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BENE. Why then your uncle, and the prince, and Claudio,
Have been deceiv'd; they swore you did.

BEAT. Do not you love me?

BENE.
Troth no, no more than reason.
BEAT. Why then my cousin, Margaret, and Ursula,

Are much deceiv'd; for they did swear you did.
BENE. They swore that you were almost sick for me.
BEAT. They swore that you were well nigh dead for me.
BENE. T is no such matter:-Then you do not love me?
BEAT. No, truly, but in friendly recompense.

LEON. Come, cousin, I am sure you love the gentleman.
CLAUD. And I'll be sworn upon 't, that he loves her;
For here 's a paper, written in his hand,

A halting sonnet of his own pure brain,
Fashion'd to Beatrice.

HERO.

And here's another,

Writ in my cousin's hand, stolen from her pocket,
Containing her affection unto Benedick.

BENE. A miracle; here's our own hands against our hearts!-Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.

BEAT. I would not deny you;-but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion; and, partly, to save your life, for I was told you were in a consump

tion.

BENE. Peace, I will stop your mouth a.

[Kissing her.

D. PEDRO. How dost thou, Benedick the married man ? BENE. I'll tell thee what, prince; a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour: Dost thou think I care for a satire, or an epigram? No: if a man will be beaten with brains, a shall wear nothing handsome about him: In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any pur pose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. For thy part, Claudio, I did think to have beaten thee; but in that thou art like to be my kinsman, live unbruised, and love my cousin. CLAUD. I had well hoped thou wouldst have denied Beatrice, that I might have cudgelled thee out of thy single life, to make thee a double dealer; which, out of question, thou wilt be, if my cousin do not look exceeding narrowly to thee.

BENE. Come, come, we are friends :-let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts, and our wives' heels.

Steevens cuts out the troth; the metre, says he, is overloaded. It would matter little what Steevens did with his own edition, but he has furnished the text of every popular edition of Shakspere extant; and for this reason we feel it a duty perpetually to protest against his corruptions of the real text.

The old copies give the line to Leonato.

b What is omitted in the folio.

• In that-because.

LEON. We'll have dancing afterwards.

BENE. First, o' my word; therefore, play music.

Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife; there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn 23.

Enter a Messenger.

MESS. My lord, your brother John is ta'en in flight,

And brought with armed men back to Messina.

BENE. Think not on him till to-morrow; I'll devise thee brave punishments for him.-Strike up, pipers.

[Dance. Exeunt.

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ILLUSTRATIONS.

ACT I.

We

puff direct, and the puff collateral, and the
puff oblique" were not then invented.
shall probably return in some degree to the
simplicity of the old time, and once more be
content to "set up our bills;" for puffery has
destroyed itself. When everything has become
alike superlative there are no superlatives.

and my uncle's fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the bird-bolt."

1 SCENE I.-" He set up his bills." THE history of advertising, if well worked out, would form one of the most curious chapters of any account of the progress of English civilisation. We are here in the rude stages of that history, and see the beginnings of the craving for publicity which was to produce that marvel of society, a Times newspaper of 1851. In Shakspere's day the bearwards, fencing- 2 SCENE I.-" Challenged Cupid at the flight : masters, mountebanks, and players, "set up their bills upon posts;" masterless men "set up their bills in Paul's for services;" schoolmasters "pasted up their papers on every post for arithmetic and writing;" and it is recorded as a somewhat clever proceeding, that a man having lost his purse "set up bills in divers places, that if any man of the city had found the purse and would bring it again to him, he should have well for his labour." These were very simple and straghtforward operations. The mysteries of advertising were not then studied. Men had to make their plain announcements, and to be attended to. "The

In Ben Jonson's 'Cynthia's Revels' Mercury says to Cupid, "I fear thou hast not arrows for the purpose;" to which Cupid replies, "O yes, here be of all sorts, flights, rovers, and buttshafts." Gifford explains that "flights were long and light-feathered arrows which went level to the mark." These were the weapons for Cupid and Benedick therefore is said to have "challenged Cupid at the flight," with arrows such as these :

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into a proverb-"a fool's bolt is soon shot." Douce has preserved the forms of some of these bird-bolts :

1111

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[Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke.]

SCENE L-"He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block."

In the perpetual change of fashions which was imputed to the English of Elizabeth's day,

(and which we shall have more particularly to notice in Act II.,) the hat underwent every possible transition of form. We had intended to have illustrated this by exhibiting the principal varieties which we find in pictures of that day; but if our blocks had been as numerous as these blocks, we should have filled pages with the graceful or grotesque caprices of the exquisites from whom Brummell inherited his belief in the powers of the hat: "Why, Mr. Brummell, does an Englishman always look better dressed than a Frenchman?" The oracular reply was, ""T is the hat." We present, however, the portrait of one ancient Brummell, with a few hats at his feet to choose from.

