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O, had it been a stranger, not my child,

To smooth his fault I should have been more mild:
A partial slander1 sought I to avoid,

And in the sentence my own life destroy'd.
Alas, I look'd, when some of you should say,
I was too strict, to make mine own away;
But you gave leave to my unwilling tongue,
Against my will to do myself this wrong.

K. RICH. Cousin, farewell:—and, uncle, bid him

so;

Six years we banish him, and he shall

go.

[Flourish. Exeunt King RICHARD and Train. AUM. Cousin, farewell: what presence must not

know,

From where you do remain, let paper show.

MAR. My lord, no leave take I; for I will ride, As far as land will let me, by your side.

GAUNT. O, to what purpose dost thou hoard thy words,

That thou return'st no greeting to thy friends?
BOLING. I have too few to take my leave of you,
When the tongue's office should be prodigal
To breathe the abundant * dolour of the heart.

GAUNT. Thy grief is but thy absence for a time. BOLING. Joy absent, grief is present for that time.

GAUNT. What is six winters? they are quickly gone.

* Quarto 1597, aboundant.

9 O, had it been a stranger,] This couplet is wanting in the folio. STEEVENS.

A partial slander-] That is, the reproach of partiality. This is a just picture of the struggle between principle and affection. JOHNSON.

This couplet, which is wanting in the folio edition, has been arbitrarily placed by some of the modern editors at the conclusion of Gaunt's speech. In the three oldest quartos it follows the fifth line of it. In the fourth quarto, which seems copied from the folio, the passage is omitted. STEEVENS.

BOLING. To men in joy; but grief makes one hour ten.

GAUNT. Call it a travel that thou tak'st for plea

sure.

BOLING. My heart will sigh when I miscall it so, Which finds it an enforced pilgrimage.

GAUNT. The sullen passage of thy weary steps Esteem a foil, wherein thou art to set

The precious jewel of thy home-return.

BOLING. Nay, rather, every tedious stride I make

2

Will but remember me, what a deal of world
I wander from the jewels that I love.
Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages; and in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else,
But that I was a journeyman to grief3?

* Quartos, 1598, 1608, and 1615, what deal.

Boling. Nay, rather, every tedious stride I make-] This, and the six verses which follow, I have ventured to supply from the old quarto. The allusion, it is true, to an apprenticeship, and becoming a journeyman, is not in the sublime taste; nor, as Horace has expressed it: "spirat tragicum satis:" however, as there is no doubt of the passage being genuine, the lines are not so despicable as to deserve being quite lost. THEOBALD.

3 - journeyman to grief?] I am afraid our author in this place designed a very poor quibble, as journey signifies both travel and a day's work. However, he is not to be censured for what he himself rejected. JOHNSON.

The quarto, in which these lines are found, is said in its titlepage to have been corrected by the author; and the play is indeed more accurately printed than most of the other single copies. There is now, however, no certain method of knowing by whom the rejection was made. STEEVENS.

Mr. Steevens has here made a great mistake. The lines in question are found in the first quarto of 1597, and continued in those of 1598, 1608, and 1615, all of which are now before me; but what these late copies read, what they insert, or what they omit, it is quite loss of time to examine. Not the smallest authority belongs to them; nor would they carry any with them, even if their titlepages announced that they were revised and corrected by the

GAUNT. All places that the eye of heaven visits*,

Are to a wise man ports and happy havens:

Teach thy necessity to reason thus ;

There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not, the king did banish thee;

author. But the title-pages of not one of these copies contains any such assertion: though in some other of his plays, the booksellers were hardy enough to add those words.

Unquestionably, Shakspeare never revised a single quarto copy of any of his plays, whether in a first or second edition; nor is the edition of Romeo and Juliet, in 1599, an exception to this assertion. It was not revised by him, but printed from an enlarged and corrected copy. To suppose that he did, is to shut our eyes to his habits, character, and history. He suffered plays to be imputed to him (with his name affixed to them), of which he had not written a word. When Thorpe, a bookseller, in 1609, printed his beautiful poem, entitled The Lover's Complaint, together with his Sonnets, in the most incorrect manner, he never took the trouble to print a second edition, or even to point out the numerous errors of the press with which these pieces abound. Can it then be supposed that he would revise or correct the second or third editions of such of his plays as had been fraudulently obtained from the players, against his will, and against his interest? MALONE.

4 All places that the EYE OF HEAVEN visits, &c.] So, Nonnus: adepos ouua: i. e. the sun. STEEVENS.

So, in Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis, 1593:

"And Titan, tired in the mid-day heat,

"With burning eye did hotly overlook them."

Again, in his Lucrece, 1594 :

"The eye of heaven is out."

So also Spencer, Faery Queene, b. i. c. iii. st. 4:

66

Her angel face,

"As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright." MALONE. The fourteen verses that follow are found in the first edition.

РОРЕ. The whole of this speech and the preceding one, are omitted in the folio; but they are found in all the quartos. BosWELL.

I am inclined to believe that what Mr. Theobald and Mr. Pope have restored were expunged in the revision by the author: If these lines are omitted, the sense is more coherent. Nothing is more frequent among dramatic writers, than to shorten their dialogues for the stage. JOHNSON.

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did banish thee;] Read:

"Therefore, think not, the king did banish thee."

RITSON.

But thou the king: Woe doth the heavier sit,
Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.
Go, say, I sent thee forth to purchase honour,
And not-the king exíl'd thee: or suppose,
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air,
And thou art flying to a fresher clime.
Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it

To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou com'st: Suppose the singing birds, musicians;

The grass whereon thou tread'st, the presence strew'd';

The flowers, fair ladies; and thy steps, no more

6 Think not, the king did banish thee;

But thou the king:] The same thought occurs in Coriolanus:

"I banish you." M. MASON.

"All places that the eye of heaven visits,

"Are to a wise man ports and happy havens :"Think not, the king did banish thee;

"But thou the king." Shakspeare, when he wrote the passage before us, probably remembered that part of Lyly's Euphues, 1579, in which Euphues exhorts Botonio to take his exile patiently. Among other arguments he observes, that "Nature hath given to man a country no more than she hath a house, or lands, or livings. Socrates would neither call himself an Athenian, neither a Græeian, but a citizen of the world. Plato would never accompt him banished, that had the sunne, fire, ayre, water, and earth, that he had before; where he felt the winter's blast, and the summer's blaze; where the same sunne and the same moone shined: whereby he noted that every place was a country to a wise man, and all parts a palace to a quiet mind.-When it was cast in Diogenes' teeth, that the Sinoponetes had banished him Pontus, yea, said he, I them of Diogenes." MALONE.

7

the presence strew'd;] Shakspeare has other allusions to the ancient practice of strewing rushes over the floor of the presence chamber. HENLEY.

So, in Cymbeline:

66

Tarquin thus

"Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken'd

"The chastity he wounded." STEEVENS.

See Hentzner's account of the presence chamber, in the palace at Greenwich, 1598. Itinerar. p. 135. MALONE.

Than a delightful measure, or a dance:
For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man that mocks at it, and sets it light.
BOLING. O, who can hold a fire in his hand,
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus'?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite,
By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow,
By thinking on fantastick summer's heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good,
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more,
Than when it bites *, but lanceth not the sore.
* Quarto 1597, he bites.

A measure was a formal

8 Than a delightful MEASURE,] court dance. So, in King Richard III. :

"Our dreadful marches to delightful measures."

STEEVENS.

It is described by our author as being "full of state and ancientry." See Much Ado About Nothing, vol. vii. p. 36.

MALONE.

9 O, who can hold a FIRE in his hand, &c.] Fire is here, as in many other places, used as a dissyllable. MALONE.

It has been remarked, that there is a passage resembling this in Tully's Fifth Book of Tusculan Questions. Speaking of Epicurus, he says:- Sed unà se dicit recordatione acquiescere præteritarum voluptatum: ut si quis æstuans, cum vim caloris non facile patiatur, recordari velit se aliquando in Arpinati nostro gelidis fluminibus circumfusum fuisse. Non enim video, quomodo sedare possint mala præsentia præteritæ voluptates." The Tusculan Questions of Cicero had been translated early enough for Shakspeare to have seen them. STEEVENS.

The Tusculan Questions were translated by John Dolman, and published in 1561.

Shakspeare, however, I believe, was thinking on the words of Lyly, which are found in the page preceding that from which an extract has been already made: "I speake this to this end, that though thy exile seem grievous to thee, yet guiding thy selfe with the rules of philosophie, it shall be more tolerable: he that is colde doth not cover himselfe with care but with clothes; he that is washed in the rayne, drieth himselfe by the fire, not by his fancie; and thou which art banished," &c. MALONE.

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