“God grant your lordship may quickly feel the comfort I now enjoy in my unfettered conversion, but that you may never feel the torments I have suffered for my long delaying it. I had none but deceivers to call upon me, to whom I said, if my ambition could have entered into their narrow breasts, they would not have been so precise.  But your lordship hath one to call upon you, that knoweth what it is you now enjoy; and what the greatest fruit and end is of all contentment that this world can afford. Think, therefore, dear earl, that I have staked and buoyed all the ways of pleasure unto you, and left them as sea-marks for you to keep the channel of religious virtue.  For shut your eyes never so long, they must be open at the last, and then you must say with me, there is no peace to the ungodly.”

IV.iii.252 (366,2) from our first swath] From infancy. Swath is the dress of a new-born child.

IV.iii.258 (366,3) precepts of respect] Of obedience to laws.

IV.iii.259 (366,4) But myself] The connection here requires some attention. But is here used to denote opposition; but what immediately precedes is not opposed to that which follows.  The adversative particle refers to the two first lines.

Thou art a slave, whom fortune’s tender arm With favour never claspt; but bred a dog.  —­But myself, Who had the world as my confectionary, &c.

The intermediate lines are to be considered as a parenthesis of passion.

IV.iii.271 (367,5) If thou wilt curse, thy father, that poor rag,/ Must be thy subject] If we read poor rogue, it will correspond rather better to what follows.

IV.iii.276 (367,6) Thou hadst been knave and flatterer] Dryden has quoted two verses of Virgil to shew how well he could have written satires.  Shakespeare has here given a specimen of the same power by a line bitter beyond all bitterness, in which Timon tells Apemantus, that he had not virtue enough for the vices which he condemns.

Dr. Warburton explains worst by lowest, which somewhat weakens the sense, and yet leaves it sufficiently vigorous.

I have heard Mr. Bourke commend the subtilty of discrimination with which Shakespeare distinguishes the present character of Timon from that of Apemantus, whom to vulgar eyes he would now resemble. (see 1763, VI, 249, 6) (rev. 1778, VIII, 424, 4)

IV.iii.308 (369,8) Ay, though it look like thee] Timon here supposes that an objection against hatred, which through the whole tenor of the conversation appears an argument for it.  One would have expected him to have answered,

  Yes, for it looks like thee.

The old edition, which always gives the pronoun instead of the affirmative particle, has it,

  I, though it look like thee.

Perhaps we should read,

  I thought it look’d like thee.