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<h1><span style="font-size: 90%">FOLK-LORE</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 50%">OF</span><br />
SHAKESPEARE</h1>

<p class="center"><small>BY THE</small></p>

<p class="author"><span class="smcap">Rev.</span> T.&nbsp;F. THISELTON DYER, M.A. <span class="smcap">Oxon.</span><br />

<small>AUTHOR OF “BRITISH POPULAR CUSTOMS, PAST AND PRESENT,” ETC.</small></p>

<p class="publisher"><big>NEW YORK</big><br />
HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE<br />
1884</p>
</div>


<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>

<hr />

<p><span class="smcap">It</span> would be difficult to overestimate the value which
must be attached to the plays of Shakespeare in connection
with the social life of the Elizabethan age. Possessed of a
rich treasury of knowledge of a most varied kind, much of
which he may be said to have picked up almost intuitively,
he embellished his writings with a choice store of illustrations
descriptive of the period in which he lived. Apart,
too, from his copious references to the manners and customs
of the time, he seems to have had not only a wide
knowledge of many technical subjects, but also an intimate
acquaintance with the folk-lore of bygone days. How
far this was the case may be gathered from the following
pages, in which are collected and grouped together, as far
as arrangement would permit, the various subjects relating
to this interesting and popular branch of our domestic history.
It only remains for me to add that the edition of
the poet’s plays made use of is the “Globe,” published by
Messrs. Macmillan.</p>

<p class="right"><span class="smcap">T.&nbsp;F. Thiselton Dyer.</span></p>



<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></h2>

<hr />

<table summary="table of contents">
<tr><td class="ral"><small>CHAP.</small></td><td class="lal">&nbsp;</td><td class="ral"><small>PAGE.</small></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Fairies</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Witches</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Ghosts</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Demonology and Devil-Lore</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Natural Phenomena</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Birds</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Animals</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Plants</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Insects and Reptiles</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Folk-Medicine</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Customs Connected with the Calendar</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_296">296</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Birth and Baptism</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_332">332</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Marriage</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_342">342</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Death and Burial</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_362">362</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Rings and Precious Stones</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_386">386</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Sports and Pastimes</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_394">394</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Dances</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_424">424</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Punishments</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_433">433</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">XIX.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Proverbs</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_444">444</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Human Body</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_475">475</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">XXI.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Fishes</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_497">497</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">XXII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Sundry Superstitions</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_505">505</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="ral"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII.</a></td><td class="lal"><span class="smcap">Miscellaneous Customs, Etc.</span></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_521">521</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="lal" colspan="2" style="padding-left: 0em"><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></td><td class="ral"><a href="#Page_549">549</a></td></tr>
</table>



<h2 style="margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em"><a name="FOLK-LORE_OF_SHAKESPEARE" id="FOLK-LORE_OF_SHAKESPEARE"></a>FOLK-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE.</h2>



<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></h2>

<h3>FAIRIES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">The</span> wealth of Shakespeare’s luxuriant imagination and
glowing language seems to have been poured forth in the
graphic accounts which he has given us of the fairy tribe.
Indeed, the profusion of poetic imagery with which he has
so richly clad his fairy characters is unrivalled, and the
“Midsummer-Night’s Dream” holds a unique position in
so far as it contains the finest modern artistic realization of
the fairy kingdom. Mr. Dowden, in his “Shakspere Primer”
(1877, pp. 71, 72) justly remarks: “As the two extremes of
exquisite delicacy, of dainty elegance, and, on the other
hand, of thick-witted grossness and clumsiness, stand the
fairy tribe and the group of Athenian handicraftsmen. The
world of the poet’s dream includes the two—a Titania, and
a Bottom the weaver—and can bring them into grotesque
conjunction. No such fairy poetry existed anywhere in
English literature before Shakspere. The tiny elves, to
whom a cowslip is tall, for whom the third part of a minute
is an important division of time, have a miniature perfection
which is charming. They delight in all beautiful and dainty
things, and war with things that creep and things that fly,
if they be uncomely; their lives are gay with fine frolic and
delicate revelry.” Puck, the jester of fairyland, stands apart
from the rest, the recognizable “lob of spirits,” a rough,
“fawn-faced, shock-pated little fellow, dainty-limbed shapes
around him.” Judging, then, from the elaborate account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
which the poet has bequeathed us of the fairies, it is evident
that the subject was one in which he took a special interest.
Indeed, the graphic pictures he has handed down to us of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ye, that on the sands with printless foot,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When he comes back; you demy-puppets that<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whereof the ewe not bites,” etc.,<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">show how intimately he was acquainted with the history
of these little people, and what a complete knowledge he
possessed of the superstitious fancies which had clustered
round them. In Shakespeare’s day, too, it must be remembered,
fairies were much in fashion; and, as Johnson remarks,
common tradition had made them familiar. It has also been
observed that, well acquainted, from the rural habits of his
early life, with the notions of the peasantry respecting these
beings, he saw that they were capable of being applied to a
production of a species of the wonderful. Hence, as Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> has so aptly written, “he founded his
elfin world on the prettiest of the people’s traditions, and
has clothed it in the ever-living flowers of his own exuberant
fancy.” Referring to the fairy mythology in the “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” it is described by Mr. Keightley<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> as
an attempt to blend “the elves of the village with the fays
of romance.” His fairies agree with the former in their
diminutive stature—diminished, indeed, to dimensions inappreciable
by village gossips—in their fondness for dancing,
their love of cleanliness, and their child-abstracting
propensities. Like the fays, they form a community, ruled
over by the princely Oberon and the fair Titania. There
is a court and chivalry; Oberon would have the queen’s
sweet changeling to be a “knight of his train, to trace the
forests wild.” Like earthly monarchs, he has his jester,
“that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow.”</p>

