13. Savile Street, Hull.
State: Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 1.—Professor Wilson proposed that in the "high and palmy state of Rome," state should be taken in the sense of city:
"Write henceforth and for ever State with a towering capital. State, properly republic, here specifically and pointedly means Reigning City. The ghosts walked in the city, not in the republic."—Vide "Dies Boreales," No. III., Blackwood, August, 1849.
Query, Has this reading been adopted by our skilled Shakspearian critics?
Coleridge uses state for city in his translation of The Death of Wallenstein, Act III. Sc. 7.:
"What think you?
Say, shall we have the State illuminated
In honour of the Swede?"
J. M. B.