Thou gav'st thine ears, like tapsters, that bid wel come 2, To knaves, and all approachers: 'Tis most just, That thou turn rascal; had'st thou wealth again, Rascals should have't. Do not assume my like ness. TIM. Were I like thee, I'd throw away myself. APEM. Thou hast cast away thyself, being like thyself; A madman so long, now a fool: What, think'st That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? Will these moss'd trees 3 4 That have outliv'd the eagle +, page thy heels, 2 like tapsters, that BID welcome,] So, in our author's Venus and Adonis : "Like shrill-tongu'd tapsters answering every call, 66 The old copy has-bad welcome. Corrected in the second folio. MALONE. 3 MOSS'D trees,] [Old copy-moist trees.] Sir Thomas Hanmer reads very elegantly: 66 - moss'd trees." JOHNSON. Shakspeare uses the same epithet in As You Like It, Act IV.: "Under an oak, whose boughs were moss'd with age." STEEVENS. So also Drayton, in his Mortimeriados, no date : 66 Upon a forest of old branching oakes, Moss'd is, I believe, the true reading. MALONE. I have inserted this reading in the text, because there is less propriety in the epithet-moist; it being a known truth that trees become more and more dry, as they encrease in age. Thus, our author, in his Rape of Lucrece, observes, that it is one of the properties of time→ 4 66 I To dry the old oak's sap-." STEEVENS. outliv'd the eagle,] Aquila Senectus is a proverb. learn from Turberville's Book of Falconry, 1575, that the great age of this bird has been ascertained from the circumstance of its always building its eyrie, or nest, in the same place. STEEVENS. And skip when thou point'st out? Will the cold brook, Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste, To cure thy o'er-night's surfeit? call the creatures, Whose naked natures live in all the spite Of wreakful heaven; whose bare unhoused trunks, To the conflicting elements expos'd, Answer mere nature 5,-bid them flatter thee; O thou shalt find TIM. A fool of thee: Depart. APEM. I love thee better now than e'er I did. APEM. TIM. Why? Thou flatter'st misery. APEM. I flatter not; but say, thou art a caitiff. TIM. Why dost thou seek me out? АРЕМ. To vex thee". TIM. Always a villain's office, or a fool's. Dost please thyself in't? APEM. TIM. Ay. What a knave too" ? APEM. If thou didst put this sour-cold habit on To castigate thy pride, 'twere well: but thou Answer MERE NATURE,] So, in King Lear, Act II. Sc. III. : "And with presented nakedness outface "The winds," &c. STEEVENS. 6 To vex thee.] As the measure is here imperfect, we may suppose, with Sir Thomas Hanmer, our author to have written : Only to vex thee. STEEVENS. 66 7 What! a KNAVE too?] Timon had just called Apemantus fool, in consequence of what he had known of him by former acquaintance; but when Apemantus tells him that he comes to vex him, Timon determines that to vex is either the office of a villain or a fool; that to vex by design is villainy, to vex without design is folly. He then properly asks Apemantus whether he takes delight in vexing, and when he answers, yes, Timon replies, "What! a knave too?" I before only knew thee to be a fool, but now I find thee likewise a knave. JOHNSON. Dost it enforcedly; thou'dst courtier be again, The other, at high wish: Best state, contentless, Thou should'st desire to die, being miserable. 8 - is crown'd before:] Arrives sooner at high wish; that is, at the completion of its wishes. JOHNSON. So, in a former scene of this play : "And in some sort these wants of mine are crown'd, Again, more appositely, in Cymbeline : 66 my supreme crown of grief." MALONE. 9 Worse than the worst, content.] Best states contentless have a wretched being, a being worse than that of the worst states that are content. JOHNSON. I by his breath,] It means, I believe, by his counsel, by his direction. 66 JOHNSON. "By his breath," I believe, is meant his sentence. To breathe is as licentiously used by Shakspeare in the following instance from Hamlet: "Having ever seen, in the prenominate crimes, "The youth you breathe of, guilty," &c. STEEVENS. By his breath means in our author's language, by his voice or speech, and so in fact by his sentence. Shakspeare frequently uses the word in this sense. It has been twice used in this play. See p. 340, n. 4. MALONE. 2 Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm With favour never clasp'd ;] In a Collection of Sonnets, entitled, Chloris, or the Complaint of the passionate despised Shepheard, by William Smith, 1596, a similar image is found: "Doth any live that ever had such hap, "That all her actions are of none effect? "Whom Fortune never dandled in her lap, "But as an abject still doth me reject." MALone. 