so's my love:
Be not offended, for it hurts not him,
That he is lov'd of me: I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him:
Yet never know how that desert may be.
I know I love in vain; strive against hope;
Yet, in this _captious and intenible_ sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love,
And lack not to lose still."

Johnson was perplexed about the word _captious_; "which (says he) I never
found in this sense, yet I cannot tell what to substitute, unless _carious_
for rotten!" Farmer supposed _captious_ to be a contraction of _capacious_!
Steevens believed that _captious_ meant _recipient_, capable of receiving;
which interpretation Malone adopts. Mr. Collier, in his recent edition of
Shakspeare, after stating Johnson's and Farmer's suggestions, says, "where
is the difficulty? It is true that this sense of _captious_ may not have an
exact parallel; but the intention of Shakspeare is very evident: _captious_
means, as Malone says, capable of _taking_ or _receiving_; and _intenible_
(printed _intemible_ in the first folio, and rightly in the second)
incapable of _retaining_. Two more appropriate epithets could hardly be
found, and a simile more happily expressive."

We no doubt all know, by intuition as it were, what Shakspeare meant; but
"the great master of English," as MR. HICKSON very justly calls him, would
never have used _captious_, as applied figuratively to a _sieve_, for
_capable of taking or receiving_.

_Intenible_, notwithstanding the hypercriticism of Mr. Nares (that "it is
incorrectly used by Shakspeare for _unable to hold_;" and that "it should
properly mean _not to be held_, as we now use _untenable_") was undoubtedly
used in the former sense, and it was most probably so accepted in the
poet's time; for in the _Glossagraphia Anglicana Nova_, 1719, we have
"Untenable, that _will not or cannot hold_ or be holden long."

With regard to _captious_, it is not so much a matter of surprise that none
of all these learned commentators should fail in their _guesses_ at the
meaning, as that none of them should have remarked that the sense of the
Latin _captiosus_, and of its congeners in Italian and old French, is
_deceitful_, _fallacious_; and Bacon uses the word for _insidious,
ensnaring_. There can be no doubt that this is the sense in which
Shakspeare used it. Helen speaks of her hopeless love for Bertram, and
says:

"I know I love i