[P. 261.] both at the first. “Hamlet,” iii, 2, 23.
[P. 262.] And visions. Hazlitt uses this quotation in his paper on “Wordsworth’s Excursion” in the “Round Table” with the change of poetic to prophetic. “This couplet occurs in a letter from Gray to Walpole (‘Letters,’ ed. Tovey I, 7-8). The lines are apparently a translation by Gray of Virgil, ‘Æneid,’ VI, 282-84.” Waller-Glover, XII, 504.
[P. 263.] Doctor Chalmers’s Discourses. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a celebrated divine and preacher of Scotland, published in 1817 “A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with Modern Astronomy.”
bandit fierce. Milton’s “Comus,” 426.
our fell of hair. “Macbeth,” v, 5, 11.
Macbeth ... for the sake of the music. Some copies of the first edition misprint Macheath, the name of the leading character in Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.” In writing “On Commonplace Critics,” in the “Round Table,” Hazlitt represents the commonplace critic as questioning whether any one of Shakespeare’s plays, “if brought out now for the first time, would succeed. He thinks that ‘Macbeth’ would be the most likely, from the music which has been introduced into it.” The reference is to the music written for D’Avenant’s version of the play, produced in 1672. According to Waller-Glover (I, 436), “this music, traditionally assigned to Matthew Locke, is now attributed to Purcell”; but Furness, in the Variorum edition of “Macbeth,” accepts the conclusion of Chappell in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music,” “that Purcell could not have been the composer of a work which appeared when he was in his fourteenth year,” especially as “the only reason that can be assigned why modern musicians should have doubted Locke’s authorship is that a manuscript of it exists in the handwriting of Henry Purcell.”
[P. 264.] Between the acting. “Julius Cæsar,” ii, 1, 63.
[P. 265.] Thoughts that voluntary move. “Paradise Lost,” III, 37.
the words of Mercury. Cf. “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v, 2, 940: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.”
So from the ground. “Faërie Queene,” I, vi, 13.