On this Mr. Steevens observes that Shakspeare had little knowledge of gardening, the medlar being one of the latest fruits, and uneatable till the end of November. But is not the charge, at least in this instance, unfounded; and has not the learned commentator misunderstood the poet's meaning? It is well known that the medlar is only edible when apparently rotten. This is what Shakspeare calls its right virtue. If a fruit be fit to be eaten when rotten and before it be ripe, it may in one sense be termed the earliest. The inaccuracy seems to be in making the medlar rotten before it is ripe, the rottenness being, as it is conceived, the ripeness.
Scene 2. Page 93.
Orl. I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly.
This very much resembles the sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuum, in one of Martial's epigrams, lib. i. ep. 39, of which the following translation was made by Timothy Kendall, in his Flowers of epigrammes, 1577, 12mo:
"The booke which thou doest read, it is
Frende Fidentinus myne;
But when thou ill doest read it, then
Beginns it to bee thyne."
Scene 4. Page 111.
Cel. He hath bought a pair of cast lips of Diana: a nun of winter's sisterhood kisses not more religiously; the very ice of chastity is in them.
Theobald explains cast lips "a pair left off by Diana." It is not easy to conceive how the goddess could leave off her lips; or how, being left off, Orlando could purchase them. Celia seems rather to allude to a statue cast in plaister or metal, the lips of which might well be said to possess the ice of chastity.
As to the "nun of winter's sisterhood," Warburton might have contented himself with censuring the dullness of Theobald. His own sisterhoods of the seasons are by much too refined and pedantic, and in every respect objectionable. Shakspeare poetically feigns a new order of nuns, most appropriate to his subject, and wholly devoid of obscurity.