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So strongly guarded.-Cousin, look not sad:
Thy grandame loves thee; and thy uncle will
As dear be to thee as thy father was.

ARTH. O, this will make my mother die with grief.

K. JOHN. Cousin [to the Bastard], away for England; haste before :

And, ere our coming, see thou shake the bags

Of hoarding abbots; imprisoned angels

Set thou at liberty: the fat ribs of peace

Must by the hungry now be fed upon :

Use our commission in his utmost force.

BAST. Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back 15,

When gold and silver becks me to come on.

I leave your highness:-Grandame, I will pray

(If ever I remember to be holy)

For your fair safety; so I kiss your hand.

ELI. Farewell, gentle cousin.

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ELI. Come hither, little kinsman; hark, a word.

K. JOHN. Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle Hubert,
We owe thee much; within this wall of flesh

There is a soul counts thee her creditor,
And with advantage means to pay thy love:
And, my good friend, thy voluntary oath
Lives in this bosom, dearly cherished.
Give me thy hand. I had a thing to say,—

But I will fit it with some better tune ".
By heaven, Hubert, I am almost asham'd
To say what good respect I have of thee.
HUB. I am much bounden to your majesty.

K. JOHN. Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet:
But thou shalt have: and creep time ne'er so slow,
Yet it shall come for me to do thee good.

I had a thing to say, but let it go:

The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day,
Attended with the pleasures of the world,
Is all too wanton, and too full of gawds,
To give me audience:-If the midnight bell
Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth,
Sound on into the drowsy race of night;

• Thou is not in the original.

[To ARTHUR.

[Exit Bastard.

[She takes ARTHUR aside.

Better tune. The old copy reads tune. Pope corrected this to time. We are by no means sure that the change was called for. The "tune" with which John expresses his willingness “to fit" the thing he had to say is a bribe;-he now only gives flattery and a promise. "The time" for saying "the thing" is discussed in the subsequent portion of John's speech.

• Sound on.

So the original. But on and one were often spelt alike; and therefore the passage

If this same were a churchyard where we stand,
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs;
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,

Had bak'd thy blood, and made it heavy-thick,
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes,
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment,
A passion hateful to my purposes;)

Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words;
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts:
But ah, I will not:-Yet I love thee well;
And, by my troth, I think thou lov'st me well.
HUB. So well, that what you bid me undertake,
Though that my death were adjunct to my act,
By heaven, I would do it.

K. JOHN.

Do not I know thou wouldst ?
Good Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye
On yon young boy: I'll tell thee what, my friend,

He is a very serpent in my way;

And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread

He lies before me: Dost thou understand me?

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must be determined by other principles than that of fidelity to the text. Which is the more poetical,

"Sound on into the drowsy race of night,"

or "sound one?" "The midnight bell" sounding "on, into" (or unto, for the words were used convertibly) the drowsy march, race, of night, seems to us far more poetical than precisely determining the hour, which was already determined by the word "midnight." It must, however, be noticed, that when Bernardo describes the appearance of the Ghost, in 'Hamlet,' he marks the time by "the bell then beating one."

• Heavy-thick. The late eminent scholar, Mr. Sydney Walker, who has left a mass of notes upon Shakspere which we should earnestly desire to see published, holds that our poet has a much more frequent use of compound epithets than the ordinary text would exhibit. This appears to us one of the many examples.

Well, I'll not say what I intend for thee:
Remember.- -Madam, fare you well:
I'll send those powers o'er to your majesty.
ELI. My blessing go with thee !
K. JOHN.

For England, cousin, go:
Hubert shall be your man, attend on you

With all true duty.-On toward Calais, ho!

SCENE IV.-The same. The French King's Tent.

Enter KING PHILIP, LEWIS, PANDULPH, and Attendants.

K. PHI. So, by a roaring tempest on the flood,
A whole armado of convicted a sail

Is scatter'd and disjoin'd from fellowship.
PAND. Courage and comfort! all shall yet go well.
K. PHI. What can go well, when we have run so ill?
Are we not beaten? Is not Angiers lost?
Arthur ta'en prisoner? divers dear friends slain?
And bloody England into England gone,
O'erbearing interruption, spite of France?
LEW. What he hath won that hath he fortified:
So hot a speed with such advice dispos'd,
Such temperate order in so fierce a cause,
Doth want example: Who hath read, or heard,
kindred action like to this?

Of any

K. PHI. Well could I bear that England had this praise,
So we could find some pattern of our shame.

Enter CONSTANCE.

Look, who comes here! a grave unto a soul;
Holding the eternal spirit, against her will,
In the vile prison of afflicted breath :-
:-
I prithee, lady, go away with me.

CONST. Lo, now! now see the issue of your peace!

K. PHI. Patience, good lady! comfort, gentle Constance !
CONST. No, I defy all counsel, all redress,

But that which ends all counsel, true redress.

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Convicted-overpowered. Mr. Dyce suggests convected, from convectus.

[Exeunt.

Death, death, O amiable lovely death!

Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones;

And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;

And ring these fingers with thy household worms;
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
And be a carrion monster like thyself:

Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st,
And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,
O, come to me!

K. PHI.

O fair affliction, peace!
CONST. No, no, I will not, having breath to cry:-

O, that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth!
Then with a passion would I shake the world;
And rouse from sleep that fell anatomy,
Which cannot hear a lady's feeble voice,
Which scorns a moderna invocation.
PAND. Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.
CONST. Thou art not holy to belie me so;

I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey's wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad;-I would to heaven I were!
For then, 't is like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!—
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canoniz'd, cardinal;
For, being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver'd of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son;
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he:
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.

• Modern. We give the reading of the original. Thus, in 'As You Like It,'— "Full of wise saws and modern instances."

In 'Romeo and Juliet' we have "modern lamentation." Modern is trite, common. But the sentence is weak, and a slight change would make it powerful. We may read "a mother's invocation" with little violence to the text: moder's (the old spelling) might have been easily mistaken for modern. We believe that it was so written; but upon re-consideration, we do not continue to alter the original.

b Not is wanting in the original.

K. PHI. Bind up those tresses: O, what love I note
In the fair multitude of those her hairs!
Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen,
Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends a
Do glue themselves in sociable grief;
Like true, inseparable, faithful loves,
Sticking together in calamity.

CONST. To England, if you will.

Bind up your hairs.

K. PHI.
CONST. Yes, that I will; And wherefore will I do it?

I tore them from their bonds; and cried aloud,
O that these hands could so redeem my son,
As they have given these hairs their liberty!
But now I envy at their liberty,

And will again commit them to their bonds,
Because my poor child is a prisoner.

And, father cardinal, I have heard you say,

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:

If that be true, I shall see my boy again;

For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child,

To him that did but yesterday suspire,

There was not such a gracious creature born.

But now will canker sorrow eat my bud,

And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit;

And so he'll die; and, rising so again,

When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
PAND. You hold too heinous a respect of grief.
CONST. He talks to me that never had a son.
K. PHI. You are as fond of grief as of your child.
CONST. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief.
well: had such a loss as I,
you

Fare you
I could give better comfort than you do.—
I will not keep this form upon my head,

• Friends. In the original, fiends.

[Tearing off her head-dress.

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