"For if thou _path_, thy native semblance on."
Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this "path" as a mere misprint or mis-script for "put." In what place does Shakespeare--where does any other writer of the same age--use "path" as a verb for "walk?"
"She dreamt to-night, she saw my _statue_."
No doubt, it should be _statua_, as in the same age, they more often pronounced "heroes" as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written,--
"Last night she dreamt that she my statue saw."
But Shakespeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it.
"Pardon me, Julius--here wast thou bay'd, brave hart: Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters stand Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy lethe. _O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,_ _And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee._"
I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;--not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakespearian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them;--and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shakespearian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakespeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it.
... "What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world, But for _supporting robbers_."
This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Cæsar supported, and was supported by, such as these;--and even so Buonaparte in our days.