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Supply his life, or that which can command it.
I'll follow, and inquire him out:

I'll serve his mind with my best will;

Whilst I have gold I'll be his steward still. [Exit.

SCENE III.

The Woods.

Enter TIMON,

TIM. O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb * Infect the air! Twinn'd brothers of one womb, Whose procreation, residence, and birth,

Scarce is dividant, -touch them with several for

tunes;

The greater scorns the lesser: Not nature,

To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune, But by contempt of nature.

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below thy sister's orb-) That is, the moon's, this sublu

nary world. JOHNSON.

5

Not nature,

To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,

But by contempt of nature.) The meaning I take to be this: 'Brother, when his fortune is enlarged, will scorn brother; for this is the general depravity of human nature, which, besieged as it is by misery, admonished as it is of want and imperfection, when elevated by fortune will despise beings of nature like its own.'

JOHNSON.

Mr. M. Mason observes, that this passage "but by the addition of a single letter may be rendered clearly intelligible; by merely reading natures instead of nature." The meaning will then be"Not even beings reduced to the utmost extremity of wretchedness, can bear good fortune, without contemning their fellow-creatures."-The word natures is afterwards used in a similar sense by Apemantus :

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Call the creatures

" Whose naked natures live in all the spite
"Of wreakful heaven," &c.

Raise me this beggar, and deny't that lord;
The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honour.

It is the pasture lards the brother's sides',

Perhaps, in the present instance, we ought to complete the measure by reading:

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- not those natures -." STEEVENS.

But by is here used for without. MALONE.

6 Raise me this beggar and DENY'T that lord,] Where is the sense and English of deny't that lord? Deny him what? What preceding noun is there to which the pronoun it is to be referred ? And it would be absurd to think the poet meant, deny to raise that lord. The antithesis must be, 'let fortune raise this beggar, and let her strip and despoil that lord of all his pomp and ornaments,' &c. which sense is completed by this slight alteration :

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and denude that lord;"

So, Lord Rea, in his relation of M. Hamilton's plot, written in 1650: "All these Hamiltons had denuded themselves of their fortunes and estates." And Charles the First, in his message to the parliament, says: "Denude ourselves of all."-Clar. vol. iii. p. 15, octavo edit. WARBURTON.

Perhaps the former reading, however irregular, is the true one. 'Raise me that beggar, and deny a proportionable degree of elevation to that lord.' A lord is not so high a title in the state, but that a man originally poor might be raised to one above it. We might read devest that lord. Devest is an English law phrase, which Shakspeare uses in King Lear:

"Since now we will devest us both of rule," &c. The word which Dr. Warburton would introduce is not, however, uncommon. I find it in The Tragedie of Cræsus, 1604: "As one of all happiness denuded." STEEVENS.

The objection to the reading of the old copy is, that there is no antecedent to which the word it can be referred; but this is in Shakspeare's manner.

So in Othello:

"And bid me when my fate would have me wive
"To give it her."

i. e. his wife, which is understood. So in this passage, "Raise me this beggar [to eminence], and deny't that lord." MALONE.

7 It is the PASTURE lards the BROTHER'S sides,] This, as the editors have ordered it, is an idle repetition at the best; supposing it did, indeed, contain the same sentiment as the foregoing lines. But Shakspeare meant quite a different thing: and having, like a sensible writer, made a smart observation, he illustrates it by a similitude thus:

"It is the pasture lards the wether's sides,
"The want that makes him lean."

The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who

dares,

And the similitude is extremely beautiful, as conveying this satirical reflection; there is no more difference between man and man in the esteem of superficial and corrupt judgments, than between a fat sheep and a lean one. WARBURTON.

This passage is very obscure, nor do I discover any clear sense, even though we should admit the emendation. Let us inspect the text as it stands in the original edition:

"It is the pastour lards the brother's sides,
"The want that makes him leave."

Dr. Warburton found the passage already changed thus :
"It is the pasture lards the beggar's sides,
"The want that makes him lean."

And upon this reading of no authority, raised another equally uncertain.

Alterations are never to be made without necessity. Let us see what sense the genuine reading will afford. Poverty, says the poet, bears contempt hereditary, and wealth native honour. To illustrate this position, having already mentioned the case of a poor and rich brother, he remarks, that this preference is given to wealth by those whom it least becomes; it is the pastour that greases or flatters the rich brother, and will grease him on till want make him leave. The poet then goes on to ask, Who dares to say this man, this pastour, is a flatterer; the crime is universal; through all the world, the learned pate, with allusion to the pastour, ducks to the golden fool. If it be objected, as it may justly be, that the mention of a pastour is unsuitable, we must remember the mention of grace grace and cherubims in this play, and many such anachronisms in many others. I would therefore read thus:

"It is the pastour lards the brother's sides,
"'Tis want that makes him leave."

The obscurity is still great. Perhaps a line is lost. I have at least given the original reading. JOHNSON.

