Notes and Queries, No. 51, October 19, 1850 - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt: ...with Mexico, that in the fourth volume of Knight's National Cyclopaedia, published early in 1848, in speaking of Upper California, it is said, "very little mineral wealth has been met with"! A few months after, intelligence reached Europe how much the reverse was the case. T.N. THE DISPUTED PASSAGE PROM THE TEMPEST. (Vol. ii., pp. 259. 299.) When the learning and experience of such gentlemen as MR. SINGER and MR. COLLIER fail to conclude a question, there is no higher appeal than to plain common sense, aided by the able arguments advanced on each side. Under these circumstances, perhaps you will allow one who is neither learned nor experienced to offer a word or two by way of vote on the meaning of the passage in the Tempest cited by MR. SINGER. It appears to me that to do full justice to the question the passage should be quoted entire, which, with your permission, I will do. "Fer. There be some sports are painful; and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This, my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed, And he's compos'd of harshness. I must remove Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says, such baseness Had ne'er like executor. I forget; But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labour(s), Most busy(l)est when I do it." The question appears to be whether "most busy" applies to "sweet thoughts" or to Ferdinand, and whether the pronoun "it" refers to the act of forgetting or to "labour(s);" and I must confess that, to me, the whole significancy of the passage depends upon the idea conveyed of the mind being "most busy" while the body is being exerted. Every man with a spark of imagination must many a time have felt this. In the..