[9] Collier's MS. corrector substituted farc'd for forc'd.
The word forced should be read farced, the letter o having evidently dropped down into a box. The enemy's ranks were not forced with Macbeth's followers, but farced or filled up. In Murrell's Cookery, 1632, this identical word is used several times; we there see that a farced leg of mutton was when the meat was all taken out of the skin, mixed with herbs, etc., and then the skin filled up again.
`I come to thee for charitable license . . .
To booke our dead.'
Henry V., iv. 7.
So all the copies, but `to book' is surely a modern commercial phrase, and the <p 113>Herald here asked leave simply to `look,' or to examine, the dead for the purpose of giving honourable burial to their men of rank. In the same sense Sir W. Lucie, in the First Part of Henry VI., says:—
`I come to know what prisoners thou hast tane,
And to survey the bodies of the dead.'
We cannot imagine an officer with pen, inkhorn, and paper, at a period when few could write, `booking' the dead. We may, I think, take it for granted that here the letter b had fallen over into the l box.''
Another point to bear in mind is the existence of such logotypes as fi, si, etc., so that, as Mr. Blades says, ``the change of light into sight must not be considered as a question of a single letter—of s in the l box,'' because the box containing si is far away from the l box, and their contents could not well get mixed.
To these instances given by Mr. Blades may be added a very interesting correction suggested to the author some years ago by a Shakespearian student. When Isabella visits her brother in prison, the <p 114>cowardly Claudio breaks forth in complaint, and paints a vivid picture of the horrors of the damned:—
``Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling!—'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.''
Measure for Measure, act iii., sc. 1.
We have here, in the expression ``delighted spirit,'' a difficulty which none of the commentators have as yet been able to explain. Warburton said that the adjective meant ``accustomed to ease and delights,'' but this was not a very successful guess, although Steevens adopted it. Sir Thomas Hanmer altered delighted to dilated, and Dr. Johnson <p 115>mentions two suggested emendations, one being benighted and the other delinquent. None of these suggestions can be corroborated by a reference to the plans of the printers' cases, but it will be seen that the one now proposed is much strengthened by the position of the boxes in those plans. The suggested word is deleted, which accurately describes the spirits as destroyed, or blotted out of existence. The word is common in the printing office, and it was often used in literature.