<p>Of the fairy characters treated by Shakespeare may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
mentioned Oberon, king of fairyland, and Titania, his queen.
They are represented as keeping rival courts in consequence
of a quarrel, the cause of which is thus told by Puck (“Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king doth keep his revels here to-night:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Take heed the queen come not within his sight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Because that she as her attendant hath<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She never had so sweet a changeling;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And jealous Oberon would have the child<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But she perforce withholds the loved boy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Crowns him with flowers and makes him all her joy;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And now they never meet in grove or green,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Oberon first appears in the old French romance of “Huon
de Bourdeaux,” and is identical with Elberich, the dwarf
king of the German story of Otuit in the “Heldenbuch.”
The name Elberich, or, as it appears in the “Nibelungenlied,”
Albrich, was changed, in passing into French, first into
Auberich, then into Auberon, and finally became our Oberon.
He is introduced by Spenser in the “Fairy Queen” (book ii.
cant. i. st. 6), where he describes Sir Guyon:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Well could he tournay, and in lists debate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And knighthood tooke of good Sir Huon’s hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When with King Oberon he came to faery land.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in the tenth canto of the same book (stanza 75) he is
the allegorical representative of Henry VIII. The wise
Elficleos left two sons,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“of which faire Elferon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The eldest brother, did untimely dy;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose emptie place the mightie Oberon<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doubly supplide, in spousall and dominion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Oboram, King of Fayeries,” is one of the characters in
Greene’s “James the Fourth.”<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span></p>
<p>The name Titania for the queen of the fairies appears to
have been the invention of Shakespeare, for, as Mr. Ritson<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
remarks, she is not “so called by any other writer.” Why,
however, the poet designated her by this title, presents,
according to Mr. Keightley,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> no difficulty. “It was,” he says,
“the belief of those days that the fairies were the same as
the classic nymphs, the attendants of Diana. The fairy
queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid (Met.
iii. 173) styles Titania.” In Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale”
Pluto is the king of faerie, and his queen, Proserpina, “who
danced and sang about the well under the laurel in January’s
garden.”<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4) she is known by the more
familiar appellation, Queen Mab. “I dream’d a dream to-night,”
says Romeo, whereupon Mercutio replies, in that
well-known famous passage—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">this being the earliest instance in which Mab is used to
designate the fairy queen. Mr. Thoms<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> thinks that the origin
of this name is to be found in the Celtic, and that it contains
a distinct allusion to the diminutive form of the elfin
sovereign. <i>Mab</i>, both in Welsh and in the kindred dialects
of Brittany, signifies a child or infant, and hence it is
a befitting epithet to one who</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“comes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In shape no bigger than an agate-stone<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the fore-finger of an alderman.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Mr. Keightley suggests that Mab may be a contraction of
Habundia, who, Heywood says, ruled over the fairies; and
another derivation is from Mabel, of which Mab is an abbreviation.</p>

<p>Among the references to Queen Mab we may mention
Drayton’s “Nymphidia:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hence Oberon, him sport to make<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
<span class="i0">(Their rest when weary mortals take,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And none but only fairies wake),<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Descendeth for his pleasure:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And Mab, his merry queen, by night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bestrides young folks that lie upright,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and
Prince at Althrope,” in 1603, describes as “tripping up the
lawn a bevy of fairies, attending on Mab, their queen, who,
falling into an artificial ring that there was cut in the path,
began to dance around.” In the same masque the queen is
thus characterized by a satyr.</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is Mab, the mistress fairy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That doth nightly rob the dairy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And can help or hurt the cherning<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As she please, without discerning,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Like Puck, Shakespeare has invested Queen Mab with
mischievous properties, which “identify her with the night
hag of popular superstition,” and she is represented as</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Platting the manes of horses in the night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The merry Puck, who is so prominent an actor in “A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” is the mischief-loving sprite,
the jester of the fairy court, whose characteristics are roguery
and sportiveness. In his description of him, Shakespeare,
as Mr. Thoms points out, “has embodied almost every
attribute with which the imagination of the people has
invested the fairy race; and has neither omitted one trait
necessary to give brilliancy and distinctness to the likeness,
nor sought to heighten its effect by the slightest exaggeration.
For, carefully and elaborately as he has finished the
picture, he has not in it invested the ‘lob of spirits’ with
one gift or quality which the popular voice of the age was
not unanimous in bestowing upon him.” Thus (ii. 1) the
fairy says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Either I mistake your shape and making quite,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are you not he<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That frights the maidens of the villagery;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You do their work, and they shall have good luck:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are not you he?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The name “Puck” was formerly applied to the whole race
of fairies, and not to any individual sprite—<i>puck</i>, or <i>pouke</i>,
being an old word for devil, in which sense it is used in the
“Vision of Piers Plowman:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Out of the poukes pondfold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No maynprise may us fecche.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The Icelandic <i>puki</i> is the same word, and in Friesland and
Jutland the domestic spirit is called Puk by the peasantry.
In Devonshire, Piskey is the name for a fairy, with which
we may compare the Cornish Pixey. In Worcestershire, too,
we read how the peasantry are occasionally “poake-ledden,”
that is, misled by a mischievous spirit called <i>poake</i>. And,
according to Grose’s “Provincial Glossary,” in Hampshire
they give the name of Colt-pixey to a supposed spirit or
fairy, which, in the shape of a horse, neighs, and misleads
horses into bogs. The Irish, again, have their Pooka,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> and
the Welsh their Pwcca—both words derived from Pouke or
Puck. Mr. Keightley<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> thinks, also, that the Scottish <i>pawkey</i>,
sly, knowing, may belong to the same list of words. It
is evident, then, that the term Puck was in bygone years
extensively applied to the fairy race, an appellation still
found in the west of England. Referring to its use in Wales,
“there is a Welsh tradition to the effect that Shakespeare
received his knowledge of the Cambrian fairies from his
friend Richard Price, son of Sir John Price, of the Priory of
Brecon.” It is even claimed that Cwm Pwcca, or Puck Valley,
a part of the romantic glen of the Clydach, in Breconshire,
is the original scene of the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream.”<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>

