To whom the foragers shall all repair, What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded, The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center,8 Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, What plagues, and what portents? what mutiny? Commotion in the winds? frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixure? O, when degree is shak'd, The enterprize is sick! How could communities, ? When that the general is not like the hive,] The meaning is, When the general is not to the army like the hive to the bees, the repository of the stock of every individual, that to which each particular resorts with whatever he has collected for the good of the whole, what honey is expected? what hope of advantage? The sense is clear, the expression is confused. JOHNSON. — the planets, and this center,] By this center, Ulysses means the earth itself, not the center of the earth. According to the system of Ptolemy, the earth is the center round which the planets move. deracinate—] i. e. force up by the roots. I brotherhoods in cities,] Corporations, companies, confraternities. 2 dividable shores,] i. e. divided. VOL. VII. Should with a bond of air (strong as the axlet expect, That matter needless, of importless burden, Ulyss. Troy, yet upon his basis, had been The specialty of rule hath been neglected: speeches,-which were such, As Agamemnon and the hand of Greece knit all the Greekish ears To his experienc'd tongue,] Ulysses begins his c praising those who had spoken before him, and ma racteristick excellencies of their different eloquenc and sweetness, which he expresses by the differe which he recommends them to be engraven for the posterity. The speech of Agamemnon is such that engraven in brass, and the tablet held up by him and Greece on the other, to show the union And Nestor ought to be exhibited in silver, uniti in one mind by his soft and gentle elocution. mon emblem of strength, and silver of gentl soft voice a silver voice, and a persuasive ton To hatch is a term of art for a particular m Hacher, to cut, Fr. The Commentators di from this explanation. -expect-] Expect for expectation. The specialty of rule-] The parti authority. 121 To whom the foragers shall all repair, What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded, The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center,R Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, And posts, like the commandment of a king, What plagues, and what portents? what mutiny? The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixure? O, when degree is shak'd, The enterprize is sick! How could communities, ? When that the general is not like the hive,] The meaning is,— When the general is not to the army like the hive to the bees, the repository of the stock of every individual, that to which each particular resorts with whatever he has collected for the good of the whole, what honey is expected? what hope of advantage? The sense is clear, the expression is confused. JOHNSON. 8 —the planets, and this center,] By this center, Ulysses means the earth itself, not the center of the earth. According to the system of Ptolemy, the earth is the center round which the planets move. deracinate―] i. e. force up by the roots. brotherhoods in cities,] Corporations, companies, con fraternities. 2- dividable shores,] i. e. divided. The primogenitive and due of birth, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong, (Between whose endless jar justice resides,) Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then every thing includes itself in power, And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, And, last, eat up himself. Great Agamemnon, Follows the choking. And this neglection of degree it is, That by a pace* goes backward, with a purpose And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, mere- -] Mere is absolute. That by a pace-] That goes backward step by step. with a purpose It hath to climb.] With a design in each man to aggrandize himself, by slighting his immediate superior. 6 bloodless emulation:] An emulation not vigorous and active, but malignant and sluggish. Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length, Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength. Nest. Most wisely hath Ulysses here discover'd The fever whereof all our power' is sick. Agam. The nature of the sickness found, Ulysses, What is the remedy? Ulyss. The great Achilles,-whom opinion crowns The sinew and the forehand of our host,Having his ear full of his airy fame, Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent Lies mocking our designs: With him, Patroclus, Upon a lazy bed the livelong day Breaks scurril jests; And with ridiculous and aukward action (Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,) He pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon, And, like a strutting player,-whose conceit 7 our power-] i. e. our army. Thy topless deputation-] Topless is that which has nothing topping or overtopping it; supreme; sovereign. Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage,] The galleries of the theatre, in the time of our author, were sometimes termed the scaffolds. 2 - o'er-wrested seeming—] i. e. wrested beyond the truth. ·unsquar'd,] i. e. unadapted to their subject, as stones are unfitted to the purposes of architecture, while they are yet unsquar'd. |