"The lamb entreats the butcher:
Where is thy knife?
Thou art too slow
To do thy master's bidding when I desire it."
Antony, as the last drops are falling from his self-inflicted wound, utters with his dying breath to Cleopatra, this:
"I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips."
To me, the last words of Hamlet are full of pathos:
"I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o'er crows my spirit * * *
The rest is silence."
XVI.
SOME have insisted that Shakespeare must have been a physician, for the reason that he shows such knowledge of medicine—of the symptoms of disease and death—was so familiar with the brain, and with insanity in all its forms.
I do not think he was a physician. He knew too much—his generalizations were too splendid. He had none of the prejudices of that profession in his time. We might as well say that he was a musician, a composer, because we find in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" nearly every musical term known in Shakespeare's time.
Others maintain that he was a lawyer, perfectly acquainted with the forms, with the expressions familiar to that profession—yet there is nothing to show that he was a lawyer, or that he knew more about law than any intelligent man should know.