having so much learning as to discover to what Shakespeare alluded, was
not willing that his audience should be less knowing than himself, and
has therefore weakened the authour's sense by the intrusion of a remote
and useless image into a speech bursting from a man wholly possess'd
with his own present condition, and therefore not at leisure to explain
his own allusions to himself. If these words are taken away, by which
not only the thought but the numbers are injured, the lines of
Shakespeare close together without any traces of a breach.

_My genius is rebuk'd. He chid the sisters._

This note was written before I was fully acquainted with Shakespeare's
manner, and I do not now think it of much weight; for though the words,
which I was once willing to eject, seem interpolated, I believe they may
still be genuine, and added by the authour in his revision. The authour
of the _Revisal_ cannot admit the measure to be faulty. There is only
one foot, he says, put for another. This is one of the effects of
literature in minds not naturally perspicacious. Every boy or girl finds
the metre imperfect, but the pedant comes to its defence with a
tribrachys or an anapaest, and sets it right at once by applying to one
language the rules of another. If we may be allowed to change feet, like
the old comic writers, it will not be easy to write a line not metrical.
To hint this once, is sufficient. (see 1765, VI, 424, 2)

III.i.65 (460,5) For Banquo's issue have I fil'd my mind] [W: 'filed]
This mark of contraction is not necessary. To _file_ is in the bishop's
_Bible_.

III.i.69 (460,6) the common enemy of man] It is always an entertainment
to an inquisitive reader, to trace a sentiment to its original source;