will she sit in her smock, till she have writ a sheet of paper:] Shakspeare has more than once availed himself of such incidents as occurred to him from history, &c. to compliment the princes before whom his pieces were performed. A striking instance of flattery to James occurs in Macbeth; perhaps the passage here quoted was not less grateful to Elizabeth, as it apparently alludes to an extraordinary trait in one of the letters pretended to have been written by the hated Mary to Bothwell :

"I am nakit, and ganging to sleep, and zit I cease not to scribble all this paper, in so meikle as rest is thairof." That is, 'I am naked, and going to sleep, and yet I cease not to scribble to the end of my paper, much as there remains of it unwritten on.

HENLEY.

Mr. Henley's observation must fall to the ground; the word in every edition of Mary's letter which Shakspeare could possibly have seen, being irkit, not nakit. The French version (as Mr. Whitaker observes in his Vindication of this unfortunate princess, 2d edit. vol. i. p. 522, &c.) "we know to talk egregious nonsense at times. It even mistakes irkit for nakit; strips the delicate Queen in the month of January, and at the hour of midnight; and keeps her in this situation toute nue,' without even the cover of a smock upon her, writing a long letter to her lover." Irkit, Scotch, is likewise rendered "nudatæ," by the Latin trans'lator.

"I am irkit," means, I am vexed, uneasy. So, in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella :

"And is even irkt that so sweete comedie

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'By such unsuted speech should hindred be."

Again, in As You Like It :

"And yet it irks me, the poor dappled fools," &c. Again, in King Henry VI. :

"It irks his heart he cannot be reveng'd." STEVENS.

LEON. O!-When she had writ it, and was reading it over, she found Benedick and Beatrice between the sheet ?

CLAUD. That.

LEON. O! she tore the letter into a thousand halfpence; railed at herself, that she should be so immodest to write to one that she knew would flout her: I measure him, says she, by my own spirit; for I should flout him, if he writ to me; yea, though I love him, I should.

CLAUD. Then down upon her knees she falls, weeps, sobs, beats her heart, tears her hair, prays, curses;-0 sweet Benedick! God give me patience! LEON. She doth indeed; my daughter says so: and the ecstasy hath so much overborne her, that my daughter is sometime afraid she will do a desperate outrage to herself; It is very true.

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D. PEDRO. It were good, that Benedick knew of it by some other, if she will not discover it.

CLAUD. To what end? He would but make a sport of it, and torment the poor lady worse.

D. PEDRO. An he should, it were an alms to hang him: She's an excellent sweet lady; and, out of all suspicion, she is virtuous.

3 O she tore the letter into a thousand HALFPENCE;] i. e. into a thousand pieces of the same bigness. So, in As You Like It:

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they were all like one another, as halfpence are." THEOBALD.

A farthing, and perhaps a halfpenny, was used to signify any small particle or division. So, in the character of the Prioress in Chaucer:

"That in hirre cuppe was no ferthing sene

"Of grese, whan she dronken hadde hire draught."

Prol. to the Cant. Tales, Tyrwhitt's edit. v. 135.
STEEVENS.

and the ECSTASY- -] i. e. alienation of mind. So, in The Tempest, Act III. Sc. III.: "Hinder them from what this ecstasy may now provoke them to." STEEVENS.

CLAUD. And she is exceeding wise.

D. PEDRO. In every thing, but in loving Benedick.

LEON. O my lord, wisdom and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one, that blood hath the victory. I am sorry for her, as I have just cause, being her uncle and her guardian. D. PEDRO. I would, she had bestowed this dotage on me; I would have daff'd all other respects, and made her half myself: I pray you, tell Benedick of it, and hear what he will say.

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LEON. Were it good, think you?

CLAUD. Hero thinks surely, she will die: for she says, she will die if he love her not; and she will die ere she makes her love known; and she will die if he woo her, rather than she will 'bate one breath of her accustomed crossness.

D. PEDRO. She doth well if she should make tender of her love, 'tis very possible he'll scorn it; for the man, as you know all, hath a contemptible spirit'.

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and BLOOD-] I suppose blood, in this instance, to mean nature, or disposition. So, in the Yorkshire Tragedy: "For 'tis our blood to love what we're forbidden."

Blood is here, as in many other places, used by our author in the sense of passion, or rather temperament of body. MALONE. have DAFF'D] To daff is the same as to doff, to do off, to put aside. So, in Macbeth:

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to doff their dire distresses." STEEVENS. 7 CONTEMPTIBLE spirit.] That is, a temper inclined to scorn and contempt. It has been before remarked, that our author uses his verbal adjectives with great licence. There is therefore no need of changing the word with Sir Thomas Hanmer to contemptuous. JOHNSON.

In the argument to Darius, a tragedy, by Lord Sterline, 1603, it is said, that Darius wrote to Alexander "in a proud and contemptible manner." In this place contemptible certainly means contemptuous.

CLAUD. He is a very proper man ®.

D. PEDRO. He hath, indeed, a good outward happiness.

CLAUD. 'Fore God, and in my mind, very wise. D. PEDRO. He doth, indeed, show some sparks that are like wit.

LEON. And I take him to be valiant.

D. PEDRO. AS Hector, I assure you: and in the managing of quarrels you may say he is wise; for either he avoids them with great discretion, or undertakes them with a most christian-like fear.

LEON. If he do fear God, he must necessarily keep peace; if he break the peace, he ought to enter into a quarrel with fear and trembling.

D. PEDRO. And so will he do; for the man doth fear God, howsoever it seems not in him, by some large jests he will make. Well, I am sorry for your niece: Shall we go see Benedick, and tell him of her love?

CLAUD. Never tell him, my lord; let her wear it out with good counsel.

LEON. Nay, that's impossible; she may wear her heart out first.

D. PEDRO. Well, we will hear further of it by your daughter; let it cool the while. I love Benedick well; and I could wish he would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy to have so good a lady 9.

Again, Drayton, in the 24th Song of his Polyolbion, speaking in praise of a hermit, says, that he

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"The mad tumultuous world contemptibly forsook,
"And to his quiet cell by Crowland him betook."
STEEVENS.

a very PROPER MAN.] i. e. a very handsome one. So, in Othello :

"This Ludovico is a proper man." STEEVENS.

9 - unworthy so good a lady.] Thus the quarto 1600. The first folio unnecessarily reads "unworthy to have so good a lady." STEEVENS.