“Pardon me, Julius—here wast thou bay’d, brave hart:
Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand
Sign’d in thy spoil, and crimson’d in thy lethe.
_O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,_
_And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee._”
I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;—not because they are vile;
but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakespearian, but just
the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have
interpolated them;—and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the
sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what
is with me still more decisive) of the Shakespearian link of association.
As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have
only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I
venture to say there is no instance in Shakespeare fairly like this.
Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines
before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the
conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching
it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have
led him away from it.