That he may vow, in that sad hour of mine, My honour I'll bequeath unto the knife. "Dear lord of that dear jewel I have lost, Myself, thy friend, will kill myself, thy foe, "This brief abridgment of my will I make: Mine honour be the knife's that makes my wound; To those that live, and think no shame of me, Thou, Collatine, shalt oversee this will; a How was I overseen that thou shalt see it! My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill; The executor of a will was sometimes called the overseer; but our ancestors often appointed overseers as well as executors. Shakspere's own will contains such an appointment. This plot of death when sadly she had laid, And wip'd the brinish pearl from her bright eyes, As winter meads when sun doth melt their snow. Her mistress she doth give demure good-morrow, Why her two suns were cloud-eclipsed so, But as the earth doth weep, the sun being set,a Who in a salt-wav'd ocean quench their light, A pretty while these pretty creatures stand, Grieving themselves to guess at others' smarts, a In the folio edition of Romeo and Juliet,' as well as in the quarto of 1597, we find the line "When the sun sets, the earth doth drizzle dew." Here the image completely agrees with that in the text before us. But in the undated quarto, which the modern editors follow, we have "the air doth drizzle dew." Science was long puzzled to decide whether the earth or the air produced dew; but it was reserved for the accurate experiments of modern times to show that the earth and the air must unite to produce this effect under particular circumstances of temperature and radiation. The correction of the undated edition of Romeo and Juliet' was certainly unnecessary. For men have marble, women waxen minds, And therefore are they form'd as marble will;a No more than wax shall be accounted evil, Their smoothness, like a goodly champaign plain, Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks, No man inveigh against the wither'd flower, With men's abuses! those proud lords, to blame, The precedent whereof in Lucrece view, That dying fear through all her body spread; By this, mild patience bid fair Lucrece speak 66 My girl," quoth she, "on what occasion break » Marble here stands for men, whose minds have just been compared to marble. b Hild-held. Such a change for the sake of rhyme is frequent in Spenser. Those tears from thee, that down thy cheeks are raining? If thou dost weep for grief of my sustaining, Know, gentle wench, it small avails my mood: If tears could help, mine own would do me good. "But tell me, girl, when went”—(and there she stay'd Till after a deep groan) "Tarquin from hence?" "Madam, ere I was up," replied the maid, "The more to blame my sluggard negligence: Yet with the fault I thus far can dispense; Myself was stirring ere the break of day, And, ere I rose, was Tarquin gone away. 66 But, lady, if your maid may be so bold, She would request to know your heaviness" "O peace!" quoth Lucrece; "if it should be told, The repetition cannot make it less; For more it is than I can well express: And that deep torture may be call'd a hell, pen "Go, get me hither paper, ink, and A letter to my lord, my love, my dear; The cause craves haste, and it will soon be writ." Her maid is gone, and she prepares to write, Throng her inventions, which shall be before. At last she thus begins :-" Thou worthy lord Health to thy person! next vouchsafe to afford So I commend me from our house in grief;" Here folds she up the tenor of her woe, Lest he should hold it her own gross abuse, Ere she with blood had stain'd her stain'd excuse. Besides, the life and feeling of her passion She hoards, to spend when he is by to hear her; When sighs, and groans, and tears may grace the fashion From that suspicion which the world might bear her. To see sad sights moves more than hear them told; The heavy motion that it doth behold, 'T is but a part of sorrow that we hear: C Deep sounds make lesser noise than shallow fords, a The simplicity of this letter is exquisitely beautiful; and its pathos is deeper from the circumstance that it is scarcely raised above the tone of ordinary correspondence. "So I commend me from our house in grief" is such a formula as we constantly find in ancient correspondence. In the 'Paston Letters' we have such conclusions as this: "Written at —— when I was not well that Sounds. Malone proposes to read floods. This Steevens resists, and says sound is such a part of the sea as may be sounded. To this Malone replies that a sound cannot be deep, and therefore sounds is not here intended. A sound is a bay or frith; and Dampier, who is better authority than the commentators on nau |