Read 'your';--at least I cannot otherwise understand the line. You made my chance indisposition and occasional unaptness your minister--that is, the ground on which you now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is necessary, if we construe 'made you' as 'did you make;' 'and that unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself.' But the former seems more in Shakspeare's manner, and is less liable to be misunderstood. [2] Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech:-- How fairly this lord strives to appear foul!--takes virtuous copies to be wicked; _like those that under hot, ardent, zeal would set whole realms on fire. Of such a nature is his politic love._ This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a settled occupancy in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakspeare does not elsewhere sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so _nolenter volenter_ (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders!--and is besides so much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I. Act iv. sc. 2. Timon's speech:-- Raise me this beggar, and _deny't_ that lord.-- Warburton reads 'denude.' I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against Shakspeare's laxities and licenses of style, forgetting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet; that, when the head and the heart are swelling with fullness, a man does not ask himself whether he has grammatically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has conveyed, his meaning. 'Deny' is here clearly equal to 'withhold;' and the 'it,' quite in the genius of vehement conversation, which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and _subauditurs_ in a Greek or Latin classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb 'raise.' Besides, does the word 'denude' occur in any writer before, or of, Shakspeare's age? [Footnote 1: It is, of course, a verse,-- Achès contract, and starve your supple joints,-- and is so printed in all later editions. But Mr. C. was reading it in prose in Theobald; and it is curious to see how his ear detected the rhythmical necessity for pronouncing 'aches' as a dissyllable, although the metrical necessity seems for the moment to have escaped him. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Your' is the received reading now. Ed.] ROMEO AND JULIET.