SHAKSPEARE'S USE OF "CAPTIOUS" AND "INTENIBLE." SHAKSPEARE'S "SMALL LATIN."
(Vol. ii., p. 354.; Vol. iii., p. 65.)

This is another discussion in which Shakspeare's love of antithesis has not been sufficiently recognised.

The contrast in this case is in the ideas—ever receiving, never retaining: an allusion to the hopeless punishment of the Danaïdes, so beautifully appropriate, so unmistakeably apparent, and so well supported in the context, that I should think it unnecessary to offer a comment upon it had the question been raised by a critic less distinguished than MR. SINGER; or if I did not fancy that I perceive the origin of what I believe to be his mistake, in the misreading of another line, the last in his quotation.

The hopelessness of Helena's love is cheerfully endured; she glories in it:

"I know I love in vain—strive against hope—

Yet still outpour the waters of my love,

And lack not to lose still."

This last line MR. SINGER reads, "and fail not to lose still;" but surely that is not Helena's meaning? She means that her spring of love is inexhaustible; that, notwithstanding the constant, hopeless waste, there lacks not (a supply) "to lose still!"

Johnson was one of those commentators enumerated by MR. SINGER, of whom he observes, as a matter of surprise, "that none of them should have remarked that the sense of the Latin 'captiosus,' and of its congeners in Italian and French, is deceitful, fallacious;" "and," he adds, "Bacon uses the word for 'insidious,' 'ensnaring.'" But surely Johnson the commentator was no other than Johnson the lexicographer; and yet, for these precise definitions of "captious," which J. S. W. thinks "too refined and recondite" for Shakspeare's "small Latin," we need apply to no higher source than to that familiar household companion—Johnson's Dictionary, wherein is anticipated the citation of Bacon, and even of the French word "captieux."

It could not therefore be from ignorance that Johnson failed to propose this recondite sense, but from a conviction that it would not represent the true meaning of Shakspeare.