<p>Another of Puck’s names was Robin Goodfellow, and one
of the most valuable illustrations we have of the “Midsummer-Night’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
Dream” is a black-letter tract published in
London, 1628, under the title of “Robin Goodfellow: His
Mad Pranks, and Merry Jests, full of honest mirth, and is
a fit medicine for melancholy.”<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>
speaking of Robin Goodfellow, says, “there can be no doubt
that in the time of Shakespeare the fairies held a more
prominent position in our popular literature than can be now
concluded from the pieces on the subject that have descended
to us.” The author of “Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory,”
printed in 1590, assures us that Robin Goodfellow was
“famosed in every old wives chronicle for his mad merry
pranks;” and we learn from “Henslowe’s Diary” that Chettle
was the writer of a drama on the adventures of that “merry
wanderer of the night.” These have disappeared; and time
has dealt so harshly with the memory of poor Robin that we
might almost imagine his spirit was still leading us astray
over massive volumes of antiquity, in a delusive search after
documents forever lost; or, rather, perhaps, it is his punishment
for the useless journeys he has given our ancestors,
misleading night-wanderers, “and laughing at their harm.”<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>
He is mentioned by Drayton in his “Nymphidia:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He meeteth Puck, which most men call<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hob-goblin, and on him doth fall,” etc.,<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“hob being the familiar or diminutive form of Robert and
Robin, so that Hobgoblin is equivalent to Robin the Goblin.
<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, Robin Goodfellow.”<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,”
alludes to him thus: “A bigger kinde there is of
them, called with us hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellows, that
would, in superstitious times, grinde corne for a mess of milk,
cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work.” Under his
name of Robin Goodfellow, Puck is well characterized in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
Jonson’s masque of “Love Restored.”<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>

<p>Another epithet applied to Puck is “Lob,” as in the “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1), where he is addressed by
the fairy as</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou lob of spirits.”<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">With this we may compare the “lubber-fiend” of Milton,
and the following in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of
the Burning Pestle” (iii. 4): “There is a pretty tale of a witch
that had the devil’s mark about her, that had a giant to be
her son, that was called Lob-lye-by-the-Fire.” Grimm<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a>
mentions a spirit, named the “Good Lubber,” to whom the
bones of animals used to be offered at Manseld, in Germany.
Once more, the phrase of “being in,” or “getting into Lob’s
pound,” is easy of explanation, presuming Lob to be a fairy
epithet—the term being equivalent to Poake-ledden or Pixy-led.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>
In “Hudibras” this term is employed as a name for
the stocks in which the knight puts Crowdero:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Crowdero, whom in irons bound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou basely threw’st into <i>Lob’s pound</i>.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It occurs, also, in Massinger’s “Duke of Milan” (iii. 2),
where it means “behind the arras:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Who forc’d the gentleman, to save her credit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To marry her, and say he was the party<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Found in Lob’s pound.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><a name="The_allusion_by" id="The_allusion_by"></a>The allusion by Shakespeare to the “Will-o’-the-Wisp,”
where he speaks of Puck as “sometime a fire,” is noticed
elsewhere, this being one of the forms under which this
fairy was supposed to play his midnight pranks.</p>

<p>Referring, in the next place, to the several names of
Shakespeare’s fairies, we may quote from “The Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iv. 3), where Mrs. Page speaks of
“urchins, ouphes, and fairies”—urchin having been an appellation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
for one class of fairies. In the “Maydes’ Metamorphosis”
of Lyly (1600), we find fairies, elves, and urchins
separately accommodated with dances for their use. The
following is the <i>urchin’s</i> dance:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By the moone we sport and play,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With the night begins our day;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As we frisk the dew doth fall,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Trip it, little urchins all,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lightly as the little bee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Two by two, and three by three,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And about goe wee, goe wee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “The Tempest” (i. 2) their actions are also limited to
the night:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“Urchins<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All exercise on thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The children employed to torment Falstaff, in “The Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4), were to be dressed in these fairy
shapes.</p>

<p>Mr. Douce regards the word <i>urchin</i>, when used to designate
a fairy, as of Celtic origin, with which view Mr. Thoms<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
compares the <i>urisks</i> of Highland fairies.</p>

<p>The term <i>ouphe</i>, according to Grimm, is only another
form of the cognate <i>elf</i>, which corresponds with the Middle
High-German <i>ulf</i>, in the plural <i>ulve</i>. He further proves the
identity of this <i>ulf</i> with <i>alp</i>, and with our English <i>elf</i>, from
a Swedish song published by Asdwiddson, in his “Collection
of Swedish Ballads,” in one version of which the elfin king
is called Herr <i>Elfver</i>, and in the second Herr <i>Ulfver</i>.</p>

<p>The name <i>elf</i>, which is frequently used by Shakespeare, is
the same as the Anglo-Saxon <i>alf</i>, the Old High-German and
the Middle High-German <i>ulf</i>. “Fairies and elvs,” says
Tollet, “are frequently mentioned together in the poets
without any distinction of character that I can recollect.”</p>

<p>The other fairies, Peas-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed
probably owe their appellations to the poet himself.</p>
<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
<p>How fully Shakespeare has described the characteristics
of the fairy tribe, besides giving a detailed account of their
habits and doings, may be gathered from the following pages,
in which we have briefly enumerated the various items of
fairy lore as scattered through the poet’s writings.</p>

