would so faine have bene among them.' The phrase is born of sympathy and conviction. North, too, has a fine impatience of fools. Hannibal, discovering the error of his guides, les feit pendre' in Amyot; in North he 'roundely trussed them up and honge them by the neckes.' 1 And he is not sparing in his censure of ill-livers. Phoea, you read in the Theseus,' was surnamed a sowe for her beastly brutishe behaviour, and wicked life.' He can be choleric as well as kindly, and never minces his words. Apart from those expressions which spring from the idiosyncrasy of his temperament, North's style shares to the full in the general glory of Elizabethan prose. You read of 'fretised seelings,' 2 of words that dulce and soften the hardened harts of the multitude'; of the Athenians 'being set on a jolitie to see themselves strong.' Heads are 'passhed in peces,' and men ashamed to cast their honour at their heeles' (Amyot: 'd'abandonner leur gloire '). Themistocles' father shows him the shipwracks and ribbes (Amyot: 'les corps') of olde gallyes cast here and there. You have, 'pluck out of his head the worm of ambition' 4 for oster de sa fantasie l'ambition'; and Cæsar on the night before his death hears Calpurnia, 'being fast asleep, weepe and sigh, and put forth many fumbling lamentable speeches.' But in particular, North is richer than even his immediate followers in homespun images and proverbial locutions. Men who succeed, 'bear the bell'; 5' tenter la fortune le premier' is 'to breake the ise of this enterprise.' " Coriolanus by his pride 'stirred coales emong the people.' The Spartans who thwarted Themistocles' dyd sit on his skirtes'; 1 Fabius Maximus. 2 Lycurgus. The old prize for a racehorse, 3 Publicola. ▲ Solon. 1 and the Athenians fear Pericles because in voice and manner he was Pisistratus up and downe.' The Veians let fall their peacockes bravery'; and a man when pleased is 'as merry as a pye.' 2 Raw recruits are fresh-water souldiers.' A turncoat carries two faces in one hoode one hoode'; 3 and the Carthaginians, being outwitted, are ready to eate their fingers for spyte.' The last locution occurs also in North's Morall Philosophie of 1570: he habitually used such expressions, and yet others which are truly proverbs, common to many languages. For instance, he writes in the Camillus, 'these words made Brennus mad as a March Hare that out went his blade'; in Cato Utican 'to set all at six and seven'; in Solonso sweete it is to rule the roste'; in Pelopidas' to hold their noses to the gryndstone'; in Cicero, with even greater incongruity, of his wife Terentia' wearing her husbandes breeches.' In the Alcibiades, the Athenians upon his persuasion, built castles in the ayer'; and this last has been referred to Sidney's Apologie; but the first known edition of the Apologie is dated 1595, and it is supposed to have been written about 1581; North has it not only in the Lives (1579), but in his Morall Philosophie of 1570.4 To North, too, we may perhaps attribute some of the popularity in England of engaging jingles. Pritle pratle' and 'topsie turvie' occur both in the Lives and the Morall Philosophie. And in the Lives you have also 'spicke and spanne newe '; 5 with 'hurly burly' and 'pel mel,' adopted by Shakespeare in Macbeth and Richard III. Since North takes the last from 2 Ibid. 11. 1 Camillus. • Fables of Bidpai, 1888, p. 6 3 Timoleon. 5 Paulus Æmilius; in a gorgeous description of the Macedonian phalanx, from spick a spike, and span = a splinter. = Amyot and explains it—' fled into the camp pel mel or hand over heade '-and since it is of French derivation-pelle-mesle = 'to mix with a shovel '—it is possible that the phrase is here used for the first time. Gathered together, these peculiarities of style seem many; and yet in truth they are few. They are the merest accidents in a great stream of rhythm. That stream flows steadily and superbly through a channel of another man's digging. For North's style is Amyot's, divided into shorter periods, strengthened with racy locutions, and decked with Elizabethan tags. In English such division was necessary: the rhythm, else, of the weightier language had gained such momentum as to escape control. But even so North's English is neither cramped nor pruned it is still unfettered by antithesis and prodigal of display. His periods, though shorter than Amyot's, in themselves are leisurely and long. There is room in them for fine words and lofty phrases; and these go bragging by, the one following a space after the other, like cars in an endless pageant. The movement of his procession rolls on : yet he halts it at pleasure, to soften sorrow with a gracious saying, or to set a flourish on the bravery of his theme. IV The earliest tribute to the language of Amyot and North was the highest that has ever been, or can ever be, paid; both for its own character and the authority of those who gave it. For Montaigne, the greatest literary genius in France during the sixteenth century, wrote thus of Amyot: 'Nous estions perdus, si ce livre ne nous eust tires du bourbier : sa mercy, nous osons a cette heure parler et escrire'; 1 and Shakespeare, the first poet of all time, borrowed three plays almost wholly from North. I do not speak of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen, for each of which a little has been gleaned from North's Theseus; nor of the Timon of Athens, although here the debt is larger.2 The wit of Apemantus, the Apologue of the Fig-tree, and the two variants of Timon's epitaph, are all in North. Indeed, it was the rich conceit' of Timon's tomb by the sea-shore which touched Shakespeare's imagination, as it had touched Antony's; so that some of the restricted passion of North's Antonius, which bursts into showers of meteoric splendour in the Fourth and Fifth Acts of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, beats too, in the last lines of his Timon, with a rhythm as of billows: 'yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye But in Antony and Cleopatra, as in Coriolanus and in Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare's obligation is apparent in almost all he has written. To measure it you must quote the bulk of the three plays. Of the incident,' Trench has said, there is almost nothing which he does not owe to Plutarch, even as continually he owes the very wording to Sir Thomas North'; and he follows up this judgment with so detailed an analysis of the Julius Cæsar that I shall not attempt to labour the same ground. As regards the Coriolanus, it was noted, even by Pope, that the 1 Essais, II. iv. 2 It is founded on one passage in the Alcibiades and another in the Antony. 3 Plutarch. Five Lectures, p. 66. whole history is exactly followed, and many of the principal speeches exactly copied, from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch.' This exactitude, apart from its intrinsic interest, may sometimes assist in restoring a defective passage. One such piece there is in II. iii. 231 of the Cambridge Shakespeare, 1865: 'The noble house o' the Marcians, from whence came The Folios here read: 'And Nobly nam'd, so twice being Censor, It is evident that, after hither,' a line has been lost, and Rowe, Pope, Delius, and others have tried their best to recapture it. Pope, knowing of Shakespeare's debt and founding his emendation on North, could suggest nothing better than And Censorinus, darling of the people'; while Delius, still more strangely, stumbled, as I must think, on the right reading, but for the inadequate reason that' darling of the people' does not sound like Shakespeare. I have given in italics the words taken from North: and, applying the same method to the line suggested by Delius, you read: 'And Censorinus that was so surnamed,' then, in the next line, by merely shifting a comma, you read on: And nobly named so, twice being Censor.' Had Delius pointed out that he got his line simply by following Shakespeare's practice of taking so many of North's words, in their order, as would fall into blank verse, his emendation must surely have been accepted, since it involves no change in the subsequent lines of the Folios; whereas |