"Foot it featly here and there,
And, sweet sprites, the burden bear,"—
which stands so in Hanmer, and, indeed is the usually received arrangement of the song.
This is the last corrected passage in the first act, in the course of which Mr. Collier gives us no fewer than sixteen, altered, emended, and commented upon in his folio. Many of the emendations are to be found verbatim in the Oxford and subsequent editions, and three only appear to us to be of any special value, tried by the standard of common sense, to which we agreed, on Mr. Collier's invitation, to refer them.
The line in Prospero's threat to Caliban,—
"I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,"—
occasioned one of Mr. John Kemble's characteristic differences with the public, who objected, perhaps not without reason, to hearing the word "aches" pronounced as a dissyllable, although the line imperatively demands it; and Shakspeare shows that the word was not unusually so pronounced, as he introduces it with the same quantity in the prose dialogue of "Much Ado about Nothing," and makes it the vehicle of a pun which certainly argues that it was familiar to the public ear as ache and not ake. When Hero asks Beatrice, who complains that she is sick, what she is sick for,—a hawk, a hound, or a husband,—Beatrice replies, that she is sick for—or of—that which begins them all, an ache,—an H. Indeed, much later than Shakspeare's day the word was so pronounced; for Dean Swift, in the "City Shower," has the line,—
"Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will rage."
The opening of this play is connected with my earliest recollections. In looking down the "dark backward and abysm of time," to the period when I was but six years old, my memory conjures up a vision of a stately drawing-room on the ground-floor of a house, doubtless long since swept from the face of the earth by the encroaching tide of new houses and streets that has submerged every trace of suburban beauty, picturesqueness, or rural privacy in the neighborhood of London, converting it all by a hideous process of assimilation into more London, till London seems almost more than England can carry.
But in those years, "long enough ago," to which I refer,—somewhere between Lea and Blackheath, stood in the midst of well-kept grounds a goodly mansion, which held this pleasant room. It was always light and cheerful and warm, for the three windows down to the broad gravel-walk before it faced south; and though the lawn was darkened just in front of them by two magnificent yew-trees, the atmosphere of the room itself, in its silent, sunny loftiness, was at once gay and solemn to my small imagination and senses,—much as the interior of Saint Peter's of Rome has been since to them. Wonderful, large, tall jars of precious old china stood in each window, and my nose was just on a level with the wide necks, whence issued the mellowest smell of fragrant pot-pourri. Into this room, with its great crimson curtains and deep crimson carpet, in which my feet seemed to me buried, as in woodland moss, I used to be brought for recompense of having been "very good," and there I used to find a lovely-looking lady, who was to me the fitting divinity of this shrine of pleasant awfulness. She bore a sweet Italian diminutive for her Christian name, added to one of the noblest old ducal names of Venice, which was that of her family.
I have since known that she was attached to the person of, and warmly personally attached to, the unfortunate Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales,—then only unfortunate; so that I can now guess at the drift of much sad and passionate talk with indignant lips and tearful eyes, of which the meaning was then of course incomprehensible to me, but which I can now partly interpret by the subsequent history of that ill-used and ill-conducted lady.