Trin. Do, do: We steal by line and level, an 't like your grace. Ste. I thank thee for that jest: here's a garment for 't: wit shall not go unrewarded while I am king of this country: Steal by line and level, is an excellent pass of pate; there's another garment for 't. Trin. Monster, come, put some lime upon your fingers, and away with the rest. Cal. I will have none on 't: we shall lose our time, And all be turn'd to barnacles, or to apes With foreheads villainous low. Ste. Monster, lay-to your fingers; help to bear this away where my hogshead of wine is, or I'll turn you out of my kingdom: go to, carry this. Trin. And this. Ste. Ay, and this. A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of hounds, and hunt them about. ting them on. Pro. Hey, Mountain, hey! PROSPERO and ARIEL set Ari. Silver! there it goes, Silver! Pro. Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark, hark! [CAL., STE., and TRIN. are driven out. Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews With aged cramps; and more pinch-spotted make them, Ari. Hark, they roar. Pro. Let them be hunted soundly: At this hour Lie at my mercy all mine enemies : Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou Follow, and do me service. [Exeunt. ILLUSTRATION OF ACT IV. 1 SCENE I." Come, hang them on this line." MR. HUNTER, in his 'Disquisition on The Tempest,' has a special heading, “the linegrove." He invites the friend to whom he addresses the. Disquisition to accompany him to the "cell of Prospero, and to the grove or berry of line-trees by which it was enclosed or protected from the weather." He adds, "if you look for the very word line-grove in any verbal index to Shakespeare you will not find it; for the modern editors, in their discretion, have chosen to alter the line in which it occurs, and we now read In the lime-grove which weather-fends your cell.'" The editors, then, have substituted the more recent name of the tree for the more ancient but the change had taken place earlier than the days of the commentators. In Dryden's alteration of 'The Tempest' (edit. of 1676) we have the above passage, with lime-grove. The effect of the change, Mr. Hunter says, is this: "When Prospero says to Ariel, who comes in bringing the glittering apparel, Come, hang them on this line,' he means on one of the line-trees near his cell, which could hardly have been mistaken if the word of the original copies, line-grove, had been allowed to keep its place. But the ear having long been familiar with lime-grove, the word suggested not the branches of a tree so called, but a cord-line, and accordingly, when the play is represented, such a line is actually drawn across the stage, and the glittering apparel is hung upon it. Anything more remote from poetry than this can scarcely be imagined." This, we admit, is exceedingly ingenious; and we were at first disposed, with many others, to receive the theory with an implicit belief. A careful examination of the matter has, however, convinced us that the poet had no such intention of hanging the clothes on a line-tree; that a clothes-line was destined to this office; and that the players are right in stretching up a clothes-line. Our reasons are as follow : 1st. When Prospero says "hang them on this line," when Stephano gives his jokes of "mistress line," and "now is the jerkin under the line," the word "line" has no characteristic mode of printing, neither with a capital, nor in italics. On the contrary, the tree, in connexion with a grove, is printed thus,-Line-grove. 2nd. Mr. Hunter furnishes no example of the word line, as applied to a tree, being used without the adjunct of tree or grove-line-tree, line-grove. The quotation which he gives from Elisha Cole is clear in this matter:-" Line-tree (tilia), a tall tree, with broad leaves and fine flowers." The other quotation which he gives from Gerard would, if correctly printed, exhibit the same thing:-" The female line, says Gerard, or linden-tree, waxeth very great," &c. But Gerard wrote, "The female line or linden tree waxeth," &c.; and the word tree as much belongs to line as to linden. 3rd. Mr. Hunter quotes "some clumsy joking about the line, among the clowns as they steal through the line-grove with the murderous intent;" and he quotes as follows, omitting certain words, which we shall presently give : "Ste. Mistress line, is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line. Now the passage really stands thus :— "Ste. Mistress line, is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line: now, jerkin, you are like to lose your hair, and prove a bald jerkin. Trin. We steal by line and level," &c. Is not the "clumsy joking" about lose your hair, and bald jerkin, of some importance in getting at the meaning? Steevens has observed that "the lines on which clothes are hung are usually made of twisted horse-hair." But they were especially so made in Shakspere's day. In a woodcut of twelve distinct figures of trades and callings of the time of James I. (see Smith's Cries of London,' p. 15), and of which there is a copy in the British Museum, we have the cry of "Buy a hair-line!" The " clumsy joking" would be intelligible to an audience accustomed to a hair-line. It is not intelligible according to Mr. Hunter's assertion that the word suggested a "cord-line." 4th. Is it likely that Shakspere would have made these drunken fellows so knowing in the peculiarities of trees as to distinguish a. line-tree from an elm-tree, or a plane-tree? Is it conceivable that the trees in Prospero's island were so young that clothes could be hung upon their lower branches? Are the branches of a line-tree of such a form as to hang clothes upon them, and to remove them easily? Had not the clowns a distinct image in their minds of an old-clothes shop? "We know what belongs to a frippery." Here is a picture of "a frippery," from a print dated 1587, with its clothes hung in "line and level." Is not the joke "we steal by line and level" applicable only to a stretched line?-or is it meaningless? It has the highest approbation of King Stephano. Lastly, with reference to the clothes-line, when Mr. Hunter says "Anything more remote from poetry than this can scarcely be imagined," we answer that the entire scene was intended to be the antagonist of poetry. All the scenes in which Trinculo and Stephano are tricked by Ariel are essentially ludicrous, and, to a certain extent, gross. The "pool" through which they were hunted had none of the poetical attributes about it. It was, compared with a fountain or a lake, as the hair-line to the line-tree. Mr. Hunter contends that, "if the word of the original, line-grove, had been allowed to keep its place," the passages in the fourth act referring to line must have been associated with the line-grove of the fifth act. The poet, we are satisfied, had no such association in his mind. ACT V. SCENE I. Before the Cell of PROSPERO. Enter PROSPERO in his magic robes; and ARIEL. Pro. Now does my project gather to a head : Pro. I did say so, Ari. In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell; Brimfull of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly b Him that you term'd, sir, "The good old lord, Gonzalo ;' His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops 99 From eaves of reeds: your charm so strongly works them, That if you now beheld them your affections Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions? and shall not myself, a And's followers. These words, says Steevens, spoil the metre without help to the sense; and so he prints "How fares the king and his." b That. All the editors omit this word, by which omission they destroy the metrical ease of the line. One of their kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am strook to the quick, Yet, with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury Do I take part the rarer action is : In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, I'll fetch them, sir. Ari. [Exit. Pro. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;' And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,a Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime Is to make midnight-mushrooms; that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid (Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm'd The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar: graves, at my command, Have wak'd their sleepers; op'd, and let them forth By my so potent art: But this rough magic I here abjure: and, when I have requir'd a The modern editors all make here a compound epithet green-sour. Douce would read green sward. Mr. Hunter agrees with Douce in his objection to the hyphen, and proposes another reading,— "By moonshine on the green sour ringlets make." But where is the necessity for change at all? Why cannot we be content to retain the double epithet of the folio? We know that the ringlets are of the green sward, and on the green; but the poet, by using the epithet green, marks the intensity of their colour. They are greener than the green about them. explains by "Whereof the ewe not bites." of what we still call fairy-rings. That they are sour he No description could be more accurate |