Coriolanus says of Menenius :

This man, Aufidius,

Was my belov'd in Rome.-Coriol., v. 2.

And Antony says of the friendship entertained by Cæsar for Brutus:For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar's angel:

Judge, oh, you gods, how dearly Cæsar lov'd him!—Jul. C., iii. 2.

And thus affectionate are the terms used by the friends and brothersin-law, when they are reconciled after their temporary heat of quarrel:

To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus,

When grief, and blood ill-temper'd, vexeth him?
Bru. When I spoke that, I was ill-temper'd too.

Cas. Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.
Bru. And my heart too.

Cas.

Bru.

O Brutus!

What's the matter?

Cas. Have not you love enongh to bear with me,
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

Bru.

Yes, Cassius; and, from henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,

He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so.-Ibid., iv. 3.

Not unfrequently the word "lover" was formerly used for "friend":How true a gentleman you send relief,

How dear a lover of my lord, your husband,

Which makes me think that this Antonio,

...

Being the bosom lover of my lord.-Mer. of V., iii. 4.

Farewell, my lord: I as your lover speak.-Tr. & Cr., iii. 3.

Thy general is my lover.-Coriol., v. 2.

As I slew my best lover for the good of Rome.—Jul. C., iii. 2. And "friend was sometimes formerly used for "lover":He hath got his friend with child.-M. for M., i. 5.

Lady, will you walk about with your friend.-M. Ado, ii. 1.

Art thou gone so? my lord, my love, my friend!—R. & Jul., iii. 5.
Or to be naked with her friend abed an hour or more.-Oth., iv. 1.

So she from Egypt drive her all-disgraced friend !—Ant. & C., iii. 10.
Though I profess myself her adorer, not [merely] her friend.
You are a friend, and therein the wiser.-Cym., i. 5.

The demonstrations between men-friends were often formerly of extreme tenderness, without being felt to impair manly dignity; and of this kind are the indications of attachment between Antonio and Bassanio:

I saw Bassanio and Antonio part:

Bassanio told him he would make some speed
Of his return: he answer'd, "Do not so;
Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio,
But stay the very riping of the time;
And for the Jew's bond which he hath of me,
Let it not enter in your mind of love:
Be merry; and employ your chiefest thoughts
To courtship, and such fair ostents of love
As shall conveniently become you there:"
And even there, his eye being big with tears,
Turning his face, he put his hand behind him,
And with affection wondrous sensible,

He wrung Bassanio's hand; and so they parted.—

I think, he only loves the world for him.-Mer. of V., ii. 8.

Give me your hand, Bassanio: fare you well!
Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you;
Commend me to your honourable wife:
Tell her the process of Antonio's end;
Say how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death;
And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

Repent not you that you shall lose your friend,
And he repents not that he pays your debt;

For, if the Jew do cut but deep enough,

I'll pay it instantly with all my heart.-Mer. of V., iv. 1.

And also this description of York and Suffolk, dying together on the battle-field, while the describer, Exeter, and the hearer, King Harry V., are not afraid to own the manly tears they feel it forces from them:

Suffolk first died: and York, all haggled over,
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep'd,
And takes him by the beard; kisses the gashes
That bloodily did yawn upon his face;
And cries aloud, " Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk!
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven;
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast;
As in this glorious and well-foughten field
We kept together in our chivalry!"
Upon these words I came and cheer'd him up:
He smiled me in the face, raught me his hand,
And, with a feeble gripe, says, Dear my lord,
Commend my service to my sovereign."

So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck

He threw his wounded arm and kiss'd his lips;

And so, espous'd to death, with blood he seal'd

A testament of noble-ending love.

The pretty and sweet manner of it forc'd

Those waters from me, which I would have stopp'd;
But I had not so much of man in me,

And all my mother came into mine eyes,

And gave me up to tears.

I blame you not;

For, hearing this, I must perforce compound

With mistful eyes, or they will issue too.-H. V., iv. 6.

That the usage existed in England in Shakespeare's time-as it still exists on the Continent-of men embracing each other when they meet or take leave, we have many indications in his contemporary writers as well as in his own writings.

The martial Coriolanus says to his fellow-general, Cominius :

O, let me clip you

In arms as sound as when I woo'd.-Coriol., i. 6.

And the warlike Aufidius, rejoicing to find his old opponent Coriolanus under his roof at Antium, exclaims :

Let me twine

Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash a hundred times hath broke,

And scar'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword.—Ibid., iv. 5.

Biron, on discovering that he, the king, and the two companion. noblemen, are all in love, cries joyfully :—

Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace !-Love's L. L., iv. 3.

Petruchio, meeting on the road the father of his brother-in-law, thus salutes the gentleman:

Let me embrace with old Vincentio.-Tam. of S., iv. 5.

And Mark Antony, taking leave of Octavius Cæsar, says :

Come, sir, come;

I'll wrestle with you in my strength of love:
Look, here I have you; thus I let you go,

And give you to the gods.-Ant. & C., iii. 2.

