But be the serpent under it."
Mrs. Jameson remarks on this passage: "This highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is defended by Schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it appears natural, however critics may argue against its taste or propriety. The warmth and vivacity of Juliet's fancy, which plays like a light over every part of her character—which animates every line she utters—which kindles every thought into a picture, and clothes her emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and unusual excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some extravagance of diction." Cf. i. 1. 168 fol. above.
83. [Was ever book,] etc. Cf. i. 3. 66 above.
84. [O, that deceit,] etc. Cf. Temp. i. 2. 468: "If the ill spirit have so fair a house," etc.
86, 87. Mr. Fleay improves the metre by a slight transposition, which Marshall adopts:—
"No faith, no honesty in men; all naught,
All perjur'd, all dissemblers, all forsworn;"
which may be what S. wrote.
[Naught] = worthless, bad. Cf. Much Ado, $1. $2. 157, Hen. V. i. 2. 73, etc. The word in this sense is usually spelt naught in the early eds., but nought when = nothing. Dissemblers is here a quadrisyllable. See p. 159 above.
90. [Blister'd,] etc. "Note the Nurse's mistake of the mind's audible struggle with itself for its decisions in toto" (Coleridge).