<p>Beauty, then, united with power, was one of the popular
characteristics of the fairy tribe. Such was that of the
“Fairy Queen” of Spenser, and of Titania in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream.” In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 8),
Antony, on seeing Cleopatra enter, says to Scarus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To this great fairy I’ll commend thy acts,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Make her thanks bless thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Cymbeline” (iii. 6), when the two brothers find Imogen
in their cave, Belarius exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But that it eats our victuals, I should think<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Here were a fairy.”<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And he then adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By Jupiter, an angel! or, if not,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An earthly paragon! behold divineness<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No elder than a boy.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The fairies, as represented in many of our old legends and
folk-tales, are generally noticeable for their beauty, the same
being the case with all their surroundings. As Sir Walter
Scott,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> too, says, “Their pageants and court entertainments
comprehended all that the imagination could conceive of
what were accounted gallant and splendid. At their processions
they paraded more beautiful steeds than those of
mere earthly parentage. The hawks and hounds which they
employed in their chase were of the first race. At their
daily banquets, the board was set forth with a splendor which
the proudest kings of the earth dared not aspire to, and the
hall of their dancers echoed to the most exquisite music.”</p>

<p>Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> quotes from the romance of “Lancelot of the
Lake,” where the author, speaking of the days of King Arthur,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
says, “En celui temps estoient appellees faees toutes
selles qui sentre-mettoient denchantemens et de charmes, et
moult en estoit pour lors principalement en la Grande Bretaigne,
et savoient la force et la vertu des paroles, des pierres,
et des herbes, parquoy elles estoient tenues et jeunesse et en
beaulte, et en grandes richesses comme elles devisoient.”</p>

<p>“This perpetual youth and beauty,” he adds, “cannot
well be separated from a state of immortality;” another
characteristic ascribed to the fairy race. It is probably alluded
to by Titania in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
(ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The human mortals want their winter here.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on (ii. 1), when speaking of the changeling’s
mother, she says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But she, being mortal, of that boy did die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, a fairy addresses Bottom the weaver (iii. 1)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hail, mortal!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—an indication that she was not so herself. The very fact,
indeed, that fairies “call themselves <i>spirits</i>, ghosts, or shadows,
seems to be a proof of their immortality.” Thus Puck styles
Oberon “king of shadows,” and this monarch asserts of himself
and his subjects—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But we are spirits of another sort.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Fletcher, in the “Faithful Shepherdess,” describes (i. 2)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A virtuous well, about whose flow’ry banks<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their stolen children, so to make them free<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From dying flesh, and dull mortality.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Ariosto, in his “Orlando Furioso” (book xliii. stanza 98)
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am a fayrie, and to make you know,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be a fayrie what it doth import,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We cannot dye, how old so e’er we grow.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of paines and harmes of ev’rie other sort<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We taste, onelie no death we nature ow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>An important feature of the fairy race was their power of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
vanishing at will, and of assuming various forms. In “A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream” Oberon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“I am invisible,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I will overhear their conference.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Puck relates how he was in the habit of taking all kinds of
outlandish forms; and in the “Tempest,” Shakespeare has
bequeathed to us a graphic account of Ariel’s eccentricities.
“Besides,” says Mr. Spalding,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> “appearing in his natural
shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner
as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea, crying,
‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ he assumes the
forms of a water nymph (i. 2), a harpy (iii. 3), and also the
Goddess Ceres (iv. 1), while the strange shapes, masquers,
and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king
and viceroys of the island, are Ariel’s ‘meaner fellows.’”
Poor Caliban complains of Prospero’s spirits (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For every trifle are they set upon me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And after bite me: then like hedgehogs which<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do hiss me into madness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>That fairies are sometimes exceedingly diminutive is fully
shown by Shakespeare, who gives several instances of this
peculiarity. Thus Queen Mab, in “Romeo and Juliet,” to
which passage we have already had occasion to allude (i. 4),
is said to come</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In shape no bigger than an agate stone<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the fore-finger of an alderman.”<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Puck tells us, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
that when Oberon and Titania meet,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“they do square, that all their elves, for fear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Further on (ii. 3) the duties imposed by Titania upon her
train point to their tiny character:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make my small elves coats.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her elves that
they should—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The honey bags steal from the humble-bees,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To have my love to bed, and to arise;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And pluck the wings from painted butterflies<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare, too, Ariel’s well-known song in “The
Tempest” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:<br /></span>
<span class="i2">In a cowslip’s bell I lie;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">There I couch when owls do cry,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">On the bat’s back I do fly<br /></span>
<span class="i2">After summer merrily,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Merrily, merrily shall I live now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, from the following passage in “The Merry Wives
of Windsor” (iv. 4) where Mrs. Page, after conferring with
her husband, suggests that—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nan Page my daughter, and my little son,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And three or four more of their growth, we’ll dress<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And rattles in their hands”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">it is evident that in Shakespeare’s day fairies were supposed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
to be of the size of children. The notion of their diminutiveness,
too, it appears was not confined to this country,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a>
but existed in Denmark,<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> for in the ballad of “Eline of Villenskov”
we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Out then spake the smallest Trold;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">No bigger than an ant;—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oh! here is come a Christian man,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">His schemes I’ll sure prevent.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, various stories are current in Germany descriptive
of the fairy dwarfs; one of the most noted being that relating
to Elberich, who aided the Emperor Otnit to gain the
daughter of the Paynim Soldan of Syria.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p>

<p>The haunt of the fairies on earth are generally supposed
to be the most romantic and rural that can be selected;
such a spot being the place of Titania’s repose described by
Oberon in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1):<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“a bank where the wild thyme blows,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There sleeps Titania some time of the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Titania also tells how the fairy race meet</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or in the beached margent of the sea.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “The Tempest” (v. 1), we have the following beautiful
invocation by Prospero:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ye, that on the sands with printless foot<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When he comes back—”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Their haunts, however, varied in different localities, but their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
favorite abode was in the interior of conical green hills, on
the slopes of which they danced by moonlight. Milton, in
the “Paradise Lost” (book i.), speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“fairy elves,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose midnight revels, by a forest side<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wheels her pale course, they, on their mirth and dance<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The Irish fairies occasionally inhabited the ancient burial-places
known as tumuli or barrows, while some of the Scottish
fairies took up their abode under the “door-stane” or
threshold of some particular house, to the inmates of which
they administered good offices.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>

