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284. mated,] . . wild, foolish, from the Italian

matto.

"I think you are all fools or madmen.”

301.

302.

deformed] for deforming. STEEVENS. strange defeatures] Defeature is the privative

of feature. The meaning is, time hath cancelled my features. JOHNSON.

Defeatures are undoings, miscarriages, misfortunes; from defaire, Fr. So, in Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, 1599:

"The day before the night of my defeature,

(i.e. undoing)

"He greets me with a casket richly wrought.": The sense is, I am deformed, undone, by misery. Misfortune has left its impression on my face.

STEEVENS.

I rather think defeatures mean here, as in another place in this play, alteration of feature, or deformity. So in our author's Venus and Adonis, 1593:

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-To cross the curious workmanship of Nature,

"To mingle beauty with infirmities,

"And pure perfection with impure defeature." If we understand by defeatures, in this place, miscarriages, or misfortunes, then we suppose Ægeon to say, "that careful hours, i. e. misfortunes, have written misfortunes in his face." MALONE.

Defeatures are certainly neither more nor less than features; as demerits are neither more nor less than merits. Time, says Ægeon, hath placed new and strange features

Dij

features in my face; i, e. given it quite a different appearance; no wonder therefore thou dost not know

me.

314.

REMARKS.

this grained face] i. e. furrow'd, like the

grain of wood. So in Coriolanus :

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321. All these OLD witnesses (I cannot err) I believe should be read :

All those OLD witnesses cannot err:

i. e. all these continue to testify that I cannot err, and tell me, &c. WARBURTON. The old reading is the true one, as well as the most poetical. The words, I cannot err, should be thrown into a parenthesis. By old witnesses, I believe he means experienced, accustom'd ones, which are therefore less likely to err. So in the Tempest:

"If these be true spies that I wear in my head," STEEVENS.

&c.

353. Besides her urging of her wreck at sea,] This is one of Shakspere's oversights. The abbess has not so much as hinted at the shipwreck. Perhaps, indeed, this and the next speech should change places.

STEEVENS.

That however would scarcely remove the difficulty: the next speech is Ægeon's: both it and the following one should precede the duke's; or there is possibly a line lost. REMARKS.

405. Twenty-five years tions :

Thirty-three years.

-] In former edi

'Tis impossible the poet should be so forgetful, as tỏ design this number here: and therefore I have ven. tured tó alter it to twenty-five, upon a proof, that, I think, amounts to demonstration. The number, I presume, was at first wrote in figures, and perhaps, blindly; and thence the mistake might arise. Ægeon, in the first scene of the first act, is precise as to the time his son left him, in quest of his brother :

My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care,

At eighteen years became inquisitive
After his brother, &c.

And how long it was from the son's thus parting from his father, to their meeting again at Ephesus, where Ægeon, mistakingly, recognizes the twin-brother, for him, we as precisely learn from another passage in the fifth act:

Æge. But seven years since, in Syracusa bay,
Thou knowest we parted;

So that these two numbers, put together, settle the date of their birth beyond dispute. THEOBALD. 407. My heavy burden not delivered :] The old copy reads-" are delivered." I believe, the author

wrote:

My heavy burdens are not deliver'd.

Printers sometimes omit words, but never insert a new word not in the manuscript, except where they mistake one word for another.-The compositor's eye might have passed over the word not; but are could

scarcely

scarcely have been printed by mistake instead of it. MALONE.

411. After so long grief, such nativity!] She has just said, that to her, her sons were not born till STEEVENS.

now.

THE END.

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