In All's Well that Ends Well (Act II. Sc. 1.) the king, when dismissing the young French noblemen who are going to the wars of Italy, says to them:
"Let higher Italy—
Those 'bated that inherit but the fall
Of the last monarchy—see, that you come
Not to woo honour, but to wed it."
Mr. Collier calls this an "obscure passage," and offers no explanation of it, merely giving a note of Coleridge's, who, after Hanmer, proposes to read bastards for 'bated, saying of the passage itself: "As it stands, I can make little or nothing of it. Why should the king except the then most illustrious states, which, as being republics, were the more truly inheritors of the Roman grandeur?" Johnson, and the other preceding editors, seem to have taken a similar view of the passage.
I trust it will not be regarded as presumption when I say, that to me the place offers no difficulty whatever. In the first place, 'bate is not, as Coleridge takes it, to except, but to overcome, put an end to (from abattre); as when we say, "abate a nuisance." In the next, we are to recollect that the citizens of the Italian republics were divided into two parties,—the Guelf, or Papal, and the Ghibelline, or Imperial; and that the French always sided with the former. Florence, therefore, was Guelf at that time, and Siena of course was Ghibelline. The meaning of the king therefore is: By defeating the Ghibelline Sienese, let Italy see, &c. As a Frenchman, he naturally affects a contempt for the German empire, and represents it as possessing (the meaning of inherit at the time) only the limited and tottering dominion which the empire of the west had at the time of its fall. By "higher Italy," by the way, I would understand not Upper Italy, but Tuscany, as more remote from France; for when the war is ended, the French envoy says:
"What will Count Rousillon do then? Will he travel higher, or return again into France?"—Act IV. Sc. 3.
The meaning is plainly: Will he go farther on? to Naples, for example.
I must take this opportunity of retracting what I have said about—