<p>The so-called fairy-rings in old pastures<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>—little circles of
a brighter green, within which it was supposed the fairies
dance by night—are now known to result from the out-spreading
propagation of a particular mushroom, the fairy-ringed
fungus, by which the ground is manured for a richer
following vegetation. An immense deal of legendary lore,
however, has clustered round this curious phenomenon,
popular superstition attributing it to the merry roundelays
of the moonlight fairies.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> In “The Tempest” (v. 1) Prospero
invokes the fairies as the “demy-puppets” that</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is to make midnight-mushrooms.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), the fairy says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I do wander everywhere,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Swifter than the moon’s sphere;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I serve the fairy queen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To dew her orbs upon the green.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Anne
Page says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, you sing<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The expressure that it bears, green let it be,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More fertile-fresh than all the field to see.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And once in “Macbeth” (v. 1), Hecate says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like elves and fairies in a ring.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Drayton, in his “Nymphidia” (l. 69-72), mentions this
superstition:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And in their courses make that round,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In meadows and in marshes found,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of them so called the fayrie ground,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Of which they have the keeping.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Cowley, too, in his “Complaint,” says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Where once such fairies dance, no grass does ever grow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in his ode upon Dr. Harvey:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And dance, like fairies, a fantastic round.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Pluquet, in his “Contes Populaires de Bayeux,” tells us
that the fairy rings, called by the peasants of Normandy
“Cercles des fées,” are said to be the work of fairies.</p>

<p>Among the numerous superstitions which have clustered
round the fairy rings, we are told that when damsels of old
gathered the May dew on the grass, which they made use
of to improve their complexions, they left undisturbed such
of it as they perceived on the fairy-rings, apprehensive that
the fairies should in revenge destroy their beauty. Nor was
it considered safe to put the foot within the rings, lest they
should be liable to the fairies’ power.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> The “Athenian
Oracle” (i. 397) mentions a popular belief that “if a house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
be built upon the ground where fairy rings are, whoever
shall inhabit therein does wonderfully prosper.”</p>

<p>Speaking of their dress, we are told that they constantly
wore green vests, unless they had some reason for changing
their attire. In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4) they
are spoken of as—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on (v. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fairies, black, grey, green, and white.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The fairies of the moors were often clad in heath-brown
or lichen-dyed garments, whence the epithet of “Elfin-grey.”<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>

<p>The legends of most countries are unanimous in ascribing
to the fairies an inordinate love of music; such harmonious
sounds as those which Caliban depicts in “The Tempest”
(iii. 2) being generally ascribed to them:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“The isle is full of noises,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That, if I then had waked after long sleep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will make me sleep again.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 3), when Titania
is desirous of taking a nap, she says to her attendants:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, now a roundel, and a fairy song.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on (iii. 1) she tells Bottom:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The author of “Round About our Coal Fire”<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> tells us
that “they had fine musick always among themselves, and
danced in a moonshiny night, around, or in, a ring.”</p>

<p>They were equally fond of dancing, and we are told how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
they meet—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in the “Maydes’ Metamorphosis” of Lyly, the fairies,
as they dance, sing:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Round about, round about, in a fine ring a,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thus we dance, thus we dance, and thus we sing a,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Trip and go, to and fro, over this green a,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All about, in and out, for our brave queen a,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As Mr. Thoms says, in his “Three Notelets on Shakespeare”
(1865, pp. 40, 41), “the writings of Shakespeare
abound in graphic notices of these fairy revels, couched in
the highest strains of poetry; and a comparison of these
with some of the popular legends which the industry of
Continental antiquaries has preserved will show us clearly
that these delightful sketches of elfin enjoyment have been
drawn by a hand as faithful as it is masterly.”</p>

<p>It would seem that the fairies disliked irreligious people:
and so, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), the mock fairies
are said to chastise unchaste persons, and those who do not
say their prayers. This coincides with what Lilly, in his
“Life and Times,” says: “Fairies love a strict diet and upright
life; fervent prayers unto God conduce much to the
assistance of those who are curious hereways,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, who wish
to cultivate an acquaintance with them.</p>

<p>Again, fairies are generally represented as great lovers and
patrons of cleanliness and propriety, for the observance of
which they were frequently said to reward good servants,
by dropping money into their shoes in the night; and, on
the other hand, they were reported to punish most severely
the sluts and slovenly, by pinching them black and blue.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a>
Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Puck says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am sent, with broom, before,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To sweep the dust behind the door.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Pistol, speaking of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
the mock fairy queen, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and the fairies who haunt the towers of Windsor are enjoined:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“About, about,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room:<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">The several chairs of order look you scour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With juice of balm and every precious flower.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Ben Jonson’s ballad of “Robin Goodfellow”<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> we have a
further illustration of this notion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When house or hearth cloth sluttish lie,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">I pinch the maidens black and blue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bed clothes from the bed pull I,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And lay them naked all to view.<br /></span>
<span class="i3">’Twixt sleep and wake<br /></span>
<span class="i3">I do them take,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on the key-cold floor them throw;<br /></span>
<span class="i3">If out they cry,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Then forth I fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And loudly laugh I, ho, ho, ho!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Round About our Coal Fire,” we find the following passage
bearing on the subject: “When the master and mistress
were laid on the pillows, the men and maids, if they
had a game at romps, and blundered up stairs, or jumbled a
chair, the next morning every one would swear ’twas the
fairies, and that they heard them stamping up and down
stairs all night, crying, ‘Waters lock’d, waters lock’d!’ when
there was no water in every pail in the kitchen.” Herrick,
too, in his “Hesperides,” speaks of this superstition:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If ye will with Mab find grace,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Set each platter in his place;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rake the fire up, and set<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Water in, ere sun be set,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wash your pales and cleanse your dairies,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Sluts are loathesome to the fairies:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sweep your house; who doth not so,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mab will pinch her by the toe.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>While the belief in the power of fairies existed, they were
supposed to perform much good service to mankind. Thus,
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Oberon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“With this field-dew consecrate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Every fairy take his gait;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And each several chamber bless,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Through this palace, with sweet peace;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the owner of it blest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ever shall in safety rest”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the object of their blessing being to bring peace upon the
house of Theseus. Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> remarks that the great influence
which the belief in fairies had on the popular mind
“gave so much offence to the holy monks and friars, that
they determined to exert all their power to expel these imaginary
beings from the minds of the people, by taking the
office of the fairies’ benedictions entirely into their own
hands;” a proof of which we have in Chaucer’s “Wife of
Bath:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I speke of many hundred yeres ago;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But now can no man see non elves mo,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For now the grete charitee and prayeres<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of limitoures and other holy freres<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That serchen every land and every streme,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As thikke as motes in the sonne beme,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blissing halles, chambres, kichenes, and boures,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Citees and burghes, castles highe and toures,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thropes and bernes, shepenes and dairies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This maketh that ther ben no faeries:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For ther as wont to walken was an elf<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ther walketh now the limitour himself.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Macbeth, too (v. 8), in his encounter with Macduff, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I bear a charmed life, which must not yield<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To one of woman born.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the days of chivalry, the champion’s arms were ceremoniously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
blessed, each taking an oath that he used no charmed
weapon. In Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” (book i. canto 4) we
read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“he bears a charmed shield,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And eke enchanted arms, that none can pierce.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Fairies were amazingly expeditious in their journeys.
Thus, Puck goes “swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s
bow,” and in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” he answers
Oberon, who was about to send him on a secret expedition:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In forty minutes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, the same fairy addresses him:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fairy king, attend, and mark:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I do hear the morning lark.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Oberon.</i> Then, my queen, in silence sad,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Trip we after the night’s shade:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We the globe can compass soon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Swifter than the wand’ring moon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, Puck says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was fatal, if we may believe Falstaff in “Merry Wives
of Windsor” (v. 5) to speak to a fairy: “They are fairies;
he that speaks to them shall die.”</p>

