You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart : Write till your ink be dry; and with your tears Moist it again; and frame some feeling line, That may discover such integrity:

For Orpheus' lute was strung with poet's sinews;
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones.
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans

Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.
After your dire-lamenting elegies,

Visit by night your lady's chamber window

With some sweet consort : to their instruments Tune a deploring dump; the night's dead silence Will well become such sweet complaining grievance. This, or else nothing, will inherit her."

Duke. This discipline shows thou hast been in love.
Thu. And thy advice this night I'll put in practice:
Therefore, sweet Proteus, my direction-giver,
Let us into the city presently,

To sort some gentlemen well skill'd in music
I have a sonnet that will serve the turn,

To give the onset to thy good advice.
Duke. About it, gentlemen.

Pro. We'll wait upon your grace till after supper; And afterward determine our proceedings.

Duke. Even now about it: I will pardon you.10

[Exeunt.

That is, sincerity, such as is shown by impassioned writing. Integrity is here used in its original sense, the sense of entireness, or wholeheartedness.

H.

The old copy has consort, which, according to Bullokar and Phillips, signified "a set or company of musicians." If we print concert, as Malone would have it, the relative pronoun their has. no correspondent word.

1 A dump was the ancient term for a mournful elegy.

To inherit is sometimes used by Shakespeare for to obtain possession of. Milton in Comus has disinherit Chaos, meaning only to dispossess it. To sort, to choose out.

10 That is, excuse your attendance on me.

H

ACT IV.

SCENE I. A Forest, between Milan and Verona

Enter certain Outlaws.

1 Out. Fellows, stand fast: I see a passenger. 2 Out. If there be ten, shrink not, but down with 'em.

Enter VALENTINE and SPEED.

3 Out. Stand, sir, and throw us that you have about you;

If not, we'll make you sit, and rifle you.

Speed. Sir, we are undone! these are the villains that all the travellers do fear so much.

Val. My friends,

1 Out. That's not so, sir: we are your enemies. 2 Out. Peace! we'll hear him.

3 Out. Ay, by my beard, will we; for he is a proper1 man.

Val. Then know, that I have little wealth to lose. A man I am, cross'd with adversity:

My riches are these poor habiliments,

Of which if you should here disfurnish me, You take the sum and substance that I have. 2 Out. Whither travel you?

Val. To Verona.

1 Out. Whence came you?

Val. From Milan.

3 Out. Have you long sojourn'd there?
Val. Some sixteen months; and longer might

have stay'd,

If crooked fortune had not thwarted me.

1 A proper man was a comely, tall, or well-proportioned man

1 Out. What!

Val. I was.

were you banish'd thence ?

2 Out. For what offence ?

Val. For that which now torments me to rehearse · I kill'd a man, whose death I much repent; But yet I slew him manfully in fight, Without false vantage, or base treachery.

1 Out. Why, ne'er repent it, if it were done so. But were you banish'd for so small a fault?

Val. I was, and held me glad of such a doom. 1 Out. Have you the tongues??

Val. My youthful travel therein made me happy; Or else I had been often miserable.

3 Out. By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar,"

This fellow were a king for our wild faction.

1 Out. We'll have him: Sirs, a word.
Speed. Master, be one of them:

It is an honourable kind of thievery.
Val. Peace, villain!

2 Out. Tell us this: Have you any thing to take to?

Val. Nothing but my fortune.

3 Out. Know, then, that some of us are gentlemen, Such as the fury of ungovern'd youth

Thrust from the company of awful' men:

2 That is, do you speak various languages?

H.

3 Friar Tuck, the chaplain of Robin Hood's merry crew; that ancient specimen of clerical baldness and plumpness and jollity, who figures so largely in old ballads and in Ivanhoe, of whom Drayton says:

"Of Tuck, the merry friar, which many a sermon made In praise of Robin Hood, his outlaws, and his trade."

H.

That is, men full of awe, or of respect for just authority. So in 2 Henry IV., Act iv. sc. 1: "We come within our awful banks again." No instance of a similar use of the word has been found

Myself was from Verona banished,

For practising to steal away a lady,

An heir, and near allied unto the duke.

2 Out. And I from Mantua, for a gentleman, Whom, in my mood," I stabb'd unto the heart. 1 Out. And I, for such like petty crimes as these.

But to the purpose;

for we cite our faults, That they may hold excus'd our lawless lives; And, partly, seeing you are beautify'd

With goodly shape; and by your own report
A linguist, and a man of such perfection,

6

As we do in our quality much want;

2 Out. Indeed, because you are a banish'd man, Therefore, above the rest, we parley to you: Are you content to be our general ?

To make a virtue of necessity,

And live, as we do, in this wilderness?

3 Out. What say'st thou wilt thou be of our consort?

Say ay, and be the captain of us all:

We'll do thee homage, and be rul'd by thee,
Love thee as our commander and our king.

1 Out. But if thou scorn our courtesy, thou diest.
2 Out. Thou shalt not live to brag what we have
offer'd.

Val. I take your offer, and will live with you, Provided that you do no outrages

On silly women, or poor passengers.

3 Out. No; we detest such vile base practices. Come, go with us: we'll bring thee to our cave,

out of Shakespeare; for which cause some have set it down as a misprint for lawful. But the word, as it stands, sounds to us Shakespearian.

Mood is anger or resentment.

That is condition, profession, occupation.

H.

And show thee all the treasure we have got;
Which, with ourselves, all rest at thy dispose.

[Exeunt

SCENE II. Milan. Court of the Palace.

Enter PROTEUS.

Pro. Already have I been false to Valentine,
And now I must be as unjust to Thurio.
Under the colour of commending him,
I have access my own love to prefer;
But Silvia is too fair, too true, too holy,
To be corrupted with my worthless gifts.
When I protest true loyalty to her,

She twits me with my falsehood to my friend;
When to her beauty I commend my vows,
She bids me think how I have been forsworn
In breaking faith with Julia whom I lov'd:
And, notwithstanding all her sudden quips,'
The least whereof would quell a lover's hope,
Yet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love,
The more it grows and fawneth on her still.
But here comes Thurio: now must we to her window,
And give some evening music to her ear.

Enter THURIO and Musicians.

Thu. How now, Sir Proteus? are you crept before us?

Pro. Ay, gentle Thurio; for you know that love Will creep in service where it cannot go.

Thu. Ay, but I hope, sir, that you love not here. Pro. Sir, but I do; or else I would be hence. Thu. Whom? Silvia?

1 Sudden quips, hasty, passionate reproaches.