tive-interrogative inflection, , with 'say you?' an enclitic rise. Were 'say you?' omitted, and 'Armed' spoken alone. with the same motive, it would, of course, receive the inflection, with stress on the falling constituent.

'From top to toe?' A moderate rising sweep, with the falling-rising wave inflection on 'toe.'

'Then saw you not his face?' The logical inference from the preceding answer and from Horatio's descriptive 'cap-ape', but confirmation is sought. The assertive melody closes on 'not', and 'his face' questions.

'What, looked he frowningly?' 'What' stands for 'What did he look like?' and should receive a falling slide. 'Looked he frowningly?' is blended assertion and inquiry: 'To comport with the garb, the face should have worn a frown; was it so?' The clause is a rising sweep, with a rising wave on 'frowningly.' Hamlet feels that the spirit walks in armor on account of some wrong to be righted, and would 'read the mind's construction in the face."

'Pale? or red?' This line is usually printed as an ordinary alternative question, often without even a comma after 'Pale'; but I think it is more,-is, in fact, two distinct questions. This figure was in complete armor; but you say the face was sorrowful, not frowning. Did the features show no sign of anger? of the warrior, seeking redress? If a spirit, the face should have been pale. But, since you saw no frown, perhaps the face was red?' I read 'Pale' with a falling-rising inflection, the assertive motive predominating. Then, after a pause, for confirmation or denial, I read 'or red?' with a tentative, anxious rising wave on 'red', as if expecting and fearing confirmation; the rising constituent of this wave wider in interval than the falling, and receiving the stress.

'And fixed his eyes upon you?' is assertive inference, with inquiry. The assertion closes on 'eyes', and 'upon you?' inquires.

'Stayed it long?' A rising-sweep inquiry, 'long' emphatic. 'His beard was grizzled?-no?' In discussing this line, Professor Corson says (Introduction to Shakespeare, 'Jottings on the Text of Hamlet,' page 325):—

Hamlet is subjecting his friends to a searching examination, and when he asks the question, 'His beard was grisly?' he adds, with decision, 'no,' as though he had caught them on this point. 'No' should be read with a strong downward inflection. To show that he has not been caught, Horatio gives a specific reply: 'It was as I have seen it in his life, a sable silver'd.'

With the greatest respect for Professor's Corson's high position as student and teacher of Shakespeare, I am sure that he misconstrues Hamlet's attitude toward the witnesses and their story. Hamlet does not apprehend concealment, evasion, or equivocation, and is not trying to 'catch' them; and Horatio, to whom he is speaking, is his dearest, trustiest friend. Hoping no and fearing yes, Hamlet half affirms, half asks, 'His beard was grizzled?'-and pauses for the answer. Horatio reads his friend's mind: if he speaks, he must speak the truth, and disappoint the hope; he hesitates. Breaking the spell of a silence no longer to be borne, comes Hamlet's supplementary 'no?'-an eager clutching at the skirts of Hope. I think this word best spoken as a rising wave, the rise predominating, with anxious, suppressed expulsive stress, the voice flooded with breath.

In the Porter-Clarke edition of the First Folio (Crowell, 1908), the line is printed,

Hamlet. His Beard was grisly? no.

If we are to accept the period after 'no' as indicative of the meaning which Shakespeare intended to attach to the word, the interrogative reading is clearly wrong. After the pause of waiting for Horatio's delayed reply, Hamlet may speak the

'no' as an affirmative of relief, of satisfied decision. The ellipsis is filled by the thought,-'Not grisly! Then your ghost was not my father, and it need not trouble me.' It is an open question how Shakespeare punctuated the line in his original manuscript, or whether he punctuated it at all. As I have elsewhere intimated, the punctuation of Shakespeare's text is, at best and worst, the work of printers, editors, and proof-readers.

The measured exactness of Horatio's answer is due, I think, to the same cause as was his hesitation of a moment before,— he feels the hurt he is dealing his friend. In sum-total, he but assents to Hamlet's description, since 'grizzled,' 'grisly,' and 'sable silvered' are identical in meaning: 'These hands. are not more like.' The referential contour belongs, if not to every group in the speech, at least to the descriptive words, 'sable silvered.'

At last almost persuaded of the shade's identity, Hamlet refrains from further questioning, as useless, and speaks the intention that has lurked in his mind all along:- 'I'll watch to-night, a falling sweep. The added 'Perchance 'twill walk again,' may be construed as a semi-question:-"Twill walk again; don't you think?' In that case, the accent of 'again' would take the inflection, a mingling of belief, doubt, and anticipation.

NOTES AND STUDIES IN INTERPRETATION.

1. 'SINK OR SWIM, LIVE OR DIE, SURVIVE or Perish.' In my boyhood days, I often pored and puzzled over the rules of inflection in the old McGuffey Readers. The book and the teacher's interpretation of its rules were infallible, of course; but from somewhere inside me I heard now and then a timid whisper of doubt. An occasional sentence or phrase, 'read according to the rule,' sounded unnatural;

the printed words seemed to mean one thing, and the same words, spoken, seemed to mean something else. I recall the opening sentence of Webster's 'Supposed Speech of John Adams', with the inflective scheme which we were taught to apply to it:

Sínk or swim, líve or dìe, survíve or pèrish, I give my hánd and my heart to this vòte.

I recall, too, the fact that the big boys who declaimed on Friday afternoons, along with 'Rienzi's Address to the Romans,' 'Rolla's Address to the Peruvians,' 'The Burial of Sir John Moore,' 'Hohenlinden,' 'Patrick Henry's Speech,' 'Marco Bozzaris,' 'Pitt's Reply to Sir Robert Walpole, ' 'Catiline's Defiance,' 'Lord Chatham on the American War,' and other heirlooms of eloquence, would one of them, about once a month, spout the 'Supposed Speech.' And I remember as if I heard it yesterday, the formal, heavy, brusque effect that the employment of the McGuffey formula gave to the three alternative clauses. Good old Doctor McGuffey would probably have justified his marking by the principles of antithesis, of alternative, and of emphatic repetition.

Many years ago, I gave a good deal of study and experiment to the reading of this sentence, and at length reached a conclusion on which I rested content.

The three opening clauses say the same thing three times, in different words. The repetition is for the sake of greater impressiveness,-no doubt about that. The utterance of the same thought twice, in the same or different words, upon the same inflective and melodic scheme, might be made. very impressive, with appropriate changes of pitch, time, force, and quality; but a third repetition, in the same contour, is out of the question.

I decided to treat the three clauses as a climax series, I preserved the opposition of inflections in the first two clauses,

but reversed their order, making the falling concrete on 'sink' and 'live', and the rising on 'swim' and 'die'; the gradual but distinct rise of melody, the increasing force and volume, and the terminal rising concretes indicating the formative motive and the growing earnestness; then, 'survive' a rising sweep and 'perish' a strong falling sweep:

(VSink or swím, +Vlive or díe, +/survive, or +\pèrish, ^I give my hand and my heart! to this vote.

If there is a better plan of intonation for this sentence, I have so far failed to find it.

AGAIN.

2. 'BLAZE WITH YOUR SERRIED COLUMNS,' On page 331 a notation was given of a line from 'The Seminole's Defiance,'

Blaze with your serried columns!

The line or half-line-was considered for the moment as a literal imperative, for the purpose of illustrating a general melodic principle. To interpret the clause in its place, at the opening of the poem, it is probably better to regard it as a scornful, defiant invitation; the following clause being correlated with it in melody. The intonation will consist of two falling successions of rising-wave sweeps, thus:

()✓Blaze with your Vsĕrried -✓columns! \+I will not -✓běnd the knee!

Lear's 'Pour on; I will endure!' is a similar case.

3. AND DAREST THOU, THEN,' ETC. Two Renderings Compared.

And darest thou, then,

To beard the lion in his den,

The Douglas in his hall?

By using the rising melody throughout the three lines above, as, I believe, they are usually read,-equality of