with a viper first?

_De F._ (_raising her_). Come, rise and shroud your blushes in my
bosom,
Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts.
Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding.
'Las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anon
What thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on."

[50] In orig. "Push," cf. "Tush."

[51] Rather than hear.

[52] A trisyllable, as in strictness it ought to be.

[53] = "claim."

[54] This omission and the substitution in the next line are due to Dyce,
and may be called _certissima emendatio_.

Two other remarkable plays of Middleton's fall with some differences under
the same second division of his works. These are _The Witch_ and _Women
Beware Women_. Except for the inevitable and rather attractive comparison
with _Macbeth_, _The Witch_ is hardly interesting. It consists of three
different sets of scenes most inartistically blended,--an awkward and
ineffective variation on the story of Alboin, Rosmunda and the skull for a
serious main plot, some clumsy and rather unsavoury comic or tragi-comic
interludes, and the witch scenes. The two first are very nearly worthless;
the third is intrinsically, though far below _Macbeth_, interesting enough
and indirectly more interesting because of the questions which have been
started, as to the indebtedness of the two poets to each other. The best
opinion seems to be that Shakespere most certainly did not copy Middleton,
nor (a strange fancy of some) did he collaborate with Middleton, and that
the most probable thing is that both borrowed their names, and some details
from Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_. _Women Beware Women_ on the
other hand is one of Middleton's finest works, inferior only to _The
Changeling_ in parts, and far superior to it as a whole. The temptation of
Bianca, the newly-married wife, by the duke's instrument, a cunning and
shameless woman, is the title-theme, and in this part again Middleton's
Shakesperian verisimilitude and certainty of touch appear. The end of the
play is something marred by a slaughter more wholesale even than that of
_Hamlet_, and by no means so well justified. Lastly, _A Fair Quarrel_ must
be mentioned, because of the very high praise which it has received from
Lamb and others. This praise has been directed chiefly to the situation of
the quarrel between Captain Ager and his friend, turning on a question (the
point of fami