animadversion. I cannot without indignation find Shakespeare saying, that death is only sleep, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet trite and vulgar.
III.i.19 (64,6)
[Thou art not thyself,
For thou exist'st on many thousand grains,
That issue out of dust]
Thou art perpetually repaired and renovated by external assistance, thou subsistest upon foreign matter, and hast no power of producing or continuing thy own being.
III.i.24 (64,7) [strange effects] For effects read affects; that is, affections, passions of mind, or disorders of body variously affected. So in Othello, The young affects.
III.i.32 (65,9)
[Thou hast nor youth, nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both]
This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young, we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old, we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.
III.i.34 (65,1)
[for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld]