354 



NOTES AND QUEEIES. 



[No. 52. 



tlie assistance of our friends upon this particular point. 

 Our purpose is aided, and our usefulness increased by 

 every introduction which can be given to our paper, 

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 lars help themselves as well as us, for there is no in- 

 quirer throughout the kingdom who is not occasionally 

 able to throw light upon some of the multifarious ob- 

 jects which are discussed in our pages. 



At the end of our first twelvemonth we thank our 

 subscribers for the patronage we have received. We 

 trust we shall go on week by week improving in our 

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 twelvemonth we may meet them with the same plea- 

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shakspeaee's use of the words "cArTious" 



AND "INTENIBI.E." 



In the following passage of All's Well that Ends 

 Well, Act i. Sc. 3., wliere Helena is confessing to 

 Bertram's motlier, the Countess, lier love for him, 

 these two words occur in an unusual sense, if not in 

 a sense peculiar to the great poet : — 

 " I love your son : — 



I\Iy friends were poor, but honest, so's my love; 



Be not offended ; for it hurts not him. 



That he is lov'd of me : I follow him not 



By any token of presumptuous suit ; 



Nor Avould I have him till I do dt'serve him : 



Yet never know how that desert may be. 



I know I love in vain ; strive against liope ; 



Yet, in this captious and intenihle sieve 



I still pour in the waters of my love. 



And lack not to lose still." 



Johnson was perplexed about the word captious; 

 " which (says he) I never found in this sense, yet 

 I cannot tell what to substitute, unless carious lor 

 rotten ! " Farmer supposed captious to be a con- 

 traction of capaciovs ! Steevens believed that 

 captious meant recipient, capable of receiving ; 

 which interpretation Malone adopts. Mr. Collier, 

 in his recent edition of Shakspeare, after stating 

 Johnson's and Farmer's suggestions, says, "where 

 is the difficulty ? It is tVue that this sense of 

 captious may not have an exact parallel; but the 

 intention of Shakspeare is very evident : captious 

 means, as Malone says, capable of taking or re- 

 ceiving ; a.udintenible (printed intemihle in the first 

 folio, and rightly in the second) incapable of re- 

 taining. Two more appropriate epithets could 

 hardly be found, and a simile more happily expres- 

 sive." 



We no doubt all know, by intuition as it were, 

 what Shakspeare meant ; but " the great master 



of English," as Mr. Hickson very justly calls him, 

 would never have used captious, as applied figura- 

 tively to a sieve, for cnpahlc of taking or receiving. 



Intenihle, notwithstanding the hypercriticism of 

 Mr. Nares (that " it is incorrectly used by Shak- 

 speare for unable to hold;" and that "it should 

 properly mean not to be he!d, as we now use un- 

 tenable " ) was undoubtedly used in the former 

 sense, and it was most probably so accepted in the 

 poet's time ; for in the Glossagraphia Anglicana 

 Nova, 1719, we have "Untenable, that ivill not or 

 cannot hold or be holden long." 



With regard to captious, it is not so much a 

 matter of surprise that none of all these learned 

 commentators should fixil in their guesses at the 

 meaning, as tliat none of them should have re- 

 marked that the sense of the Latin captiosus, and 

 of its congeners in Italian and old French, is de- 

 ceitftd, fallacious ; and Bacon uses the word for 

 insidious, ensnaring. There can be no doubt that 

 this is the sense in which Shakspeare used it. 

 Helen speaks of her hopeless love for Bertram, 

 and says : 



" I know I love in vain, strive against hope ; yet in 

 this fallacious and vnlwlilinr) sieve 1 still pour in the 

 waters of my love, and fail not to lose still." 



When we speak of a captious person, do we 

 mean one capable of taking or receiving ? Then 

 how much more absurd would it be to take it in 

 that impossible sense, when figuratively applied in 

 the passage before us ! Bertram shows himself 

 incapable of receiving Helena's love : he is truly 

 captious in that respect. 



In French the word captieux, according to the 

 Academy, is only applied to language, though we 

 may say un homme captieux to signify a man who 

 has the art of deceiving or leading into error by 

 captious language. 



It is not impossible that the poet may have had 

 in his mind the fruitless labour imposed upon the 

 Danai'des as a punishment, for it has been thus 

 moralised : 



" Tiiese virgins, who in the flower of their age pour 

 water into pierced vessels which they can never fill, 

 what is it but to be always bestowing our love and 

 benefits upon the ungrateful." 



S. W. Singer. 



Mickleham, Oct. 4. 1850. 



ORATORIES OF THE KONJUROKS. 



As the nooks and corners of London in olden 

 times are now engaging the quiet musings of 

 mos-t of the topographical brotherhood, perhaps 

 you can spare a nook or a corner of your valu- 

 able periodical for a lew notes on the Oratories of 

 those good men and true — the Nonjurors. "These 

 were honourable men in their generation," and 

 were made of most unbending materials. 



