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SCENE III.

The same.

Alarums; Excursions; Retreat. Enter King JOHN, ELINOR, ARTHUR, the Bastard, HUBERT, and Lords.

K. JOHN. So shall it be; your grace shall stay

behind,

[TO ELINOR. So strongly guarded.-Cousin, look not sad:

[To ARTHUR. Thy grandam loves thee; and thy uncle will As dear be to thee as thy father was.

ARTH. O, this will make my mother die with grief.

K. JOHN. Cousin, [To the Bastard.] away for
England; haste before:

And, ere our coming, see thou shake the bags
Of hoarding abbots; angels imprisoned
Set thou at liberty: the fat ribs of peace
Must by the hungry now be fed upon :2
Use our commission in his utmost force.

1 Set thou at liberty:] The word thou (which is wanting in the old copy) was judiciously added, for the sake of metre, by Sir T. Hanmer. STEEVens.

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the fat ribs of peace

Must by the hungry now be fed upon:] This word now seems a very idle term here, and conveys no satisfactory idea. An antithesis, and opposition of terms, so perpetual with our author, requires:

Must by the hungry war be fed upon. War, demanding a large expence, is very poetically said to be hungry, and to prey on the wealth and fat of peace.

WARBURTON.

BAST. Bell, book, and candle3 shall not drive me back,

This emendation is better than the former word, but yet not necessary. Sir T. Hanmer reads-hungry maw, with less deviation from the common reading, but not with so much force or elegance as war. JOHNSON.

Either emendation may be unnecessary. Perhaps, the hungry now is this hungry instant. Shakspeare uses the word now as a substantive, in Measure for Measure:

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till this very now,

"When men were fond, I smil'd and wonder'd how."

STEEVENS.

The meaning, I think, is, " the fat ribs of peace must now be fed upon by the hungry troops,"-to whom some share of this ecclesiastical spoil would naturally fall. The expression, like many other of our author's, is taken from the sacred writings: "And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare a city for habitation." 107th Psalm.-Again: "He hath filled the hungry with good things," &c. St. Luke, i. 53.

This interpretation is supported by the passage in the old play, which is here imitated:

Philip, I make thee chief in this affair;

"Ransack their abbeys, cloysters, priories,
"Convert their coin unto my soldiers', use."

When I read this passage in the old play, the first idea that suggested itself was, that a word had dropped out at the press, in the line before us, and that our author wrote:

Must by the hungry soldiers now be fed on.

But the interpretation above given renders any alteration unnecessary. MALONE.

3 Bell, book, and candle-] In an account of the Romish curse given by Dr. Grey, it appears that three candles were extinguished, one by one, in different parts of the execration. JOHNSON.

I meet with the same expression in Ram-Alley, or Merry Tricks, 1611:

"I'll have a priest shall mumble up a marriage
"Without bell, book, or candle." STEEVENS.

In Archbishop Winchelsea's Sentences of Excommunication, anno 1298, (see Johnson's Ecclesiastical Laws, Vol. II.) it is directed that the sentence against infringers of certain articles should be "throughout explained in order in English, with bells tolling, and candles lighted, that it may cause the greater

When gold and silver becks me to come on.
I leave your highness:-Grandam, I will pray
(If ever I remember to be holy,)
For your fair safety; so I kiss your

ELI. Farewell, my gentle cousin.
K. JOHN.

hand.

Coz, farewell. [Exit Bastard.

ELI. Come hither, little kinsman; hark, a word. [She takes ARTHUR aside. K. JOHN. Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle

Hubert,

We owe thee much; within this wall of flesh
There is a soul, counts thee her creditor,
And with advantage means to pay thy love:
And my good friend, thy voluntary oath
Lives in this bosom, dearly cherished.
Give me thy hand. I had a thing to say,-

But I will fit it with some better time.*
By heaven, Hubert, I am almost asham'd
To

say what good respect I have of thee. HUB. I am much bounden to your majesty.

