An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend; An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die i' the streets, [Exit. La. Cap. Talk not to me, for I 'll not speak a word; Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee. [Exit. What say'st thou hast thou not a word of joy? Nurse. 'Faith, here it is: Romeo Is banished; and all the world to nothing, Or, if he do, it needs must be by stealth. Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, Romeo's a dishclout to him; an eagle, madam, Jul. Speakest thou from thy heart? Or else beshrew them both. VOL. VII. From my soul too; 2 B Jul. Nurse. Amen! What? Jul. Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much. Having displeas'd my father, to Laurence' cell, Nurse. Marry, I will; and this is wisely done. [Exit. If all else fail, myself have power to die. [Exit. ILLUSTRATIONS OF ACT III. 1 SCENE I." Affection makes him false." THERE is a slight particle of untruth in Benvolio's statement, which, to a certain degree, justifies this charge of Lady Capulet. Tybalt was bent upon quarrelling with Romeo, but Mercutio forced on his own quarrel with Tybalt. Dr. Johnson's remark upon this circumstance is worthy his character as a moralist:-"The charge of falsehood on Benvolio, though produced at hazard, is very just. The author, who seems to intend the character of Benvolio as good, meant, perhaps, to show how the best minds, in a state of faction and discord, are detorted to criminal partiality." 2 SCENE II.-" God save the mark!" This expression occurs in 'The First Part of Henry IV.,' in Hotspur's celebrated speech defending the denial of his prisoners. In Othello,' we have God bless the mark. In these cases, as in the instance before us, the commentators leave the expression in its original obscurity. May we venture a conjecture? The mark which persons who are unable to write make, instead of their signature, was often in the form of a cross; but anciently the use of this mark was not confined to illiterate persons, for, amongst the Saxons, the mark of the cross, as an attestation of the good faith of the person signing, was required to be attached to the signature of those who could write, and to stand in the place of the signature of those who could not write. (See Blackstone's Commentaries.') The word mark was, we believe, thus taken to signify the cross. God save the mark was, therefore, a form of ejaculation ayproaching to the character of an oath; in the same manner as assertions were made emphatic by the addition of "by the rood," or, "by the holy rood." 3 SCENE III." Like powder in a skill-less soldier's flask." The force and propriety of this comparison are manifest; but, fully to understand it, we must know how the soldier of Shakspere's time was accoutred. His heavy gun was fired with a match, his powder was carried in a flask; and the match and the powder, in unskilful hands, were doubtless sometimes productive of accidents; so that the man-at-arms was, like Romeo in his passion, "dismembered with his own defence." 4 SCENE V." Juliet's chamber." The stage-direction in the folio edition of 1623 is, "Enter Romeo and Juliet aloft." In the first quarto, 1597, the direction is, "Enter Romeo and Juliet at the window." To understand these directions, we must refer to the construction of the old theatres. "Towards the rear of the stage," says Malone, "there appears to have been a balcony or upper stage; the platform of which was probably eight or nine feet from the ground. I suppose it to have been supported by pillars. From hence, in many of our old plays, part of the dialogue was spoken; and in the front of it curtains likewise were hung, so as occasionally to conceal the persons in it from the view of the audience. At each side of this balcony was a box very inconve. niently situated, which was sometimes called the private box. In these boxes, which were at a lower price, some persons sate, either from economy or singularity." The balcony probably served a variety of purposes. Malone says, "When the citizens of Angiers are to appear on the walls of their town, and young Arthur to leap from the battlements, I suppose our ancestors were contented with seeing them in the balcony already described; or, perhaps, a few boards tacked together, and painted so as to resemble the rude discoloured walls of an old town, behind which a platform might have been placed near the top, on which the citizens stood." It appears to us probable that even in these cases the balcony served for the platform, and that a few painted boards in front supplied the illusion of wall and tower. There was still another use of the balcony. According to Malone, when a play was exhibited within a play, as in 'Hamlet,' the court, or audience, before whom the interlude was performed, sate in the balcony. To Malone's historical account of the English stage, and to Mr. Collier's valuable details regarding theatres (Annals of the Stage,' vol. iii.), the reader is referred for fuller information upon this and other points which bear upon the economy of our ancient drama. We prefix a representation of the old stage, with its balcony, which is engraved in the title-page to William Alabaster's Latin tragedy of Roxana,' 1632. 5 SCENE V.-"Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree." In the description of the garden in Chaucer's translation of "The Romaunt of the Rose,' the pomegranate is first mentioned amongst the fruit-trees :- "There were (and that wot I full well) Of pomegranates a full great deal." The "orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits" was one of the beautiful objects described by Solomon in his 'Canticles.' Amongst the fruit-bearing trees, the pomegranate is in some respects the most beautiful; and, therefore, in the south of Europe and in the East it has become the chief ornament of the garden. But where did Shakspere find that the nightingale haunted the pomegranate-tree, pouring forth her song from the same bough, week after week? Doubtless in some of the old travels with which he was familiar. Chaucer puts his nightingale "in a fresh green laurel-tree;" but the preference of the nightingale for the pomegranate is unquestionable. "The nightingale sings from the pomegranate-groves in the daytime,” says Russel in his account of Aleppo. A friend, whose observations as a traveller are as acute as his descriptions are graphic and forcible, informs us that throughout his journeys in the East he never heard such a choir of nightingales as in a row of pomegranate-trees that skirt the road from Smyrna to Boudjia. In the truth of details such as these the genius of Shakspere is as much exhibited as in his wonderful powers of generalization. 6 SCENE V.- —" It was the lark, the herald of the morn." Shakspere's power of describing natural objects is unequalled in this beautiful scene, which, as we think, was amongst his very early productions. The 'Venus and Adonis,' published in 1593, is also full of this power. Compare the following passage with the description of morning in the scene before us :-- "Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, Who doth the world so gloriously behold, That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold." 7 Scene V.—“ Hunting thee hence with hunts up to the day.” There was one Gray, a maker of "certain merry ballads," who, according to Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy' (1589), grew into good estimation with Henry VIII., and the Protector Somerset, for the said merry ballads, "whereof one chiefly was, The hunte is up, the hunte is up." Douce thinks he has recovered the identical which he reprints. One stanza will, perhaps, satisfy our readers : song, The hunt is up, the hunt is up, "Chorus. {Sing merrily wee, the hunt is up; The birds they sing, The deer they fling, Hey, nony nony-no: The hounds they crye, The hunters flye, Hey trolilo, trololilo. The hunt is up, the hunt is up." 8 SCENE V." O God! I have an ill-divining soul." Coleridge has some remarks upon that beautiful passage in Richard II.,' where the queen says— "Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb, Is coming toward me," which we may properly quote here: "Mark in this scene Shakspere's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the terræ incognitæ of presentiments, in the human mind; and how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken, once for all, as the truth, that Shakspere, in the absolute universality of his genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind.”—('Literary |