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And ne'er shook hands," nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps, And fix'd his head upon our battlements.

Till he fac'd the slave, could never be besigned as the beginning of a verse, if harmony were at all attended to in its construction. STEEVENS.

Like valour's minion,] So, in King John:

66

fortune shall cull forth,

"Out of one side, her happy minion." MALONE.

And ne'er shook hands, &c.] The old copy reads-Which

nev'r.

shook hands -] So, in King Henry VI. P. III:
"Till our King Henry had shook hands with death."
STEEVENS.

Mr. Pope, instead of which, here, and in many other places, reads-who. But there is no need of change. There is scarcely one of our author's plays in which he has not used which for who. So, in The Winter's Tale: " the old shepherd, which stands by," &c. MALONE.

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The old reading-Which never, appears to indicate that some antecedent words, now irretrievable, were omitted in the playhouse manuscript; unless the compositor's eye had caught which from a foregoing line, and printed it instead of And. Which, in the present instance, cannot well have been substituted for who, because it will refer to the slave Macdonwald, instead of his conqueror Macbeth. STEEVens.

-he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,] We seldom hear of such terrible cross blows given and received but by giants and miscreants in Amadis de Gaule. Besides, it must be a strange aukward stroke that could unrip him upwards from the navel to the chaps. But Shakspeare certainly wrote:

he unseam'd him from the nape to the chaps. i. e. cut his skull in two; which might be done by a Highlander's sword. This was a reasonable blow, and very naturally expressed, on supposing it given when the head of the wearied combatant was reclining downwards at the latter end of a long duel. For the nape is the hinder part of the neck, where the vertebræ join to the bone of the skull. So, in Coriolanus:

"O! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks."

The word unseamed likewise becomes very proper, and alludes

DUN. O, valiant cousin! worthy gentleman! SOLD. As whence the sun 'gins his reflexion'

to the suture which goes cross the crown of the head in that direction called the sulura sagittalis; and which, consequently, must be opened by such a stroke. It is remarkable, that Milton, who in his youth read and imitated our poet much, particularly in his Comus, was misled by this corrupt reading. For in the manuscript of that poem, in Trinity-College library, the following lines are read thus:

"Or drag him by the curls, and cleave his scalpe
"Down to the hippes."

An evident imitation of this corrupted passage. But he altered it with better judgment to

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to a foul death

"Curs'd as his life."

WARBURTON.

The old reading is certainly the true one, being justified by a passage in Dido Queene of Carthage, by Thomas Nash, 1594: "Then from the navel to the throat at once

"He ript old Priam.”

So likewise in an ancient MS. entitled The Boke of Huntyng, that is cleped Mayster of Game: Cap. V. "Som men haue sey hym slitte a man fro the kne up to the brest, and slee hym all starke dede at o strok." STEEVENS.

Again, by the following passage in an unpublished play, entitled The Witch, by Thomas Middleton, in which the same wound is described, though the stroke is reversed:

"Draw it, or I'll rip thee down from neck to NAVEL,
"Though there's small glory in't." MALONE.

• As whence the sun 'gins his reflexion-] The thought is expressed with some obscurity, but the plain meaning is this: As the same quarter, whence the blessing of day-light arises, sometimes sends us, by a dreadful reverse, the calamities of storms and tempests; so the glorious event of Macbeth's victory, which promised us the comforts of peace, was immediately succeeded by the alarming news of the Norweyan invasion. The natural history of the winds, &c. is foreign to the explanation of this passage. Shakspeare does not mean, in conformity to any theory, to say that storms generally come from the east. If it be allowed that they sometimes issue from that quarter, it is sufficient for the purpose of his comparison. STEevens.

The natural history of the winds, &c. was idly introduced on this occasion by Dr. Warburton. Sir William D'Avenant's

Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break;' So from that spring, whence comfort seem'd to

come,

2

Discomfort swells. Mark, king of Scotland, mark:
No sooner justice had, with valour arm'd,

Compell'd these skipping Kernes to trust their heels;
But the Norweyan lord, surveying vantage,
With furbish'd arms, and new supplies of men,
Began a fresh assault.

Dismay'd not this

Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

DUN.

