trouble and embarrassment to the knitter or HEATH.

weaver.

Sleave is properly silk which has not been twisted. STEEVENS.

Sleave appears to have signified coarse, soft, unwrought silk. Seta grossolana, Ital. MALONE. P. 26, last 1. The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,] In

this encomium upon sleep, amongst the inany appellations which are given it, significant of its beneficence and friendliness to life, we find one which conveys a different idea, and by no means agrees with the rest, which is: The death of each day's life. I make no question but Shak

speare wrote:

The birth of each day's life:

The true characteristick of sleep, which repairs the decays of labour, and assists that returning vigour which supplies the next day's activity.

WARBURTON.

The death of each day's life, means the end of each day's labour, the conclusion of all that bustle and fatigue that each day's life brings

with it.

STEEVENS.

P. 27, I. 25. 26. I'll gild the faces &c.] Could Shakspeare mean to play upon the similitude of gild and guilt? JOHNSON.

This quibble too frequently occurs in the old plays. STEEVENS.

P. 27, last lines.

- No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.] To incarnar line is to stain any thing of a flesh colour, or red. Carnardine is the old term for carSTEEVENS. * 198 ON

nation.

By the multitudinous seas, perhaps the poet meant, not the seas of every denomination, as the Caspian, &c. (as some have thought,) nor the many-coloured seas, (as others contend,) but the seas which swarm with myriads of inhabitants.

As it objected by Mr. Kenrick, that Macbeth in his present disposition of mind would hardly have adverted to a property of the sea, which has so little relation to the object immediately before him; and if Macbeth had really spoken this speech in his castle of Inverness, the remark would be just. But the critick should have remembered, that this speech is not the real effusion of a distempered mind, but the composition of Shakspeare; of that poet, who has put a circumstantial account of an apothecary's shop into the mouth of Romeo, the moment after he has heard the fatal news of his beloved Juliet's death; and has inade Othello, when in the anguish of his heart he determines to kill his wife, digress from the object which agitates his soul, to describe minutely the course of the Pontick sea.

Mr. Steevens objects in the following note to this explanation, thinking it more probable that Shakspeare should refer to some visible quality in the ocean," than "to its concealed inhabitants;", to the waters that might admit of discolouration,' than, "to the fishes whose hue could suffer no change from the tinct of blood." But in what page of our author do we find his allusions thus curiously rounded, and complete in all their parts? Or rather does not every page of these volumes furnish us with images crouded on each other, that are not naturally counected, and sometimes are even discordant? Hamlet's proposing to take up arms against a sea of troubles is a well

known example of this kind, and twenty others might be produced. Our author certainly alludes to the waters, which are capable of discoloration, and not to the fishes. His allusion to the waters is expressed by the word seas; to which, if he has added an epithet that has no very close connection with the subject immediately before him, he has only followed his usual practice.

If however no allusion was intended to the myriads of inhabitants with which the deep is peopled, I believe by the multitudinous seas was meant, not the many-waved ocean, as is suggested, but the countless masses of waters wherever dispersed on the surface of the globe; the multitudes of seas, as Heywood has it in a passage, that perhaps our author remembered: and indeed it must be owned that his having used the plural seas seems to countenance such an interpretation; for the singu lar sea is equally suited to the epithet multitadinous in the sense of xvosvrα, and would certainly have corresponded better with the subsequent line. MALONE

I believe that Shakspeare referred to some visible quality in the ocean, rather than to its concealed inhabitants: to the waters that might admit of discoloration, and not to the fishes whose hue could suffer no change from the tinct of blood. Waves appearing over waves are no unapt symbol of a crowd. He who beholds an audience from the stage or any other multitude gazing on any particular object, must perceive that their heads are raised over each other, velut unda supervenit undam. If therefore our author by the "multitudinous sea" does not mean the aggregate of seas, he must be understood to design the multitude of

waves, or the waves that have the appearance of a multitude. STEEVENS.

The last line of the passage before us, on the suggestion of the ingenious author of The Gray's -Inn Journal, has been printed in some late editions in the following manner:

Making the green-one red.

Every part of this line, as thus regulated, appears to me exceptionable. One red does not sound to my ear as the phraseology of the age of Elizabeth; and the green, for the green one, or for the green sea, is, I am persuaded, unexaınpled. The quaintness introduced by such a regulation seems of an entirely different colour from the quaintnesses of Shakspeare. He would have written, I have no doubt, Making the green sea, red," if he had not used the word seas in the preceding line, which forced him to employ another word here. MALONE.

66

P. 28, 1. 14. 15. To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself.] i. e. While I have the thoughts of this deed, it were best not know, or be lost to, myself. This is an answer to the lady's reproof:

be not lost

So poorly in your thoughts. WARBURTON. P. 28, 1. 16. Wake Duncan with thy knocking!] Macbeth is addressing the person who knocks at the outward gate. Sir William D'Avenant, in his alteration of this play, reads (and intended probably to point) Wake, Dunkan, with this knocking!" conceiving that Macbeth called upon Duncan to awake. From the same misapprehension, I once thought his emendation right; but there is certainly no need of change. MALONE.

P. 28, 1. 18. SCENE III.] Though Shakspeare (see Sir J. Reynolds's excellent note on Act I. sc. vi.) might have designed this scene as another instance of what is called the repose in painting, I cannot help regarding it in a different light. A glimpse of comedy was expected by our author's audience in the most serious drama; and where else could the merriment, which he himself was always struggling after, be so happily introduced? STEEVENS. old — i. e. frequent, more than

P. 28, 1. 23. enough. STEEvens. P. 28, 1. 27.

napkins

an

i. e. handkerchiefs. STEEVENS. P. 29, 1. 1-3. here's an equivocator, that could swear &c. &c.] Meaning a Jesuit: order so troublesome to the state in Queen Elizabeth and King James the first's time The inventors of the execrable doctrine of equivocation. WARBURTON.

P. 29, 1. 6. 7. here's an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French hose:] The archness of the joke consists in this, that a French hose being very short and strait, a tailor must be master of his trade who could steal any thing from thence. WARBURTON.

Dr. Warburton has said this at random. The French hose (according to Stubbs in his Anatomie of Abuses) were in the year 1595 much in fashion.. "The Gallic hosen are made very large and wide, reaching down to their knees only, with three or foure gards apeece laid down along either hose." STEEVENS.

When Mr. Steevens censured Dr. Warburton in this place, he forgot the uncertainty of French