Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember
Two moving speeches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, both in the same scene:
one a soliloquy on his own fate . . .
I have lived long enough: My way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
. . . the other lamenting a physician’s lack of cure for his wife’s guilt-worn sanity —
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
This Jolly Beggar 