wise impressed on the minds of the audience through the sense of hearing. From these proofs results the following definition which I have given of this wonderful art: "Writing may be defined to be the art of exhibiting to the sight the conceptions of the mind, by means of marks or characters, significant by compact of the sounds of language." 1785, Dec. LXXXVI. Parallel Passages and Remarks on Shakespeare. MR. URBAN, PLEASE to insert the inclosed parallel passages, and remarks on Shakespeare, and you will oblige your correspondent, T. H. W. Have giv'n you here a third of mine own life, Or that for which I live. σε Το γαρ ήμισυ τας ζωίας εχώς " 65 Ζα ταν σαν ιδέαν. Theocrit. Id. 29. v. 5. The Merry Wives of Windsor.-Act I. Scene 1. Slen. She has brown hair, and speaks small* like a wo man. "Then the company answered all, With voices sweet entuned, and so small, Chaucer. The Flower and the Leaf. "At last she warbled forth a treble small, And with sweet lookes, her sweet song enterlaced." Fairfar's Tasso. L. 15. stanza 62. * In Hanmet's edition, 12mo. 1747, this emphatical word is omitted. Ea Measure for Measure.-Act III. Scene 1. Claud. The delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice. The epithet delighted seems to be so misplaced, that dif ferent commentators have proposed to read dilated, benighted, delinquent; but Shakespeare took delighted from the following uncouth passage. "But round about the island, for the space of seven or eight moneths in the yere there floateth ise, making a miserable kind of mone not unlike to man's voice, by reason of the clashing together. The inhabitants are of opinion that in Mount Hecla, and in the ise, there are places wherein the soules of their countrymen are tormented. "No doubt a worthy augmentation of the history, concerning the hel of Island, shut up within the bottome of one mountaine, and that no great one; yea at some times, (by fits and seasons) changing places; namely, when it is weary of lurking at home by the fire's-side within the mountaine, it delighteth to be ranging abroad, and to venture to sea, but without a ship, and to gether itself round into morsels of yce." Hakluyt's Voyages, Vol. I. P. 562. Love's Labour's Lost.-Act V. Scene 2. Biron. To shew his teeth as white, as whale his bone. The white whale his bone, which is now superseded by ivory, was the tooth of the horse-whale, morse, or walrus, as appears by King Alfred's preface to his Saxon translation of Orosius. Song.-Act V. Scene 2. Nightly sings the staring owl To-whit! to-whoo! "To-whit, to-whoo the owle does cry." Lylly's Mother Bombie." Midsummer-Night's Dream. Johnson doubts whether Shakespeare in this play, or Drayton in his Nimphidia, first produced the system of the fairy empire. But if Drayton wrote the Nimphidia after the Midsummer-Night's Dream had been acted, he could with very little propriety say, Puck. “Then since no muse hath bin so bold, Which lye from others reeding, Act II. Scene 1. When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, Scene 2. Queen. The childing autumn "An hundreth plants beside (even in his sight) Childed an hundreth nymphes, so great, so dight." Fairfax's Tasso, B. 18 Stan. 26. Childing is also an old term in botany, when a small flower grows out of a large one, "The childing autuan," . e. producing flowers on those of summer. Florists have a childing rose, a childing daisy, and a childing sca bious. Act III. Scene 7. Hel. But you must join in soulst, to mock me too. Macb. Macbeth.-Act II. Scene 2. Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood "Non si Neptuni fluctu renovare operam des; Macb. Act III. Scene 2. The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hums As the meaning of the epithet shard-born is yet unsettled, I give the following from Dryden : "Such souls as shards produce, such beetle things, Doct. The Hind and the Panther. Act V. Scene 1. My mind she has mated, and amaz'd my sight, "Yet with these broken reliques, mated mind, Scory to Drayton. King John.-Act I. Scene 1. Gur. Good leave, good Philip. The sparrow is called Philip from its note. Cry Phip phip the sparrowes as they fly." Lylly's Mother Bombie. The second part of King Henry IV-Act III. Scene 2. Bard. Accommodated; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing. The following is a parallel explanation of the word ob noxious. "Quis adeo tam linguæ Latinæ ignarus est, quin sciat eum dici obnoxium, cui quid ab eo, cui esse obnoxius dicitur, incommodari et noceri potest, et qui habeat aliquem noxæ, il est culpæ suæ conscium." Aul. Gell. Noct. Attic. 1. 7. c. 17. Cymbeline-Act II. Scene 3. Song. Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings Imitated from Lylly. "The larke so shrill and cleare, How at heaven's gates she claps her wings, "Nunc non e tumulo, fortunataque favilla Pers. Sat. i. v. 39. MR. URBAN, YOUR learned correspondent T. H. W. has not shewn his usual attention to the lines from Theocritus, cited as a parallel passage to the following clause of Prospero's address to Ferdinand respecting Miranda. Tempest, Act iv. Scene i. init. For I Have giv'n you here a third of my own life; Or that for which I live: the half the words in the Greek poet being ημισυ της ζωίας is very similar, viz. Act i. Scene ii. where Iago, alarming Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul; |