3 but bred a DOG.] Alluding to the word Cynick, of which sect Apemantus was. WARBURTON. For the etymology of Cynick, our author was not obliged to Hadst thou, like us, from our first swath3, proceeded have recourse to the Greek language. The dictionaries of his time furnished him with it. See Cawdrey's Dictionary of Hard English Words, octavo, 1604: "Cynical, doggish, froward." Again, in Bullokar's English Expositor, 1616: "Cynical, doggish, or currish. There was in Greece an old sect of philo sophers so called, because they did ever sharply barke at men's vices," &c. After all, however, I believe Shakspeare only meant, thou wert born in a low state, and used from thy infancy to hardships. MALONE. 4 Hadst thou, like us.] There is in this speech a sullen haughtiness and malignant dignity, suitable at once to the lord and the man-hater. The impatience with which he bears to have his luxury reproached by one that never had luxury within his reach, is natural and graceful. There is in a letter, written by the Earl of Essex, just before his execution, to another nobleman, a passage somewhat resembling this, with which, I believe, every reader will be pleased, though it is so serious and solemn that it can scarcely be inserted without irreverence: "God grant your lordship may quickly feel the comfort I now enjoy in my unfeigned conversion, but that you may never feel the torments I have suffered for my long delaying it. I had none but deceivers to call upon me, to whom I said, if my ambition could have entered into their narrow breasts, they would not have been so humble; or if my delights had been once tasted by them, they would not have been so precise. But your lordship hath one to call upon you, that knoweth what it is you now enjoy; and what the greatest fruit and end is of all contentment that this world can afford. Think, therefore, dear earl, that I have staked and buoyed all the ways of pleasure unto you, and left them as sea-marks for you to keep the channel of religious virtue. For shut your eyes never so long, they must be open at the last, and then you must say with me, there is no peace to the ungodly." JOHNSON. A similar thought occurs in a MS. metrical translation of an ancient French romance, preserved in the Library of King's College, Cambridge. [See note on Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Sc. X.]: "But heretofore of hardnesse hadest thou never; "But were brought forth in blisse, as swich a burde ought, Wyth alie maner gode metes, and to misse them now "It were a botles bale," &c. p, 26, b. STEEVENS. first swATH,] From infancy. Swath is the dress of a new-born child. JOHNSON. 5 6 The sweet degrees that this brief world affords Freely command, thou would'st have plung'd thyself In general riot; melted down thy youth So, in Heywood's Golden Age, 1611: "No more their cradles shall be made their tombs, "Nor their soft swaths become their winding-sheets." Again, in Chapman's translation of Homer's Hymn to Apollo: swaddled with sincere 66 "And spotless swath-bands-." STEEVENS. 6 THE sweet degrees-] Thus the folio. The modern editors have, without authority, read-Through, &c. but this neglect of the preposition was common to many other writers of the age Shakspeare. STEEVENS. of 7 To such as may the PASSIVE DRUGS of it-] Though all the modern editors agree in this reading, it appears to me corrupt. The epithet passive is seldom applied, except in a metaphorical sense, to inanimate objects; and I cannot well conceive what Timon can mean by the passive drugs of the world, unless he means every thing that the world affords. But in the first folio the words are not " passive drugs," but "passive drugges." This leads us to the true reading-drudges, which improves the sense, and is nearer to the old reading in the trace of the letters. Dr. Johnson says in his Dictionary, that a drug means a drudge, and cites this passage as an instance of it. But he is surely mistaken; and I think it is better to consider the passage as erroneous, than to acknowledge, on such slight authority, that a drug signifies a drudge. M. MASON. 8 -command,] Old copy-command'st. Corrected by Mr. Rowe. MALONE. In different beds of lust ;] Thus, in the Achilleid of Statius, ii. 394: precepts of respect,] Of obedience to laws. JOHNSON. Timon cannot mean by the word respect, obedience to the laws, as Johnson supposes; for a poor man is more likely to be impressed with a reverence for the laws, than one in a station of nobility and affluence. Respect may possibly mean, as Steevens |
