III.i.14 (63,3) [For all the accommodations, that thou bear'st Are nurs'd by baseness] Dr. Warburton is undoubtedly mistaken in supposing that by _baseness_ is meant _self-love_ here assigned as the motive of all human actions. Shakespeare only meant to observe, that a minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendour which dazzles the imagination. Whatever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by _baseness_, by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill, all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornaments dug from among the damps and darkness of the mine. III.i.16 (64,4) [the soft and tender fork Of a poor worm] _Worm_ is put for any creeping thing or _serpent_. Shakespeare supposes falsely, but according to the vulgar notion, that a serpent wounds with his tongue, and that his tongue is _forked_. He confounds reality and fiction, a serpent's tongue is _soft_ but not _forked_ nor hurtful. If it could hurt, it could not be soft. In _Midsummer Night's Dream_ he has the same notion. --_With_ doubler _tongue Than thine, O serpent, never adder_ stung. III.i.17 (64,5) [Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grosly fear'st Thy death which is no more] Here Dr. Warburton might have found a sentiment worthy of his animadversion. I cannot without indignation find Shakespeare saying, that _death is only sleep_, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet trite and vulgar. III.i.19 (64,6) [Thou art not thyself, For thou exist'st on many thousand grains, That issue out of dust] Thou art perpetually repaired and renovated by external assistance, thou subsistest upon foreign matter, and hast no power of producing or continuing thy own being. III.i.24 (64,7) [strange effects] For _effects_ read _affects_; that is, _affections_, _passions_ of mind, or disorders of body variously _affected_. So in _Othello_, _The young_ affects. III.i.32 (65,9) [Thou hast nor youth, nor age; But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, Dreaming on both] This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young, we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old, we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening. III.i.34 (65,1) [for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld]