Chapter CXXXI: Act III: SCENE 1. Page 452

ROM. O! I am fortune's fool!

"I am always running in the way of evil fortune, _like the fool in the play_," says Dr. Johnson. There is certainly no allusion to any _play_. See the note in p. 146.

SCENE 2. Page 456.

JUL. That _run-away's eyes_ may wink.

A great deal of ingenious criticism has been expended in endeavouring to ascertain the meaning of this expression. Dr. Warburton thought the _runaway_ in question was the _sun_; but Mr. Heath has most completely disproved this opinion. Mr. Steevens considers the passage as extremely elliptical, and regards the _night_ as the _runaway_; making Juliet wish that its eyes, the stars, might retire to prevent discovery. Mr. Justice Blackstone can perceive nothing _optative_ in the lines, but simply a _reason_ for Juliet's wish for a cloudy night; yet according to this construction of the passage, the grammar of it is not very easily to be discovered.

Whoever attentively reads over Juliet's speech will be inclined to think, or even be altogether satisfied, that the _whole tenor_ of it is _optative_. With respect to calling the night a runaway, one might surely ask how it can possibly be so termed in _an abstract point of view_? Is it a greater fugitive than the morning, the noon, or the evening? Mr. Steevens lays great stress on Shakspeare's having before called the night a runaway in _The Merchant of Venice_,

"For the close night doth play the _runaway_;"

but there it was already far advanced, and might therefore with great propriety be said to _play the runaway_; here it was not begun. The same remark will apply to the other passage cited by Mr. Steevens from _The fair maid of the Exchange_. Where then is this _runaway_ to be found? or can it be Juliet herself? She who had just been secretly married to the enemy of her parents might with some propriety be termed a _runaway from her duty_; but she had not abandoned her native pudency. She therefore invokes the night to veil those rites which she was about to perform, and to bring her Romeo to her arms in darkness and in silence. The lines that immediately follow may be thought to favour this interpretation; and the whole Scene may possibly bring to the reader's recollection an interesting part in the beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche.

SCENE 5. Page 483.

JUL. Hunting thee hence with _hunt's-up_ to the day.

Of the notes on this line, that by Mr. Malone is most to the point. He has shown from Cotgrave, that the _hunt's-up_ was "a morning song to a new married woman, &c.;" and it was, no doubt, an imitation of the tune to wake the hunters, noticed by Mr. Steevens, as was that in the celebrated Scotish _booke of godly and spirituall songs_, beginning,

"With hunts up, with huntis up,
It is now perfite day:
Jesus our king is gane in hunting,
Quha likes to speed they may."

It is not improbable that the following was the identical song composed by the person of the name of Gray mentioned in Mr. Ritson's note. It occurs in a collection entitled _Hunting, hawking, &c._, already cited in the course of the remarks on _The merry wives of Windsor_. There was likewise a country dance with a similar title.

CHO. { The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
{ Sing merrily wee, the hunt is up;
The birds they sing,
The Deare they fling,
Hey, nony nony-no:
The hounds they crye,
The hunters flye,
Hey trolilo, trololilo.
The hunt is up, _ut supra_.

The wood resounds
To heere the hounds,
Hey, nony nony-no:
The rocks report
This merry sport,
Hey, trolilo, trololilo.
CHO. { The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
{ Sing merrily wee, the hunt is up.

Then hye apace,
Unto the chase,
Hey nony, nony-no;
Whilst every thing
Doth sweetly sing,
Hey trolilo, trololilo.
CHO. { The hunt is up, the hunt is up,
{ Sing merrily wee, the hunt is up.

SCENE 5. Page 496.

NURSE. ... an eagle, madam,
Hath not so _green_, so quick, so fair an eye.

Besides the authorities already produced in favour of _green_ eyes, and which show the impropriety of Hanmer's alteration to _keen_, a hundred others might, if necessary, be given. The early French poets are extremely fond of alluding to them under the title of _yeux vers_, which Mons. Le Grand has in vain attempted to convert into _yeux vairs_, or grey eyes.[22] It must be confessed that the scarcity, if not total absence of such eyes in modern times, might well have excited the doubts of the above intelligent and agreeable writer. For this let naturalists, if they can, account. It is certain that green eyes were found among the ancients. Plautus thus alludes to them in his _Curculio_:

"Qui hic est homo
Cum collativo ventre, atque oculis _herbeis_?"

Lord Verulam says, "Great eyes with a _green circle_ between the white and the white of the eye, signify long life."--_Hist. of life and death_, p. 124. Villa Real, a Portuguese, has written a treatise in praise of them, and they are even said to exist now among his countrymen. See Pinkerton's _Geography_, vol. i. p. 556, and Steevens's Shakspeare, vol. v. 164, 203.