FullReads

[Ibid.

‘His two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince.’

COR. is not happy at this point in his suggestion: tinkers are accused (often calumniously, for tinkers have enemies as well as other people) of insidiously enlarging holes, making simple into compound fractures, and sometimes of planting two holes where they find one. But I have it on the best authority–namely, the authority of three tinkers who were unanimous–that, if sometimes there is a little treachery of this kind amongst the profession, it is no more than would be pronounced ‘in reason’ by all candid men. And certainly, said one of the three, you wouldn’t look for perfection in a tinker? Undoubtedly a seraphic tinker would be an unreasonable postulate; though, perhaps, the man in all England that came nearest to the seraphic character in one century was a tinker–namely, John Bunyan. But, as my triad of tinkers urged, men of all professions do cheat at uncertain times, are traitors in a small proportion, must be perfidious, unless they make an odious hypocritical pretension to the character of angels. That tinkers are not alone in their practice of multiplying the blemishes on which their healing art is invoked, seems broadly illustrated by the practice of verbal critics. Those who have applied themselves to the ancient classics, are notorious for their corrupt dealings in this way. And Coleridge founded an argument against the whole body upon the confessedly dreadful failure of Bentley, prince of all the order, when applied to a case where most of us could appreciate the result–namely, to the Paradise Lost. If, said Coleridge, this Bentley could err so extravagantly in a case of mother-English, what must we presume him often to have done in Greek? Here we may see to this day that practice carried to a ruinous extent, which, when charged upon tinkers, I have seen cause to restrict. In the present case from Macbeth, I fear that COR. is slightly indulging in this tinkering practice. As I view the case, there really is no hole to mend. The old meaning of the word convince is well brought out in the celebrated couplet–

‘He, that’s convinc’d against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.

How can that be? I have often heard objectors say. Being convinced by his opponent–i. e., convinced that his opponent’s view is the right one–how can he retain his own original opinion, which by the supposition is in polar opposition. But this argument rests on a false notion of the sense attached originally to the word convinced. That word was used in the sense of refuted; redargued, the alternative word, was felt to be pedantic. The case supposed was that of a man who is reduced to an absurdity; he cannot deny that, from his own view, an absurdity seems to follow; and, until he has shown that this absurdity is only apparent, he is bound to hold himself provisionally answered. Yet that does not reconcile him to his adversary’s opinion; he retains his own, and is satisfied that somewhere an answer to it exists, if only he could discover it.

Here the meaning is, ‘I will convince his chamberlains with wine’–i. e., will refute by means of the confusion belonging to the tragedy itself, when aided by intoxication, all the arguments (otherwise plausible) which they might urge in self-defence.

[‘Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined:’–

This our friend COR. alters to twice; but for the very reason which should have checked him–namely, on Theobald’s suggestion that ‘odd numbers are used in enchantments and magical operations;’ and here he fancies himself to obtain an odd number by the arithmetical summation–twice added to once makes thrice. Meantime the odd number is already secured by viewing the whines separately, and not as a sum. The hedge-pig whined thrice–that was an odd number. Again he whined, and this time only once–this also was an odd number. Otherwise COR. is perfectly right in his general doctrine, that