and:
"Virginius, thou dost but supply my place,
I thine: Fortune hath lift me [thee] to my chair,
And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar";
and:
"I'll pour my soul into my daughter's belly, [body,]
And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds."
We suggest that the change of an a to an r would make sense of the following:—
"Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors,
to this unlawful painting-house,"
[printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note on the word compositors:—"i.e. (conjecturally), making up the composition of the picture"! Our readers can decide for themselves;—the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214.
We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main, good; but we should like to know his authority for saying that pench means "the hole in a bench by which it was taken up,"—that "descant" means "look askant on,"—and that "I wis" is equivalent to "I surmise, imagine," which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is appended. On page 9, Vol. I., we read in the text,
"To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,"
and in the note, "i.e. submission." The original has aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here. Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the Annunciation with ave written on the scroll proceeding from the bending angel's mouth? We find the same word in Vol. III. p. 217,—