<p>Fairies are accustomed to enrich their favorites; and in
“A Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3) the shepherd says: “It was told
me I should be rich by the fairies;”<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> and in “Cymbeline”
(v. 4), Posthumus, on waking and finding the mysterious
paper, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What fairies haunt this ground? A book? O rare one!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nobler than that it covers,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>At the same time, however, it was unlucky to reveal their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
acts of generosity, as the shepherd further tells us: “This is
fairy gold, boy; and ’twill prove so; up with’t, keep it close,
home, home, the next way. We are lucky, boy; and to be
so still requires nothing but secrecy.”</p>

<p>The necessity of secrecy in fairy transactions of this kind
is illustrated in Massinger and Field’s play of “The Fatal
Dowry,” 1632 (iv. 1),<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> where Romont says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But not a word o’ it; ’tis fairies’ treasure,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, but reveal’d, brings on the blabber’s ruin.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among the many other good qualities belonging to the
fairy tribe, we are told that they were humanely attentive
to the youthful dead.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> Thus Guiderius, in “Cymbeline,”
thinking that Imogen is dead (iv. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And worms will not come to thee;”<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">there having been a popular notion that where fairies resorted
no noxious creature could be found.</p>

<p>In the pathetic dirge of Collins a similar allusion is made:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No wither’d witch shall here be seen,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">No goblin lead their nightly crew;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The female fays shall haunt the green,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And dress thy grave with pearly dew.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It seems, however, that they were also supposed to be malignant;
but this, “it may be,” says Mr. Ritson, “was merely
calumny, as being utterly inconsistent with their general
character, which was singularly innocent and amiable.”
Thus, when Imogen, in “Cymbeline” (ii. 2), prays on going
to sleep,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“From fairies and the tempters of the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Guard me, beseech ye,”<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">it must have been, says Mr. Ritson,<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> the <i>incubus</i> she was so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
afraid of.</p>

<p>Hamlet, too, notices this imputed malignity of the fairies
(i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Then no planet strikes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm.”<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>That the fairies, however, were fond of indulging in mischievous
sport at the expense of mortals is beyond all
doubt, the merry pranks of Puck or Robin Goodfellow fully
illustrating this item of our fairy-lore. Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1) this playful fairy says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am that merry wanderer of the night.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I jest to Oberon and make him smile,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In very likeness of a roasted crab;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A fairy, in another passage, asks Robin:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Are you not he<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That frights the maidens of the villagery,<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We have already mentioned how Queen Mab had the
same mischievous humor in her composition, which is described
by Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“This is that very Mab<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That plats the manes of horses in the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another reprehensible practice attributed to the fairies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
was that of carrying off and exchanging children, such being
designated changelings.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> The special agent in transactions
of the sort was also Queen Mab, and hence Mercutio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She is the fairies’ midwife.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And “she is so called,” says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, “because
it was her supposed custom to steal new-born babes
in the night and leave others in their place.” Mr. Steevens
gives a different interpretation to this line, and says, “It
does not mean that she was the midwife to the fairies, but
that she was the person among the fairies whose department
it was to deliver the fancies of sleeping men in their dreams,
those children of an idle brain.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> “Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of ‘A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,’” 1845, p. xiii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> “Fairy Mythology,” p. 325.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Aldis Wright’s “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” 1877, Preface, pp. xv.,
xvi.; Ritson’s “Fairy Mythology,” 1875, pp. 22, 23.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Essay on Fairies in “Fairy Mythology of Shakspeare,” p. 23.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> “Fairy Mythology,” 1878, p. 325.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Notes to “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” by Aldis Wright, 1877,
Preface, p. xvi.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” pp. 100-107.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> See Croker’s “Fairy Legends of South of Ireland,” 1862, p. 135.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> “Fairy Mythology,” 1878, p. 316.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Wirt Sikes’s “British Goblins,” 1880, p. 20.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> This is reprinted in Hazlitt’s “Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances,
illustrating Shakespeare and other English Writers,” 1875, p. 173.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> “Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of the Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” printed for the Shakespeare Society, p. viii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 508-512.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Thoms’s “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” p. 88.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> See Nares’s Glossary, vol. ii. p. 695.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Mr. Dyce considers that Lob is descriptive of the contrast between
Puck’s square figure and the airy shapes of the other fairies.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> “Deutsche Mythologie,” p. 492.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> See Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” pp. 318, 319.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” pp. 79-82.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Showing, as Mr. Ritson says, that they never ate.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> “Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,” 1831, p. 121.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 115.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> “Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 50.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Agate was used metaphorically for a very diminutive person, in allusion
to the small figures cut in agate for rings. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2),
Falstaff says: “I was never manned with an agate till now; but I will
inset you neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel, and send you
back again to your master, for a jewel.” In “Much Ado About Nothing”
(iii. 1) Hero speaks of a man as being “low, an agate very vilely
cut.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> See Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Thoms’s “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” 1865, pp. 38, 39.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> See Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” 1878, p. 208.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> See also Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” 1852, vol. iii. p. 32, etc.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Gunyon’s “Illustrations of Scottish History, Life, and Superstitions,”
p. 299.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Chambers’s “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 671.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Among the various conjectures as to the cause of these verdant circles,
some have ascribed them to lightning; others maintained that
they are occasioned by ants. See Miss Baker’s “Northamptonshire
Glossary,” vol. i. p. 218; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 480-483;
and also the “Phytologist,” 1862, pp. 236-238.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 112.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Ritson’s “Fairy Mythology,” 1878, pp. 26, 27.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> Quoted by Brand, “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 481.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 483.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Illustrations of Fairy Mythology,” p. 167;
see Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 122, 123.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 126, 127.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> See Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,”
p. 316.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 493.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> Ritson’s “Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare,” 1875, p. 29.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Some copies read <i>them</i>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> We may compare Banquo’s words in “Macbeth” (ii. 1):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gives way to in repose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> “Fairy Mythology,” pp. 27, 28.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2) some critics read:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> This superstition is fully described in chapter on <i>Birth</i>.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></h2>

