Besides the hymn of Prudentius referred to in Dr. Farmer's note, there is another said to have been composed by Saint Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury service. It contains the following lines, which so much resemble Horatio's speech, that one might almost suppose Shakspeare had seen them:
"Preco diei jam sonat,
Noctis profundæ pervigil;
Nocturna lux viantibus,
A nocte noctem segregans.
Hoc excitatus Lucifer,
Solvit polum caligine;
Hoc omnis errorum chorus
Viam nocendi deserit.
Gallo canente spes redit, &c."
See Expositio hymnorum secundum usum Sarum, pr. by R. Pynson, n. d. 4to, fo. vii. b. The epithets extravagant and erring are highly poetical and appropriate, and seem to prove that Shakspeare was not altogether ignorant of the Latin language.
Scene 2. Page 35.
Ham. Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self slaughter.
Mr. Steevens says, "there are yet those who suppose the old reading (cannon, in the sense of artillery) to be the true one." He himself was not of the number. It must be owned that fixing a cannon is an odd mode of vengeance on the part of the Deity; yet it is still more difficult to conceive in what manner this instrument could operate in avenging suicide. The pedants of Hierocles, who were the Gothamites of their time, might, if now existing, be competent to explain all this; or, indeed, we might ourselves suppose that suicides could be blown into atoms as the seapoys sometimes are, by tying them to the cannon's mouth, a method equally humane with the practice of driving stakes through their bodies. Mr. Malone's happy quotation has for ever fixed the proper meaning.
Scene 2. Page 40.
Ham. ... the funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
The practice of making entertainments at funerals which prevailed in this and other countries, and which is not even at present quite disused in some of the northern counties of England, was certainly borrowed from the cœna feralis of the Romans, alluded to in Juvenal's fifth satire, and in the laws of the twelve tables. It consisted of an offering of a small plate of milk, honey, wine, flowers, &c., to the ghost of the deceased. In the instances of heroes and other great characters, the same custom appears to have prevailed among the Greeks. With us the appetites of the living are consulted on this occasion. In the North this feast is called an arval or arvil-supper; and the loaves that are sometimes distributed among the poor, arval-bread. Not many years since one of these arvals was celebrated in a village in Yorkshire at a public-house, the sign of which was the family arms of a nobleman whose motto is VIRTUS POST FUNERA VIVIT. The undertaker, who, though a clerk, was no scholar, requested a gentleman present to explain to him the meaning of these Latin words, which he readily and facetiously did in the following manner: Virtus, a parish clerk, vivit, lives well, post funera, at an arval. The latter word is apparently derived from some lost Teutonic term that indicated a funeral pile on which the body was burned in times of Paganism. Thus ærill in Islandic signifies the inside of an oven. The common parent seems to have been ar, fire; whence ara, an altar of fire, ardeo, aridus, &c. &c. So the pile itself was called ara by Virgil, Æn. vi. 177:
"Haud mora, festinant flentes; aramque sepulchri
Congerere arboribus, cœloque educere certant."