Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The sum of all our answer is but this:

We would not seek a battle, as we are;
Nor, as we are, we say, we will not shun it;
So tell your master.

MONT. I shall deliver so.

ness.

Thanks to your high

[Exit MONTJOY.

GLO. I hope, they will not come upon us now. K. HEN. We are in God's hand, brother, not in

theirs.

March to the bridge; it now draws toward night:-
Beyond the river we'll encamp ourselves;
And on to-morrow bid them march away.

[Exeunt.

SCENE VII.9

The French Camp, near Agincourt.

Enter the Constable of France, the Lord RAMBURES, the Duke of ORLEANS, Dauphin, and Others.

CON. Tut! I have the best armour of the world.'Would, it were day!

ORL. You have an excellent armour; but let my horse have his due.

CON. It is the best horse of Europe.

ORL. Will it never be morning?

DAU. My lord of Orleans, and my lord high constable, you talk of horse and armour,—

9 Scene VII.] This scene is shorter, and I think better, in the first editions of 1600 and 1608. But as the enlargements appear to be the author's own, I would not omit them.

POPE.

ORL. You are as well provided of both, as any prince in the world.

DAU. What a long night is this!—I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. Ca, ha! He bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs;1 le cheval volant, the Pegasus, qui a les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. ORL. He's of the colour of the nutmeg.

DAU. And of the heat of the ginger. It is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness, while his rider mounts him he is, indeed, a horse; and all other jades you may call-beasts.3

'He bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs;] Alluding to the bounding of tennis-balls, which were stuffed with hair, as appears from Much Ado about Nothing: "And the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuff'd tennis-balls.” WARBURTON.

2

he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him,] Thus Cleopatra, speaking of

herself:

"I am air and fire; my other elements

"I give to baser life." STEEVENS.

So, in our author's 44th Sonnet:

66

so much of earth and water wrought, "I must attend time's leisure with

my moan."

[ocr errors]

Again, in Twelfth Night: "Do not our lives consist of the four elements?" MALONE.

[ocr errors]

3 and all other jades you may call-beasts.] It is plain that jades and beasts should change places, it being the first word and not the last, which is the term of reproach; as afterwards it is said:

"I had as lief have my mistress a jade." WARBURTON.

CON. Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.

There is no occasion for this change. In The Second Part of King Henry IV. sc. i:

[ocr errors]

he gave his able horse the head,

"And, bending forward, struck his armed heels
"Against the panting sides of the poor jade."

Again, in Arthur Hall's translation of the 4th Iliad:

"Two horses tough ech one it [his chariot] hath, the jades they are not dul,

"Of barley white, of rie and oates, they feede in mangier full."

Jade is sometimes used for a post horse. Beast is always employed as a contemptuous distinction. So, in Macbeth :

[ocr errors]

what beast was't then

66

"That made you break this enterprize to me?" Again, in Timon of Athens: - what a wicked beast was I to disfurnish myself against so good a time!" STEevens.

I agree with Warburton in supposing that the words-beasts and jades have changed places. Steevens says, that beast is always employed as a contemptuous distinction, and, to support this assertion, he quotes a passage from Macbeth, and another from Timon, in which it appears that men were called beasts, where abuse was intended. But though the word beast be a contemptuous distinction, as he terms it, when applied to a man, it does not follow that it should be so when applied to a horse. He forgets the following speech in Hamlet, which militates strongly against his assertion:

66

he grew unto his seat,

"And to such wond'rous doings brought his horse,

"As he had been incorps'd, and demi-natur'd

"With the brave beast."

But the word jade is always used in a contemptuous sense; and in the passage which Steevens quotes from The Second Part of Henry IV. the able horse is called a poor jade, merely because the poor beast was supposed to be jaded. The word is there an expression of pity, not of contempt. M. MASON.

I cannot forbear subjoining two queries to this note. In the passage quoted by Mr. M. Mason from Hamlet, is not the epithet brave added, to exempt the word beast from being received in a slight sense of degradation?

Is not, in the instance quoted by me from Henry IV. the epi❤ thet poor supplied, to render jade an object of compassion?

DAU. It is the prince of palfreys; his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage.

ORL. No more, cousin.

DAU. Nay, the man hath no wit, that cannot, from the rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb, vary deserved praise on my palfrey: it is a theme as fluent as the sea; turn the sands into eloquent tongues, and my horse is argument for them all: 'tis a subject for a sovereign to reason on, and for a sovereign's sovereign to ride on; and for the world (familiar to us, and unknown,) to lay apart their particular functions, and wonder at him. I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and began thus: Wonder of nature,

Jade is a term of no very decided meaning. It sometimes signifies a hackney, sometimes a vicious horse, and sometimes a tired one; and yet I cannot help thinking, in the present instance, that as a horse is degraded by being called a jade, so a jade is vilified by being termed a beast. STEEVENS.

I do not think there is any ground for the transposition proposed by Dr. Warburton, who would make jades and beasts change places. Words under the hand of either a transcriber or compositor, never thus leap out of their places. The Dauphin evidently means, that no other horse has so good a title as his, to the appellation peculiarly appropriated to that fine and useful animal. The general term for quadrupeds may suffice for all other horses. MALONE.

Wonder of nature,] Here, I suppose, some foolish poem of our author's time is ridiculed; which indeed partly appears from the answer. WARBURTON.

In The First Part of King Henry VI. Act V. sc. iv. Shakspeare himself uses the phrase which he here seems to ridicule: "Be not offended, nature's miracle !" MALONE.

The phrase is only reprehensible through its misapplication. It is surely proper when applied to a woman, but ridiculous indeed when addressed to a horse. STEEvens.

ORL. I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.

DAU. Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress. ORL. Your mistress bears well.

DAU. Me well; which is the prescript praise and perfection of a good and particular mistress. CON. Ma foy! the other day, methought, your mistress shrewdly shook your back.

DAU. So, perhaps, did yours.

CON. Mine was not bridled.

DAU. O! then, belike, she was old and gentle; and you rode, like a Kerne of Ireland, your French hose off, and in your strait trossers.5

5

like a Kerne of Ireland, your French hose off, and in your strait trossers.] This word very frequently occurs in the old dramatick writers. A man in The Coxcomb of Beaumont and Fletcher, speaking to an Irish servant, says, "I'll have thee flead, and trossers made of thy skin, to tumble in." Trossers appear to have been tight breeches.-The Kernes of Ireland anciently rode without breeches, and therefore strait trossers, I believe, means only in their naked skin, which sits close to them. The word is still preserved, but now written—trowsers. Thus, says Randle Holme, in his Academy of Arms and Blazon, B. III. ch. iii: "The Spanish breeches are those that are stret and close to the thigh, and are buttoned up the sides from the knee with about ten or twelve buttons: anciently called TROWSES." STEEVENS.

"Trowses," says the explanatory Index to Cox's History of Ireland, " are breeches and stockings made to sit as close to the body as can be." Several of the morris-dancers represented upon the print of my window have such hose or strait trowsers; but the poet seems, by the waggish context, to have a further meaning. TOLLET.

The following passage in Heywood's Challenge for Beauty, 1636, proves that the ancient Irish trousers were somewhat more than mere buff:

« AnteriorContinuar »