<h3>WITCHES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">In</span> years gone by witchcraft was one of the grossest forms
of superstition, and it would be difficult to estimate the extent
of its influence in this and other countries. It is not
surprising that Shakespeare should have made frequent allusions
to this popular belief, considering how extensively it
prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the religious
and dramatic literature of the period being full of it.
Indeed, as Mr. Williams<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> points out, “what the vulgar superstition
must have been may be easily conceived, when men
of the greatest genius or learning credited the possibility,
and not only a theoretical but possible occurrence, of these
infernal phenomena.” Thus, Francis Bacon was “not able
to get rid of the principles upon which the creed was based.
Sir Edward Coke, his contemporary, the most acute lawyer
of the age, ventured even to define the devil’s agents in
witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Matthew Hale, in
1664, proved their faith—the one by his solemn testimony
in open court, the other by his still more solemn sentence.”
Hence, it was only to be expected that Shakespeare should
introduce into his writings descriptions of a creed which
held such a prominent place in the history of his day, and
which has made itself famous for all time by the thousands
of victims it caused to be sent to the torture-chamber, to
the stake, and to the scaffold. Thus he has given a graphic
account of the celebrated Jeanne D’Arc, the Maid of Orleans,
in “1 Henry VI.,” although Mr. Dowden<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> is of opinion
that this play was written by one or more authors, Greene
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>having had, perhaps, a chief hand in it, assisted by Peele and
Marlowe. He says, “It is a happiness not to have to ascribe
to our greatest poet the crude and hateful handling of the
character of Joan of Arc, excused though to some extent it
may be by the occurrence of view in our old English chronicles.”</p>

<p>Mr. Lecky,<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> too, regards the conception of Joan of Arc
given in “1 Henry VI.” as “the darkest blot upon the poet’s
genius,” but it must be remembered that we have only expressed
the current belief of his day—the English vulgar
having regarded her as a sorceress, the French as an inspired
heroine. Talbot is represented as accusing her of being a
witch, serving the Evil One, and entering Rouen by means
of her sorceries (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“France, thou shalt rue this treason with thy tears,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If Talbot but survive thy treachery.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pucelle, that witch, that damned sorceress,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath wrought this hellish mischief unawares,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That hardly we escaped the pride of France.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Further on (v. 3) she is made to summon fiends before her,
but she wishes them in vain, for they speak not, hanging
their heads in sign of approaching disaster.</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now help, ye charming spells and periapts;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ye choice spirits that admonish me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And give me signs of future accidents.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You speedy helpers, that are substitutes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Under the lordly monarch of the north,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Appear and aid me in this enterprise.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">But she adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“See, they forsake me! Now the time is come<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That France must vail her lofty-plumed crest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let her head fall into England’s lap.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My ancient incantations are too weak,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And hell too strong for me to buckle with:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now, France, thy glory droopeth to the dust.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Finally, convicted of practising sorcery, and filling “the
world with vicious qualities,” she was condemned to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
burned. Her death, however, Sir Walter Scott<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> says, “was
not, we are sorry to say, a sacrifice to superstitious fear of
witchcraft, but a cruel instance of wicked policy, mingled with
national jealousy and hatred. The Duke of Bedford, when
the ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life
in order to stigmatize her memory with sorcery, and to destroy
the reputation she had acquired among the French.”</p>

<p>The cases of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore,
also immortalized by Shakespeare, are both referred to in
the succeeding pages.</p>

<p>The Witch of Brentford, mentioned by Mrs. Page in “The
Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2), was an actual personage,
the fame, says Staunton,<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> of whose vaticinations must have
been traditionally well known to an audience of the time,
although the records we possess of her are scant enough.
The chief of them is a black-letter tract, printed by William
Copland in the middle of the sixteenth century, entitled “Jyl
of Braintford’s Testament,” from which it appears she was
hostess of a tavern at Brentford.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> One of the characters in
Dekker and Webster’s “Westward Ho”<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> says, “I doubt
that old hag, Gillian of Brainford, has bewitched me.”</p>

