Only he hath an eye to gaze on beauty,

And dotes on what he looks, 'gainst law or duty.

'I have debated, even in my soul,

What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I shall breed:
But nothing can Affection's course control
Or stop the headlong fury of his speed.
I know repentant tears ensue the deed,
Reproach, disdain, and deadly enmity;
Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy."

This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade,
Which, like a falcon towering in the skies,
Coucheth' the fowl below with his wing's shade,
Whose crooked beak threats, if he mount he dies:
So under his insulting falchion lies

Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells

With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon's bells."

"Lucrece," quoth he, "this night I must enjoy thee
If thou deny, then force must work my way,
For in thy bed I purpose to destroy thee;
That done, some worthless slave of thine I'll slay,
To kill thine honor with thy life's decay;

And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him,
Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him.

"So thy surviving husband shall remain
The scornful mark of every open eye;
Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain,

1 Coucheth, causes to couch.

2 We have the same image in Henry VI. Part III.:

"Not he that loves him best

Dares stir a wing if Warwick shake his bells "

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Thy issue blurred with nameless bastardy.
And thou, the author of their obloquy,

Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes,
And sung by children in succeeding times.

"But if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend :
The fault unknown is as a thought unacted;
A little harm, done to a great good end,
For lawful policy remains enacted.

The poisonous simple sometimes is compacted
In a pure compound; being so applied,
His venom in effect is purified.

Then for thy husband and thy children's sake,
Tender1 my suit: bequeath not to their lot
The shame that from them no device can take,
The blemish that will never be forgot;
Worse than a slavish wipe, or birth-hour's blot :2
For marks descried in men's nativity

Are nature's faults, not their own infamy."

Here with a cockatrice' dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause;
While she, the picture of pure piety,

Like a white hind under the grype's3 sharp claws,
Pleads in a wilderness, where are no laws,

1 Tender, heed, regard.

2 Birth-hour's blot, corpcral blemish. So in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"And the blots of nature's hand

Shall not in their issue stand;

Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious."

3 Steevens says the grype is properly the griffin. But in the passage before us, as in the early English writers, the word is applied to birds of prey,—the eagle especially.

To the rough beast that knows no gentle right,
Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.

1

But when a black-faced cloud the world doth threat, In his dim mist the aspiring mountains hiding,

From earth's dark womb some gentle gust doth get,
Which blows these pitchy vapors from their biding,
Hindering their present fall by this dividing;

So his unhallowed haste her words delays,
And moody Pluto winks while Orpheus plays

Yet, foul night-waking cat, he doth but dally,
While in his hold-fast foot the weak mouse panteth;
Her sad behavior feeds his vulture folly,

A swallowing gulf that even in plenty wanteth:
His ear her prayers admits, but his heart granteth
No penetrable entrance to her plaining:

Tears harden lust, though marble wear with raining.

Her pity-pleading eyes are sadly fixed
In the remorseless wrinkles of his face;
Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed,
Which to her oratory adds more grace.
She puts the period often from his place,2

And 'midst the sentence so her accent breaks,
That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks.

1 Malone, who has certainly made very few deviations from the original text of this poem, here changes but to look, "there being no opposition whatsoever between this and the preceding passage." An opposition is, however, intended. Lucretia pleads to the rough beast that "knows no right;" but, as the gentle gust divides the black cloud,

"So his unhallowed haste her words delays."

Shakspeare, whose knowledge of the outward effects of the passions was universal, makes the terror of poor Lucrece display

She conjures him by high almighty Jove,

By knighthood, gentry, and sweet friendship's oath, By her untimely tears, her husband's love,

By holy human law, and common troth,

By heaven and earth, and all the power of both,
That to his borrowed bed he make retire,
And stoop to honor, not to foul desire.

Quoth she, "Reward not hospitality

With such black payment as thou hast pretended;'
Mud not the fountain that gave drink to thee;
Mar not the thing that cannot be amended,
End thy ill aim, before thy shoot 2 be ended:
He is no woodman that doth bend his bow
To strike a poor unseasonable doe.

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My husband is thy friend, for his sake spare me · Thyself art mighty, for thine own sake leave me; Myself a weakling, do not then ensnare me;

Thou look'st not like deceit; do not deceive me :
My sighs, like whirlwinds, labor hence to heave
thee.

If ever man were moved with woman's moans,
Be moved with my tears, my sighs, my groans:

itself in the same manner as that of " great clerks" greeting their prince with "premeditated welcomes." They also

"Make periods in the midst of sentences,

Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off.”

(Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1.)

1 Pretended, proposed.

2 Shoot. Malone says that the author intended this word to be taken in a double sense, suit and shoot being in his time pronounced alike. We doubt this.

dignation of Lucrece would have carried forward at all.

Suit is not the word that the in

used; nor is the doub e sense

"A which together, like a troubled ocean,
Beat at thy rocky and wreck-threatening heart,
To soften it with their continual motion;
For stones dissolved to water do convert.
O, if no harder than a stone thou art,
Melt at my tears, and be compassionate!
Soft pity enters at an iron gate.

"In Tarquin's likeness I did entertain thee;
Hast thou put on his shape to do him shame?
To all the host of heaven I complain me,
Thou wrong'st his honor, wound'st his princely name
Thou art not what thou seem'st; and if the same
Thou seem'st not what thou art, a god, a king;
For kings, like gods, should govern every thing.

"How will thy shame be seeded in thine age,
When thus thy vices bud before thy spring?
If in thy hope thou dar'st do such outrage,
What dar'st thou not when once thou art a king!
O, be remembered, no outrageous thing

From vassal actors can be wiped away;
Then kings' misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.

“This deed will make thee only loved for fear,
But happy monarchs still are feared for love:
With foul offenders thou perforce must bear,
When they in thee the like offences prove:
If but for fear of this thy will remove;

For princes are the glass, the school, the book,
Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look.

"And wilt thou be the school where Lust shall learn? Must he in thee read lectures of such shame ?

Wilt thou be glass, wherein it shall discern