d is used as
an adverbial or rather an interjectional expression, when it may be
rendered, _it may be so_, _so it is_, _is it so_, &c. Sometimes ironically,
sometimes expressing chance, &c.; in the course of time it became
superseded by the more modern term _perhaps_. Instances of similar
elliptical expressions are common at the present day, and will readily
suggest themselves: the modern _please_, used for entreaty, is analogous.

It is not a little singular that this account of the word _belike_ enables
us to understand a passage in _Macbeth_, which has been unintelligible to
all the commentators and readers of Shakspeare down to the present day. I
allude to the following, which stands in my first folio, Act IV. Sc. 3.,
thus:

" . . . . What I am truly
Is thine, and my poor countries, to command:
Whither indeed before they heere approach,
Old Seyward, with ten thousand warlike men,
Already at a point, was setting foorth:
Now we'll together, and the chance of goodnesse
Be like our warranted quarrel."

Now it is not easy to see why Malcolm should wish that "chance" should "be
_like_," i. e. similar to, their "warranted quarrel;" inasmuch as that
quarrel was most unfortunate and disastrous. Chance is either fortunate or
unfortunate. The epithet _just_, which might apply to the quarrel in
question, is utterly irreconcilable with _chance_. Still this sense has
pleased the editors, and they have made "of goodnesse" a precatory and
interjectional expression. Surely it is far more probable that the poet
wrote _belike_ (_belicgan_, _geliggen_) as one word, and that the meaning
of the passage is simply "May good fortune attend our enterprise." MR.
COLLIER'S old corrector passes over this difficulty in silence, doubtless
owing to the circumstance that the word was well understood in his time.

I have alluded to the word _like_ as expressive in the English language of
three distinct ideas, and in the A.-S. of at least four; is it not possible
that these meanings, which, as we find the words used, are undoubtedly
widely distinct, having travelled to us by separate channels, may
nevertheless have had originally one and the same source? I should be glad
to elicit the opinion of some one of your more learned correspondents as to
whether the unused Hebrew [Hebrew: YLN] may not be that source.

H. C. K.

---- Rectory, Hereford.

* * * * *

{360}

DRUSES.

Compar