Than if you had at leisure known of this 1. BAST. How did he take it? who did taste to him? And brought prince Henry in their company2; BAST. Withhold thine indignation, mighty And tempt us not to bear above our power!- that you might The better arm you to the sudden time, [Exeunt. Than if you had AT LEISURE known of this.] It appears to me, that at leisure means less speedily, after some delay. M. MASON. 2 Why, know you not? the lords, &c.] Perhaps we ought to point thus: Why know you not, the lords are all come back, MALONE. SCENE VII. The Orchard of Swinstead-Abbey. Enter Prince HENRY, SALISBURY, and BIGOT. P. HEN. It is too late; the life of all his blood Is touch'd corruptibly; and his pure brain (Which some suppose the soul's frail dwellinghouse,) Doth, by the idle comments that it makes, Enter PEMBROKE. PEM. His highness yet doth speak; and holds belief, That, being brought into the open air, Of that fell poison which assaileth him. P. HEN. Let him be brought into the orchard here. Doth he still rage? [Exit BIGOT. PEM. He is more patient Than when you left him; even now he sung. P. HEN. O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes, In their continuance 5, will not feel themselves. Death, having prey'd upon the outward parts, 3 PRINCE HENRY,] This prince was only nine years old when his father died. STEEVENS. 4 Is touch'd CORRUPTIBLY ;] i. e. corruptively. Such was the phraseology of Shakspeare's age. So, in his Rape of Lucrece : "The Romans plausibly did give consent." i. e. with acclamations. Here we should now say-plausively. MALONE. 5 IN THEIR Continuance,] I suspect our author wrote—“ In thy continuance." In his Sonnets the two words are frequently confounded. If the text be right, continuance means continuity. Bacon uses the word in that sense. MALONE. Leaves them invisible; and his siege is now Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds With many legions of strange fantasies; 6 Leaves them INVISIBLE; and his siege is now this Against the mind,] As the word invisible has no sense in passage, I have no doubt but the modern editors are right in reading insensible, which agrees with the two preceding lines: fierce extremes, "In their continuance, will not feel themselves. Against the mind,” &c. The last lines are evidently intended as a paraphrase, and confirmation of the two first. M. MASON. Invisible is here used adverbially. Death, having glutted himself with the ravage of the almost wasted body, and knowing that the disease with which he has assailed it is mortal, before its dissolution, proceeds, from mere satiety, to attack the mind, leaving the body invisibly; that is, in such a secret manner that the eye cannot precisely mark his progress, or see when his attack on the vital powers has ended, and that on the mind begins; or, in other words, at what particular moment reason ceases to perform its function, and the understanding, in consequence of a corroding and mortal malady, begins to be disturbed. Our poet, in his Venus and Adonis, calls Death, "invisible commander." Henry is here only pursuing the same train of thought which we find in his first speech in the present scene. Our author has, in many other passages in his plays, used adjectives adverbially. So, in All's Well That Ends Well: "Was it not meant damnable in us," &c. Again, in King Henry IV. Part I.: "ten times more dishonourable ragged than an old faced ancient." See vol. x. p. 438, n. 7, and King Henry IV. Act IV. Sc. II. Mr. Rowe reads-her siege-, an error derived from the corruption of the second folio. I suspect, that this strange mistake was Mr. Gray's authority for making Death a female; in which, I believe, he has neither been preceded, or followed, by any English poet : "The painful family of Death, "More hideous than their queen." The old copy, in the passage before us, reads-Against the wind; an evident error of the press, which was corrected by Mr. Pope, and which I should scarcely have mentioned, but that it justifies an emendation made in Measure for Measure, [vol. ix. p. 72, Which, in their throng and press to that last hold, n. 2,] where, by a similar mistake, the word flawes appears in the old copy instead of flames. MALONE. Mr. Malone reads: "Death, having prey'd upon the outward parts, "Leaves them invisible;" &c. As often as I am induced to differ from the opinions of a gentleman whose laborious