Scene 2. Page 469.
Por. ... he makes a swan-like end.
Fading in musick.
That the swan uttered musical sounds at the approach of death was credited by Plato, Chrysippus, Aristotle, Euripides, Philostratus, Cicero, Seneca, and Martial. Pliny, Ælian, and Athenæus, among the ancients, and Sir Thomas More, among the moderns, treat this opinion as a vulgar error. Luther believed in it. See his Colloquia, par. 2, p. 125, edit. 1571, 8vo. Our countryman Bartholomew Glantville thus mentions the singing of the swan: "And whan she shal dye and that a fether is pyght in the brayn, then she syngethe, as Ambrose sayth," De propr. rer. 1. xii. c. 11. Monsieur Morin has written a dissertation on this subject in vol. v. of the Mem. de l'acad. des inscript. There are likewise some curious remarks on it in Weston's Specimens of the conformity of the European languages with the Oriental, p. 135; in Seelen Miscellanea, tom. i. 298; and in Pinkerton's Recollections of Paris, ii. 336.
Scene 2. Page 472.
Bass. Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man.
The greatest part of the current coin being of silver, this metal is here emphatically called the common drudge in the more frequent transactions among men.
Scene 2. Page 472.
Bass. Thy plainness moves me more than eloquence.
However elegant this emendation by Dr. Warburton, it must yield to the decisive reasoning of Dr. Farmer and Mr. Malone, in favour of paleness, which ought to have been adopted in the text.