SOLD.

Yes; 3

it:

reading of this passage, in an alteration of this play, published in quarto, in 1674, affords a reasonably good comment upon "But then this day-break of our victory "Serv'd but to light us into other dangers,

1

"That spring from whence our hopes did seem to rise." MALONE.

Mr.

- thunders break;] The word break is wanting in the oldest copy: The other folios and Rowe read-breaking. Pope made the emendation. STEEVENS.

Break, which was suggested by the reading of the second folio, is very unlikely to have been the word omitted in the original copy. It agrees with thunders;-but who ever talked of the breaking of a storm? MALONE.

The phrase, I believe, is sufficiently common. Thus Dryden, in All for Love, &c. Act I:

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the Roman camp

"Hangs o'er us black and threat'ning, like a storm
"Just breaking o'er our heads."

Again, in Ogilby's version of the 17th Iliad:

"Hector o'er all an iron tempest spreads,

"Th' impending storm will break upon our heads."

STEEVENS.

* Discomfort swells,] Discomfort the natural opposite to comfort. JOHNSON.

Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

Sold.

Yes;] The reader

cannot fail to observe, that some word, necessary to complete

As sparrows, eagles; or the hare, the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were

As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks;"
So they

Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:

the verse, has been omitted in the old copy. Sir T. Hanmer reads

Our captains, brave Macbeth, &c. STEEVENS.

As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks; &c.] That is, with double charges; a metonymy of the effect for the cause. НЕАТН.

Mr. Theobald has endeavoured to improve the sense of this passage, by altering the punctuation thus:

they were

As cannons overcharg'd; with double cracks
So they redoubled strokes.

He declares, with some degree of exultation, that he has no idea of a cannon charged with double cracks; but surely the great author will not gain much by an alteration which makes him say of a hero, that he redoubles strokes with double cracks, an expression not more loudly to be applauded, or more easily pardoned, than that which is rejected in its favour.

That a cannon is charged with thunder, or with double thunders, may be written, not only without nonsense, but with elegance, and nothing else is here meant by cracks, which, in the time of this writer, was a word of such emphasis and dignity, that in this play he terms the general dissolution of nature the crack of doom. JOHNSON.

Crack is used on a similar occasion by Barnaby Googe, in his Cupido Conquered, 1563:

"The canon's cracke begins to roore
"And darts full thycke they flye,
"And cover'd thycke the armyes both,
"And framde a counter-skye."

Barbour, the old Scotch Poet, calls fire-arms-" crakys of war."

STEEVENS.

Again, in the old play of King John, 1591, and applied, as here, to ordnance:

66 as harmless and without effect,

"As is the echo of a cannon's crack." MALONE.

Doubly redoubled strokes &c.] So, in King Richard II:
"And let thy blows, doubly redoubled,

"Fall," &c.

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, Or memorize another Golgotha,"

I cannot tell :

But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

DUN. So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds;

They smack of honour both :-Go, get him sur[Exit Soldier, attended.

geons.

The irregularity of the metre, however, induces me to believe our author wrote

they were

As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks,
Doubly redoubling strokes upon the foe.

For this thought, however, Shakspeare might have been indebted to Caxton's Recuyel, &c. "The batayll was sharp, than the grekes dowblid and redowblid their strokes," &c. STEEVENS.

" Or memorize another Golgotha,] That is, or make another Golgotha, which should be celebrated and delivered down to posterity, with as frequent mention as the first. HEATH.

The word memorize, which some suppose to have been coined by Shakspeare, is used by Spenser, in a sonnet to Lord Buckhurst, prefixed to his Pastorals, 1579:

"In vaine I thinke, right honourable lord,

"By this rude rime to memorize thy name."

T. WARTON.

The word is likewise used by Drayton; and by Chapman, in his translation of the second Book of Homer, 1598:

66

which let thy thoughts be sure to memorize.”

Again, in the third Iliad:

66

and Clymene, whom fame

"Hath, for her fair eyes, memoriz'd.”

And again, in a copy of verses prefixed to Sir Arthur Gorges's translation of Lucan, 1614:

"Of them whose acts they mean to memorize."

STEEVENS.

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