"The house ought to dye all the surrounding country with a strength of colouring, and to an extent proportioned to its own importance."—Life of Wordsworth, i. 355.
Another place on which I had offered a conjecture, and which Mr. A. takes under his patronage, is "Clamor your tongues" (Winter's Tale, Act IV. Sc. 4.) and in proof of clamor being the right word, he quotes passages from a book printed in 1542, in which are chaumbreed and chaumbre, in the sense of restraining. I see little resemblance here to clamor, and he does not say that he would substitute chaumbre. He says, "Most judiciously does Nares reject Gifford's corruption of this word into charm [it was Grey not Gifford]; nor will the suffrage of the 'clever' old commentator," &c. It is very curious, only that we criticasters are so apt to overrun our game, that the only place where "charm your tongue" really occurs, seems to have escaped Mr. Collier. In Othello, Act V. Sc. 2., Iago says to his wife, "Go to, charm your tongue;" and she replies, "I will not charm my tongue." My conjecture was that clamor was clam, or, as it was usually spelt, clem, to press or restrain; and to this I still adhere.
"When my entrails
Were clemmed with keeping a perpetual fast."
Massinger, Rom. Actor., Act II. Sc. 1.
"I cannot eat stones and turfs: say, what will he clem me and my followers?"—Jonson, Poetaster, Act I. Sc. 2.
"Hard is the choice when the valiant must eat their arms or clem." Id., Every Man Out of his Humour Act III. Sc. 6.
In these places of Jonson, clem is usually rendered starve; but it appears to me, from the kindred of the term, that it is used elliptically. Perhaps, instead of "Till famine cling thee" (Macbeth, Act V. Sc. 5.), Shakspeare wrote "Till
famine clem thee." While in the region of conjecture, I will add that coasting, in Troilus and Cressida (Act IV. Sc. 5.), is, in my opinion, simply accosting, lopped in the usual way by aphæresis; and that "the still-peering air" in All's Well that Ends Well (Act III. Sc. 2.), is, by the same figure, "the still-appearing air," i. e. the air that appears still and silent, but that yet "sings with piercing."
One conjecture more, and I have done. I do not like altering the text without absolute necessity; but there was always a puzzle to me in this passage: