In _All's Well that Ends Well_ (Act II. Sc. 1.) the king, when dismissing
the young French noblemen who are going to the wars of Italy, says to them:
"Let higher Italy--
Those 'bated that inherit but the fall
Of the last monarchy--see, that you come
Not to woo honour, but to wed it."
MR. COLLIER calls this an "obscure passage," and offers no explanation of
it, merely giving a note of Coleridge's, who, after Hanmer, proposes to
read _bastards_ for _'bated_, saying of the passage itself: "As it stands,
I can make little or nothing of it. Why should the king except the then
most illustrious states, which, as being republics, were the more truly
inheritors of the Roman grandeur?" Johnson, and the other preceding
editors, seem to have taken a similar view of the passage.
I trust it will not be regarded as presumption when I say, that to me the
place offers no difficulty whatever. In the first place, _'bate_ is not, as
Coleridge takes it, to except, but to overcome, put an end to (from
_abattre_); as when we say, "abate a nuisance." In the next, we are to
recollect that the citizens of the Italian republics were divided into two
parties,--the Guelf, or Papal, and the Ghibelline, or Imperial; and that
the French always sided with the former. Florence, therefore, was Guelf at
that time, and Siena of course was Ghibelline. The meaning of the king
therefore is: By defeating the Ghibelline Sienese, let Italy see, &c. As a
Frenchman, he naturally affects a contempt for the German empire, and
represents it as possessing (the meaning of _inherit_ at the time) only the
limited and tottering dominion which the empire of the west had at the time
of its fall. By "higher Italy," by the way, I would understand not Upper
Italy, but Tuscany, as more remote from France; for when the war is ended,
the French envoy says:
"What will Count Rousillon do then? Will he travel _higher_, or return
again into France?"--Act IV. Sc. 3.
The meaning is plainly: Will he go farther on? to Naples, for example.