SCENE I.-" Cupid is a good hare-finder, and
Vulcan a rare carpenter."

The English commentators can give no explanation of this passage; except Steevens, who makes it the vehicle for one of his Collins notes. Tieck says that Ayrer of Nürnberg,who has treated after his own manner the novel of Bandello upon which this comedy is founded,-introduces Venus complaining that Cupid has shot many arrows in vain at the Count Claudio of his story, and that Vulcan will make no more arrows; and Tieck adds his opinion that Ayrer was acquainted with some English comedy older than that of Shakspere, from which Cupid and Vulcan have been derived. The resemblance which Tieck produces is not very striking. Benedick's allusion, whatever it be, must pass to the limbo of meaningless jokes-that is, jokes of which time has worn out the application.

5 SCENE I.-" Like the old tale, my lord: 'it is not so, nor 't was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.'"

Mr. Blakeway, who has contributed a few valuable notes to Shakspere which will be found in Boswell's edition of Malone, has given us an illustration of this passage, in his own recollections of an old tale to which he thinks our poet evidently alludes, "and which has often froze my young blood, when I was a child, as, I dare say, it had done his before me."

"Once upon a time there was a young lady (called Lady Mary in the story) who had two brothers. One summer they all three went to a country-seat of theirs, which they had not before visited. Among the other gentry of the nighbourhood who came to see them was a Mr. Fox, a bachelor, with whom they, particularly the young lady, were much pleased. He used often to dine with them, and frequently invited Lady Mary to come and see his house. One day that her brothers were absent elsewhere, and she had nothing better to do, she determined to go thither, and accordingly set out unattended. When she arrived at the house, and knocked at the door, no one answered. At length she opened it and went in. Over the portal of the hall was written, 'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. She advanced: over the staircase, the same inscription. She went up over the entrance of a gallery, the same. She proceeded over the door of a chamber,-'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that your heart's blood should run cold.' She opened it-it was full of skeletons, tubs full of blood, &c. She retreated in haste. Coming down stairs she saw, out of a window, Mr. Fox advancing towards the house, with a drawn sword in one hand, while with the other he dragged along a young lady by her hair. Lady Mary had just time to slip down and hide herself under the stairs before Mr. Fox and his victim arrived at

the foot of them. As he pulled the young lady up stairs she caught hold of one of the banisters with her hand, on which was a rich bracelet. Mr. Fox cut it off with his sword: the hand and bracelet fell into Lady Mary's lap, who then contrived to escape unobserved, and got home safe to her brothers' house.

"After a few days Mr. Fox came to dine with them as usual (whether by invitation or of his own accord, this deponent saith not). After dinner, when the guests began to amuse each

other with extraordinary anecdotes, Lady Mary at length said she would relate to them a remarkable dream she had lately had. "I dreamt,' said she, 'that as you, Mr. Fox, had often invited me to your house, I would go there one morning. When I came to the house, I knocked, &c., but no one answered. When I opened the door, over the hall was written, Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. But,' said she, turning to Mr. Fox, and smiling, 'It is not so, nor it was not so;' then she pursues the rest of the story, concluding at every turn with 'It is not so, nor it was not so,' till she comes to the room full of bodies, when Mr. Fox took up the burden of the tale, and said, 'It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so:' which he continues to repeat at every subsequent turn of the dreadful story, till she came to the circumstance of his cutting off the young lady's hand, when, upon his saying as usual, It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so,' Lady Mary retorts, But it is so, and it was so, and here the hand I have to show,' at the same time producing the hand and bracelet from her lap: whereupon the guests drew their swords, and instantly cut Mr. Fox into a thousand pieces."

SCENE I.-" Hang me in a bottle like a
cat," &c.

This is very obvious. A cat was hung in a bottle and shot at;-as cocks were thrown at. Yet we have a story of a cat being closed up in a wooden bottle, containing also soot, and he that beat out the bottom of the bottle, and escaped the soot, running under it, was the winner. The cat shot at was probably a real cat on some occasions, and on others a stuffed cat; as the popinjay in 'Old Mortality' had He that probably a fluttering predecessor. should be "clapped on the shoulder, and called Adam," was to be so honoured, in allusion to the famous old archer Adam Bell, who

"sat in Englyshe wood, Under the green-wood tre." See Note on 'Romeo and Juliet,' Act II., Sc. 1.

7 SCENE I.-"Ere you flout old ends any

further."

The "old ends" flouted at were probably the formal conclusions of letters, such as we find in The Paston Letters :-"No more at this time, but the Trinity have you in protection,

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