"Where I find him, were it
At home, upon my brother's guard, even there,
Against the hospitable canon, would I
Wash my fierce hand in 's blood."
Coriol., Act I. Sc. 10.
Why should Aufidius speak thus of a brother who is not mentioned anywhere else in the play or in Plutarch? It struck me one day that Shakspeare might have written, "Upon my household hearth;" and on looking into North's Plutarch, I found that when Coriolanus went to the house of Aufidius, "he got him up straight to the chimney-hearth, and sate him downe." The poet who adhered so faithfully to his Plutarch may have wished to preserve this image, and, chimney not being a very poetic word, may have substituted household, or some equivalent term. Again I say this is all but conjecture.
Thomas Keightley.
P.S.—It is really very annoying to have to reply to unhandsome and unjust accusations. The Rev. Mr. Arrowsmith first transposes two lines of Shakspeare, and then, by notes of admiration, holds me up as a mere simpleton; and then A. E. B. charges me with having pirated from him my explanation of a passage in Love's Labour's Lost, Act V. Sc. 2. Let any one compare his (in "N. & Q.," Vol. vi., p. 297.) with mine (Vol. vii., p. 136.), and he will see the utter falseness of the assertion. He makes contents the nom. to dies, taken in its ordinary sense (rather an unusual concord). I take dyes in the sense of tinges, imbues with, and make it governed of zeal. But perhaps it is to the full-stop at presents that the "that's my thunder!" applies. I answer, that that was a necessary consequence of the sense in which I had taken dies, and that their must then refer to things maugre Mr. Arrowsmith. And when he says that I "do him the honour of requoting the line with which he had supported it," I merely observe that it is the line immediately following, and that I have eyes and senses as well as A. E. B.
A. E. B. deceives himself, if he thinks that literary fame is to be acquired in this way. I do not much approve either of the manner in which, at least to my apprehension, in his opening paragraph, he seems to insinuate a charge of forgery against Mr. Collier. Finally, I can tell him that he need not crow and clap his wings so much at his emendation of the passage in Lear, for, if I mistake not, few indeed will receive it. It may be nuts to him and Mr. Arrowsmith to know that they have succeeded in driving my name out of the "N. & Q."