Perhaps Shakspeare wrote pasterer, for I meet with such a word in Greene's Farewell to Follie, 1617: "Alexander, before he fell into the Persian delicacies, refused those cooks and pasterers that Ada queen of Caria sent to him." There is likewise a proverb among Ray's Collection, which seems to afford much the some meaning as this passage in Shakespeare:-"Every one basteth the fat hog, while the lean one burneth." Again, in Troilus and Cressida, Act II.:

"That were to enlard his fat-already pride." STEEVENS. In this very difficult passage, which still remains obscure, some liberty may be indulged. Dr. Farmer proposes to read it thus : " It is the pasterer lards the broader sides, "The gaunt that makes him leave."

In purity of manhood stand upright,
And say, This man's a flatterer? if one be,

And in support of this conjecture, he observes, that the Saxon d is frequently converted into th, as in murther, murder, burthen, burden, &c. REED.

That the passage is corrupt as it stands in the old copy, no one, I suppose, can doubt; emendation therefore in this and a few other places, is not a matter of choice but necessity. I have already more than once observed, that many corruptions have crept into the old copy, by the transcriber's ear deceiving him. In Coriolanus we have higher for hire, and hope for holp; in the present play, reverends for reverend'st; and in almost every play similar corruptions. In King Richard II. quarto, 1598, we find the very error that happened here :

and bedew

"Her pastor's grass with faithful English blood." Again, in As You Like It, folio, 1623, we find, "I have heard him read many lectors against it;" intead of lectures.

Pasture when the u is sounded thin, and pastor, are scarcely distinguishable.

Thus, as I conceive, the true reading of the first disputed word of this contested passage is ascertained. In As You Like It, we have-" good pasture makes fat sheep." Again, in the same play:

"Anon, a careless herd,

"Full of the pasture, jumps along by him," &c.

The meaning then of the passage is, -' It is the land alone which each man possesses that makes him rich, and proud, and flattered; and the want of it, that makes him poor, and an object of contempt. I suppose, with Dr. Johnson, that Shakspeare was still thinking of the rich and poor brother already described.

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I doubt much whether Dr. Johnson himself was satisfied with his far-fetched explication of pastour, as applied to brother; [See his note] and I think no one else can be satisfied with it. In order to give it some little support, he supposes This man's a flatterer," in the following passage, to relate to the imaginary pastor in this; whereas those words indubitably relate to any one individual selected out of the aggregate mass of mankind.

Dr. Warburton reads-wether's sides; which affords a commodious sense, but is so far removed from the original reading as to be inadmissible. Shakspeare, I have no doubt, thought at first of those animals that are fatted by pasture, and passed from thence to the proprietor of the soil.

Concerning the third word there can be no difficulty. Leane was the old spelling of lean, and the u in the MSS. of our author's time is not to be distinguished from an n. Add to this, that in

So are they all; for every grize of fortune
Is smooth'd by that below: the learned pate

the first folio u is constantly employed where we now use a v; and hence by inversion, the two letters were often confounded (as they are at this day in almost every proof-sheet of every book that passes through the press). Of this I have given various instances in a note in vol. viii. p. 176, n. 3.

But it is not necessary to have recourse to these instances. This very word leave is again printed instead of leane, in King Henry IV. Part II. quarto, 1600:

"The lives of all your loving complices
"Leave on your health."

On the other hand in King Henry VIII. 1623, we have leane instead of leave : "You'll leane your noise anon, you rascals." But any argument on this point is superfluous, since the context clearly shows that lean must have been the word intended by Shakspeare.

Such emendations as those now adopted, thus founded and supported, are not capricious conjectures, against which no one has set his face more than myself, but almost certainties.

This note has run out into an inordinate length, for which I shall make no other apology than that finding it necessary to depart from the reading of the old copy, to obtain any sense, I thought it incumbent on me to support the readings I have chosen, in the best manner in my power. MALONE.

As a brother (meaning, I suppose, a churchman) does not, literally speaking, fatten himself by feeding on land, it is probable that pasture signifies eating in general, without reference to terra firma. So, in Love's Labour's Lost:

"Food for his rage, repasture for his den."

Pasture in the sense of nourishment collected from fields, will undoubtedly fatten the sides of a sheep or an ox, but who ever describes the owner of the fields as having derived from them his embonpoint?

The emendation-lean is found in the second folio, which should not have been denied the praise to which it is entitled. The reading in the text may be the true one; but the condition in which this play was transmitted to us, is such as will warrant repeated doubts in almost every scene of it. STEEVENS.

8 And say, THIS man's a flatterer?] This man does not refer to any particular person before mentioned, as Dr. Johnson thought, but to some supposed individual. Who, says Timon, can with propriety lay his hand on this or that individual, and pronounce him a peculiar flatterer? All mankind are equally flatterers. So, in As You Like It:

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