Or possibly, as the folio has Take 't,-

Com.

"Of my lord general.

Cor. I sometime lay,

Here in Corioli," &c.

Take 't: 'tis yours.-What is 't?

But I have hardly any doubt that the former is the true arrangement.

10, init. Perhaps we should arrange,—

We may suppose Aufidius to syllable the hated word.

ii. 1,—

"At some time when his soaring insolence

Shall teach the people."

What can teach mean? Possibly touch, i.e., annoy, provoke. Reach (which was suggested to me by soaring) seems still less unlikely. 4

3," Bid them wash their faces," &c.-Playing upon Menenius's wholesome manner.

Ib.,

દ

to my poor unworthy notice (!)

He mock'd us when he begg'd our voices."

4 Touch is the reading of the Old Corrector; reach the conjecture of Theobald. The letters and t are frequently confounded. In old books, particularly when the type is worn, they are so much alike as not to be readily distinguished.-Ed.

Notion. Note v. 5,

Your judgments, my grave lords,

Must give this cur the lie: and his own notion,

(Who wears my stripes imprest on him; that must bear My beating to the grave;) shall join to thrust

The lie unto him."

Does this mean, "his own knowledge or consciousness shall condemn him?"

Ib. We should arrange and write, perhaps,

iv. 1,

Will have five hundred voices of that sound."

Determine on some course

More than a wild exposture to each chance

That starts i' th' way before thee."

So I am inclined to read with the folio (p. 20, col. 1), not

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
Inseparable," &c.

Compare Midsummer Night's Dream,

"Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd," &c.

As You Like It, i. 3,—

we still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, cat together;" &c.

Two Noble Kinsmen, i. 3,

I was acquainted

Once with a time, when I enjoy'd a playfellow ; " &c.

"And scarr'd the moon with splinters; " &c. and Steevens's note. The word meant is undoubtedly scared. Scare is frequently, if not uniformly, spelt scarre in the folio; e.g., Troilus and Cressida, near the end, last page, col. 1,—

"Scarre Troy out of it selfe."

Romeo and Juliet, v. 3, p. 79 (erratum for 77), col. 1,— "But then, a noyse did scarre me from the Tombe." And so 1 King Henry VI. i. 6, p. 100, col. 1,"The Scar-Crow that affrights our Children so."

with no less confidence

Than boys pursuing summer butterflies,

Or butchers killing flies."

Write, or at least pronounce, butterflees. Drayton, Muses' Elysium, viii.,

"Of lilies shall the pillows be,

With down stuft of the butterflee."

Nymphidia (I quote here from a note in the Variorum Shakespeare, vol. vi. p. 52, where the passage is cited with a different purpose),

"The seat, the soft wool of the bee,

The cover (gallantly to see)

The wing of a py'd butterflee,

I trow, 't was simple trimming."

Butterfly (as I am informed) is pronounced butterflee (u as oo in took) in Lancashire; and so also, I doubt not, in

Yorkshire, as fly in that county is pronounced flee. I know not that the difference of spelling which the folio exhibits in the two words in the place of Coriolanus, Butter-flies and Flyes, indicates anything.

Ib. Arrange, perhaps,—

Men.

7,

"Who is 't can blame him? your enemies and his
Find something in him.

We' are all undone unless

The noble man have mercy."

yet he hath left undone

That, which shall break his neck, or hazard mine,
Whene'er we come to our account.

Lieu. Sir, I beseech you, think you he'll carry Rome?"

v. 4,

"Ne'er through an arch so hurried the blown tide,
As the recomforted through [th' 5] gates."

Not, I imagine, driven by wind, but swollen; as Beaumont and Fletcher, Queen of Corinth, iii. 1,—

my blown billows must not

Strive 'gainst the shore, that should confine me, nor
Justle with rocks to break themselves to pieces."

5 So the first folio.-In the passage quoted below, from the Seasons, hilly was altered to inflated, and wintry to secret in later editions.-Ed.

So "blown ambition," King Lear, iv. 4, ad fin. "our blown sails," Pericles v. 2. "something blown," Antony and Cleopatra, near the end. (In the first edition of the Seasons, 1730, Winter, 143, we find,—

Straining they scale, and now impetuous shoot
Into the wintry chambers of the deep,

The full-blown Baltic thundering o'er their heads."

This, being awkward, was afterwards altered to "wintry
Baltic." Collins, Ode to Liberty,-

"To the blown Baltic then, they say,
The wild waves found another way.")

Authorship of the play.-A. i., and the greater part, or rather the whole of A. v., are the work of one writer, and that writer not Shakespeare. The Latinism both of the manner and the matter would be sufficient to prove this, did not the utter want of imagination in the author render all other arguments needless. The other three acts-with

6 The arrangement here proposed by Walker is, in fact, that which appears in all the folios, and in all the earlier modern editions, if I mistake not, down to Johnson's inclusive.-Ed.