As a token of the extreme intimacy and familiarity of intercourse that subsisted formerly between men-friends, we find denotement that they often occupied the same bed-room, and even the same bed together.

Exeter, speaking indignantly of Lord Scroop's treason towards the king, says:

Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,*

Whom he hath dull'd and cloy'd with gracious favours-
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell

His sovereign's life to death and treachery !—H. V., ii. 2.

Owing to this custom, the term became used to express close intimacy and affectionate companionship:

He loves your people;

But tie him not to be their bedfellow.—Coriol., ii. 2.

And the following passage again serves to show how common was

the custom :

Oh, world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,

Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal, and exercise,

Are still together, who twin, as 'twere, in love

Unseparable, shall within this hour,

On a dissension of a doit, break out

To bitterest enmity.-Ibid., iv. 4.

Finally, Iago says:

I lay with Cassio lately;

And, being troubled with a raging tooth,
I could not sleep.

There are a kind of men so loose of soul,

That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs
One of this kind is Cassio:

In sleep I heard him say, &c.,-Oth., iii. 3.

BEAST AND MAN.

Shakespeare frequently uses "beast" and "man" in contradistinction each to each-the one as the type of inhumanity, the other of humanity or the one as representing unintelligence, the other intelligence; and his practice in this respect serves to show that the original is the right reading in the disputed instance of the passage

Holinshed records this circumstance: "The said Lord Scroop was in such favour with the king that he admitted him sometime to be his bedfellow."

from "Macbeth," which we have cited among the rest to show how it is but one of many parallel cases occurring in his works :

O powerful love! that, in some respects, makes a beast a man; in some other, a man a beast.—Merry W., v. 5.

When he is best, he is little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast.-Mer. of V., i. 2.

I think he be transformed into a beast;

For I can no where find him like a man.-As You L., ii. 7.

Whiles the eye of man did woo me,

That could do no vengeance to me.
Meaning me a beast.—Ibid., iv. 3.

A king of beasts, indeed; if aught but beasts,

I had been still a happy king of men.- R. II., v. I.

What, ho! you men, you beasts.—R. & Jul., i. 1.

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art.
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast;

Unseemly woman in a seeming man!

Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both.-Ibid., iii. 3.

Timon will to the woods; where he shall find

Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.—Timon, iv. 1.

A beast, as thou art.

The canker gnaw thy heart,

For showing me again the eyes of man !— Ibid., iv. 3.

What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?—

Give it the beasts, to be rid of the men.

Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?-Ibid., iv. 3.

O, thou touch of hearts!

Think, thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire !-Ibid., iv. 3.
We cannot live on grass, on berries, water,
As beasts, and birds, and fishes.-

Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds, and fishes;
You must eat men.-Ibid., iv. 3.

Timon is dead. Who hath outstretch'd his span-
Some beast-read this; there does not live a man.
Ibid., v. 4 (Inscription).

O, judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!-Jul. C., iii. 2.
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.-

What beast was 't, then,

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it, then you were a man ;

And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.-Macb., i.

What is a man,

7.

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.-Hamlet, iv. 4.

Shakespeare puts the word "beast into a woman's mouth as a term of strongest reprobation for unmanliness and unnaturalness :Sweet sister, let me live:

What sin you do to save a brother's life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far

That it becomes a virtue.

O, you beast!

O, faithless coward! O, dishonest wretch!

Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?-M. for M., iii. I.

:

And into another woman's mouth to express a creature devoid of natural feeling,'' an inhuman monster':—

O, what a beast was I to chide at him!—R. & Jul., iii. 2.

BITTER PUNS AND PLAYS ON WORDS: CONCEITS. With his marvellous insight into the hidden springs of human passion as well as its effusive vents, the sources of emotion as well as its external signs, Shakespeare could hardly fail of denoting-among other fantastic shapes that human feeling takes the proneness of some natures in moments of acute mental suffering to seek relief from the utterance of some bitter jest or whimsical quibble. He has a passage that directly draws attention to this practice. When the dying John of Gaunt, desperately grieving at his nephew King Richard's blindly pursued downward course, makes punning illustrations in reference to his own name, “Gaunt," the king exclaims, "Can sick men play so nicely with their names?" And Gaunt replies, "No, misery makes sport to mock itself." ("Richard II.," act ii., sc. 1.) And on reference to this scene, a long string of instances will be found in addition to the following, which serve to show Shakespeare's sagacity in knowing as well as indicating this phase of passionate expression :—

For life, I prize it

As I weigh grief, which I would spare: for honour,
'Tis a derivative from me to mine;

And only that I stand for.-W. T., iii. 2.

This is said by Hermione, a woman of strong self-control; and she uses the word "spare" with concentratedly witty felicity of varied significance, partly in its sense of part with,' do without,'' let go,' partly in that of forbear from destroying,' or 'shield from destruction,' and partly in that of avoid encountering;' so that her sentence tersely implies, I estimate life as I estimate grief-things

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