K. JOHN. Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet:

But thou shalt have; and creep time ne'er so slow,

dread; for laymen have greater regard to this solemnity, than to the effect of such sentences." See Dodsley's Old Plays, Vol. XII. p. 397, edit. 1780. REED.

with some better time.] The old copy reads-tune. Corrected by Mr. Pope. The same mistake has happened in Twelfth Night. See that play, Vol. V. p. 300, n. 3. In Macbeth, Act IV. sc. ult. we have" This time goes manly," instead of "This tune goes manly." MALONE.

In the hand-writing of Shakspeare's age, the words time and tune are scarcely to be distinguished from each other.

STEEVENS.

Yet it shall come, for me to do thee good.
I had a thing to say,-But let it go:
The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day,
Attended with the pleasures of the world,
Is all too wanton, and too full of gawds,
To give me audience :-If the midnight bell
Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth,
Sound one unto the drowsy race of night;"

5

full of gawds,] Gawds are any showy ornaments. So, in The Dumb Knight, 1633:

"To caper in his grave, and with vain gawds
"Trick up his coffin."

See A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Vol. IV. p. 320, n. 8.

STEEVENS.

• Sound one unto the drowsy race of night;] Old copySound on-." STEEVENS.

We should read-Sound one-,

WARBURTON.

I should suppose the meaning of-Sound on, to be this: If the midnight bell, by repeated strokes, was to hasten away the race of beings who are busy at that hour, or quicken night itself in its progress; the morning bell (that is, the bell that strikes one,) could not, with strict propriety, be made the agent; for the bell has ceased to be in the service of night, when it proclaims the arrival of day. Sound on may also have a peculiar propriety, because, by the repetition of the strokes at twelve, it gives a much more forcible warning than when it only strikes

one.

Such was once my opinion concerning the old reading; but, on re-consideration, its propriety cannot appear more doubtful to any one than to myself.

It is too late to talk of hastening the night, when the arrival of the morning is announced: and I am afraid that the repeated strokes have less of solemnity than the single notice, as they take from the horror and awful silence here described as so propitious to the dreadful purposes of the king. Though the hour of one be not the natural midnight, it is yet the most solemn moment of the poetical one; and Shakspeare himself has chosen, to introduce his Ghost in Hamlet,

"The bell then beating one."

STEEVENS.

The word one is here, as in many other passages in these plays, written on in the old copy. Mr. Theobald made the cor

If this same were a church-yard where we stand, And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs;

rection.

He likewise substituted unto for into, the reading of the original copy; a change that requires no support. In Chaucer, and other old writers, one is usually written on. See Mr. Tyrwhitt's Glossary to The Canterbury Tales. So once was anciently written ons. And it should seem, from a quibbling passage in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, that one, in some counties at least, was pronounced, in our author's time, as if written on. Hence the transcriber's ear might easily have deceived him. One of the persons whom I employed to read aloud to me each sheet of the present work [Mr. Malone's edition of our author] before it was printed off, constantly sounded the word one in this manner. He was a native of Herefordshire.

The instances that are found in the original editions of our author's plays, in which on is printed instead of one, are so numerous, that there cannot, in my apprehension, be the smallest doubt that one is the true reading in the line before us. Thus, in Coriolanus, edit. 1623, p. 15:

66

This double worship,

"Where on part does disdain with cause, the other
"Insult without all reason."

Again, in Cymbeline, 1623, p. 380:

66

perchance he spoke not; but

"Like a full-acorn'd boar, a Jarmen on," &e.

Again, in Romeo and Juliet, 1623, p. 66:

"And thou, and Romeo, press on heavie bier."

Again, in The Comedy of Errors, 1623, p. 94:

"On, whose hard heart is button'd up with steel."

Again, in All's well that ends well, 1623, p. 240: "A good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner,-but on that lies three thirds," &c.

Again, in Love's Labour's Lost, quarto, 1598:

"On, whom the musick of his own vain tongue-." Again, ibid, edit. 1623, p. 133:

"On, her hairs were gold, crystal the other's eyes." The same spelling is found in many other books. So, in Holland's Suetonius, 1606, p. 14: "-he caught from on of them a trumpet," &c.

I should not have produced so many passages to prove a fact of which no one can be ignorant, who has the slightest knowledge of the early editions of these plays, or of our old writers, had not the author of Remarks, &c. on the last Edition of

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