It will hardly be denied that the remainder of this scene is not of equal excellence with the part of it we have been considering, nor is it equal to many other parts of the play. This presents a difficulty which is hardly explained by the obvious remark that a poet, however great, is not always in his finest mood, and that, as Horace Walpole is said to have remarked, there are seasons when poets are in flower. We may remark, however, upon this part of the scene, that it exhibits a curious proof that when Shakespeare delineated, in a manner to make the scene visible to every eye, the garden of Portia, he thought of the garden he had himself created of the Capulets at Verona. The passages which open a view of this little process of the poet's mind are these: Portia-" Swear by your double self;" Juliet-"Swear by your gracious self." Bassanio-"The blessed candles of the night;" Romeo"Night's candles are burnt out." Bassanio's hyperbolical compliment to the eyes of Portia,—

We should hold day with the Antipodes

If you should walk in absence of the sun,

is not more worthy of the poet than the words which he had put into the mouth of Romeo,

Her eye in heaven

Would through the airy regions stream so bright

That birds would sing and think it were not night.

With one remark more I close the illustrations of this most beautiful scene. Lorenzo has observed

Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature,

and this might open the whole question of the effect of musick on irrational animals, and the margins might overflow with the discordant opinions of the critics. For the purpose of legitimate annotation it is sufficient to shew that this was the opinion of Shakespeare's age, and of the persons for

whose entertainment he wrote; and it happens that we have the testimony of a learned foreigner who visited England a little before the time of Shakespeare, that a lion in the Tower, which is described as of extraordinary size, afforded a remarkable instance of brute susceptibility to the power of music. The traveller was Henry Stephens, and the passage being in itself very curious, and affording so apt an illustration of this part of the philosophical discourse of Lorenzo, and being, moreover, little known, is here given at large

Cum Londini agerem, animum cupido incessit visendi leonem, cujus omnes mihi vastitatem prædicabant. Forte accidit, dum ejus una cum aliis sodalibus spectator essem, ut ingrederetur juvenis organum quoddam circumferens. Is quum paullo post hortatu nostro (experiri enim licebat, quam verum esset quod de leone ferebatur) pulsare illud cæpisset, repente vastam illam belluam, relictis quas avide alioqui vorabat antea carnibus, non modo attentam musicorum sonorum adjutricem esse, sed et in gyrum corpus circumagere, perque certos orbes ire ac redire, tanquam tripudiantem non sine stupore conspeximus. Pulsare organum ille desinebat? ad carnes hic suas redibat. Ad pulsandum organum ille revertebatur: missas carnes hic faciebat, suamque tripudationem iterum incœptabat. Nec vero hoc tum aliquoties expertos esse, satis esse nobis visum est: sed et aliquot post diebus eo reversi iterum experiri voluimus: et experti certe sumus, sed minore tamen cum admiratione, quod tunc in vorandis carnibus occupatus minime esset.*

The recovery of the original play mentioned by Gossonwould doubtless throw much light upon the composition of The Merchant of Venice, as we now have it. In its present state it seems to have been subjected to correction, alteration, and addition after it had been once completed, but doubtless all by Shakespeare's own hand, though one passage at least remained not accommodated to the changes which were made. The passage is this: "The four strangers seek for you, Madam, to take their leave;" but in all the copies, beginning with the earliest, there were six, namely, the Neapolitan, the County Palatine, the French lord, the English

* De Vitis Stephanorum, Amst. 12mo. 1683, p. 65.

baron, the Scottish lord, and the young German. It may be presumed that the number originally was only four, and that the two added on a revisal were the English and Scottish lords, the better to please an English audience.

No printed copy is known of an earlier date than 1600, in which year there were two editions; but it is named by Meres in 1598, and Whalley has shewn that the beauty of the moonlight contest between Lorenzo and Jessica did not protect it from being derided by a very inferior dramatist, the author of a play called Wily Beguiled. This play is of uncertain date, but Malone informs us that it is mentioned by Nash in 1596, whence it may be safely inferred that some of the most exquisite portions of this play were written before that year. A few notes on particular words or passages follow.