diligence in the cause of Shakspeare is without example, I subject myself to the most unwelcome part of editorial duty. Success, however, is not, in every instance, proportionable to zeal and effort; and he who shrinks from controversy, should also have avoided the vestibulum ipsum, primasque fauces, of the school of Shakspeare. Sir Thomas Hanmer give us-insensible, which affords a meaning sufficiently commodious. But, as invisible and insensible are not words of exactest consonance, the legitimacy of this emendation has been disputed. It yet remains in my text, for the sake of those who discover no light through the ancient reading. Perhaps (I speak without confidence) our author wrote-invincible, which, in sound, so nearly resembles invisible, that an inattentive compositor might have substituted the one for the other.All our modern editors (Mr. Malone excepted) agree that invincible, in King Henry IV. Part II. Act III. Sc. II. was a misprint for invisible; and so (vice versa) invisible may here have usurped the place of invincible. If my supposition be admitted, the Prince must design to say, that Death had battered the royal outworks, but, seeing they were invincible, quitted them, and directed his force against the mind. In the present instance, the King of Terrors is described as a besieger, who, failing in his attempt to storm the bulwark, proceeded to undermine the citadel. Why else did he change his mode and object of attack?-The Spanish ordnance sufficiently preyed on the ramparts of Gibraltar, but still left them impregnable.-The same metaphor, though not continued so far, occurs again in Timon of Athens: "To whom all sores lay siege." Again, in All's Well That Ends Well : 66 and yet my heart "Will not confess he owes the malady Mr. Malone, however, gives a different turn to the passage before us; and leaving the word siege out of his account, appears to represent Death as a gourmand, who had satiated himself with Confound themselves 7. "Tis strange, that death should sing. the King's body, and took his intellectual part by way of change of provision. Neither can a complete acquiescence in the same gentleman's examples of adjectives used adverbially, be well expected; as they chiefly occur in light and familiar dialogue, or where the regular full-grown adverb was unfavourable to rhyme or metre. Nor indeed are these docked adverbs (which perform their office, like the witch's rat," without a tail,") discoverable in any solemn narrative like that before us. A portion of them also might be no other than typographical imperfections; for this part of speech, shorn of its termination, will necessarily take the form of an adjective.I may subjoin, that in the beginning of the present scene, the adjective corruptible is not offered as a locum tenens for the adverb corruptibly, though they were alike adapted to our author's mea sure. It must, notwithstanding, be allowed, that adjectives employed adverbially are sometimes met with in the language of Shakspeare. Yet, surely, we ought not (as Polonius says) to crack the wind of the poor phrase," by supposing its existence where it must operate equivocally, and provoke a smile, as on the present occasion. That Death, therefore, "left the outward parts of the King invisible," could not, in my judgment, have been an expression hazarded by our poet in his most careless moment of composition. It conveys an idea too like the helmet of Orcus, in the fifth Iliad *, Gadshill's "receipt of fern-seed," Colonel Feignwell's moros musphonon, or the consequences of being bit by a Seps, as was a Roman soldier, of whom says our excellent translator of Lucan, none was left, no least remains were seen, 46 "No marks to show that once a man had been." † Besides, if the outward part (i. e. the body) of the expiring monarch was, in plain, familiar, and unqualified terms, pronounced to be invisible, how could those who pretended to have just seen it, expect to be believed? and would not an audience, uninitiated in the mystery of adverbial adjectives, on hearing such an account of the royal carcase, have exclaimed, like the Governor of Tilbury Fort, in The Critic : thou canst not see it, "Because 'tis not in sight.” But I ought not to dismiss the present subject, without a few words in defence of Mr. Gray, who had authority somewhat more * Δῦν Αίδος κυνέην, ΜΗ ΜΙΝ ΙΔΟΙ ὄβριμος "Αρης. |