I. 1. SALARINO.

Your mind is tossing on the ocean;

There, where your ARGOSIES with portly sail-
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or as it were the pageants of the sea,-
Do overpeer the petty traffickers.

Shakespeare shews great address in the opening of this play. Anthonio, sad, he knows not why, is a very suitable introduction to the deeply serious character of the incidents which are soon to succeed.

With the word argosy he might become acquainted in reading Marlowe's Jew of Malta, in which play the word often occurs; but, though the commentators have bestowed so much attention upon it, it is by no means an uncommon word. An argosy was a vessel of great bulk. Cuningham, in his Cosmography, when enumerating different kinds of vessels, places the argosy at the head of the list. The vessels of the Venetian merchants are perhaps especially called argosies. Thus Taylor writes, " One of the Christian fleet was

a great vessel, or a supposed Venetian argosy; and another was a tall ship, as it were, appointed for the safe convoy of the argosy. "It would appear from this quotation that it was used for merchant vessels only.

Though the passage pleases every one who reads it, as well by the agreeable flow of the verse as by the beautiful image it presents to the mind of a richly laden vessel with all its sails unfurled passing in a stately manner along, it is perhaps not perfectly constructed. At least we cannot be sure that we apprehend what was the real meaning of the poet, between two meanings of which the passage admits. It may be that the argosies of Anthonio overpeer at sea the petty traffickers, just as the signiors and rich burghers do petty traffickers upon land, in which case the line, "Or, as it were the pageants of the sea," must be regarded as parenthetical, and as producing a slight interruption of the continuity: or it may be taken as meaning that the argosies appear upon the sea like so many signiors and rich burghers, bearing with them the ideas of wealth and abundance, and, as if that was not thought sufficient, he compares them again to "pageants," pageant ships, gorgeously decorated, such as were exhibited in the shows of the time, no longer confined to some inland lake or river, but "the pageants of the sea" itself, so large and so magnificent in all their apparatus.

I. 3.-SHYLOCK.

Three thousand DUCATS,-well.

We hear so much of ducats in the course of this play, and so little that is satisfactory is to be learned from the dictionaries concerning this coin, that a few words respecting it may not be misplaced. It is a pure Venetian piece

* Heaven's blessing and Earth's joy, a kind of masque written on the marriage of the Elector Palatine.

of money, and the name is a mere abbreviation of Ducatus Venetorum. It was a gold coin, so that a loan of three thousand ducats must be considered a very large sum, perhaps something nearly equivalent to a loan of twenty or thirty thousand pounds, were such a transaction to take place now. The ducat bore this inscription,

SIT. T. XPEDAT. Q. TUREGIS. ISTE. DVCA.

which is to be read in full thus:

Sit tibi, Christe, datus

Quem tu regis, iste Ducatus.

See on this subject C. A. Heumann's Poecile sive Epist. Miscell. Halæ, 1729, vol. iii. book ii. p. 242, to which a friend of great learning drew my attention.

I. 3. SHYLOCK.

There be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves; I mean pirates.

There is a resemblance sufficient to be taken notice of between this passage and one in Florio's address to the reader before his Italian dictionary, 1598;-"And here might I begin with those notable pirates in this our paper sea, those sea-dogs, or land critikes, monsters of men, if not beasts rather than men." King Charles the First is said to have called seamen in contempt "water-rats. Harris's Historical Account, &c. London, 1814, vol. ii. p. 82.

II. 6.-JESSICA.

Why, 'tis an office of DISCOVERY, love;

And I should be OBSCUred.

This is a military term. Sir John Smith in his Instructions and Orders military, 1595, p. 51, speaks of "great intelligence by discoverers and espials." Obscured is disguised.