<p>The witches in “Macbeth” are probably Scottish hags.
As Mr. Gunnyon remarks,<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> “They are hellish monsters, brewing
hell-broth, having cats and toads for familiars, loving
midnight, riding on the passing storm, and devising evil
against such as offend them. They crouch beneath the gibbet
of the murderer, meet in gloomy caverns, amid earthquake
convulsions, or in thunder, lightning, and rain.” Coleridge,
speaking of them, observes that “the weird sisters are
as true a creation of Shakespeare’s as his Ariel and Caliban—fates,
fairies, and materializing witches being the elements.
They are wholly different from any representation of witches
in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to
act immediately on the audience. Their character consists
in the imaginative disconnected from the good, they are the
shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature,
elemental avengers without sex or kin.”</p>

<p>It has been urged, however, by certain modern critics, that
these three sisters, “who play such an important part in
‘Macbeth,’ are not witches at all, but are, or are intimately
allied to, the Norns or Fates of Scandinavian paganism.”<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a>
Thus, a writer in the <i>Academy</i> (Feb. 8, 1879) thinks that
Shakespeare drew upon Scandinavian mythology for a portion
of the material he used in constructing these characters,
and that he derived the rest from the traditions of contemporary
witchcraft; in fact, that the “sisters” are hybrids
between Norns and witches. The supposed proof of this is
that each sister exercises the special function of one of the
Norns. “The third,” it is said, “is the special prophetess,
while the first takes cognizance of the past, and the second
of the present, in affairs connected with humanity. These
are the tasks of Urda, Verdandi, and Skulda. The first begins
by asking, ‘When shall we three meet again?’ The
second decides the time: ‘When the battle’s lost and won.’
The third the future prophesies: ‘That will be ere the set
of sun.’ The first again asks, ‘Where?’ The second decides:
‘Upon the heath.’ The third the future prophesies:
‘There to meet with Macbeth.’”</p>

<p>It is further added that the description of the sisters given
by Banquo (i. 3) applies to Norns rather than witches:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“What are these<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So wither’d and so wild in their attire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That man may question? You seem to understand me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By each at once her chappy finger laying<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet your beards forbid me to interpret<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That you are so.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">But, as Mr. Spalding truly adds, “a more accurate poetical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
counterpart to the prose descriptions given by contemporary
writers of the appearance of the poor creatures who were
charged with the crime of witchcraft could hardly have been
penned.” Scot, for instance, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft”
(book i. chap. iii. 7), says: “They are women which
commonly be old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of
wrinkles; they are leane and deformed, showing melancholie
in their faces.” Harsnet, too, in his “Declaration of Popish
Impostures” (1603, p. 136), speaks of a witch as “an old
weather-beaten crone, having her chin and knees meeting for
age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, un-toothed,
furrowed, having her limbs trembling with palsy,
going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her
paternoster, yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab.”</p>

<p>The beard, also, to which Shakespeare refers in the passage
above, was the recognized characteristic of the witch. Thus,
in the “Honest Man’s Fortune” (ii. 1), it is said, “The women
that come to us for disguises must wear beards, and that’s to
say a token of a witch.” In the “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(iv. 2), Sir Hugh Evans says of the disguised Falstaff: “By
yea and no, I think the ’oman is a witch indeed: I like not
when a ’oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under
her muffler.”</p>

<p>It seems probable, then, that witches are alluded to by
Shakespeare in “Macbeth,” the contemporary literature on
the subject fully supporting this theory. Again, by his introduction
of Hecate among the witches in “Macbeth” (iii. 5),
Shakespeare has been censured for confounding ancient with
modern superstitions. But the incongruity is found in all
the poets of the Renaissance. Hecate, of course, is only another
name for Diana. “Witchcraft, in truth, is no modern
invention. Witches were believed in by the vulgar in the
time of Horace as implicitly as in the time of Shakespeare.
And the belief that the pagan gods were really existent as
evil demons is one which has come down from the very
earliest ages of Christianity.”<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> As far back as the fourth
century, the Council of Ancyra is said to have condemned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
the pretensions of witches; that in the night-time they rode
abroad or feasted with their mistress, who was one of the
pagan goddesses, Minerva, Sibylla, or Diana, or else Herodias.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a>
In Middleton’s “Witch,” Hecate is the name of one
of his witches, and she has a son a low buffoon. In Jonson’s
“Sad Shepherd” (ii. 1) Maudlin the witch calls Hecate, the
mistress of witches, “Our dame Hecate.” While speaking
of the witches in “Macbeth,” it may be pointed out that<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a>
“the full meaning of the first scene is the fag-end of a witch’s
Sabbath, which, if fully represented, would bear a strong resemblance
to the scene at the commencement of the fourth
act. But a long scene on such a subject would be tedious
and uninteresting at the commencement of the play. The
audience is therefore left to assume that the witches have
met, performed their conjurations, obtained from the evil
spirits the information concerning Macbeth’s career that they
desired to obtain, and perhaps have been commanded by the
fiends to perform the mission they subsequently carry
through.” Brand<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> describes this “Sabbath of the witches as
a meeting to which the sisterhood, after having been anointed
with certain magical ointments, provided by their infernal
leader, are supposed to be carried through the air on brooms,”
etc. It was supposed to be held on a Saturday, and in past
centuries this piece of superstition was most extensively
credited, and was one of the leading doctrines associated
with the system of witchcraft.</p>

<p>Referring, in the next place, to the numerous scattered
notices of witches given by Shakespeare throughout his
plays, it is evident that he had made himself thoroughly
acquainted with the superstitions connected with the subject,
many of which he has described with the most minute
accuracy. It appears, then, that although they were supposed
to possess extraordinary powers, which they exerted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
in various ways, yet these were limited, as in the case of
Christmas night, when, we are told in “Hamlet” (i. 1), “they
have no power to charm.” In spite, too, of their being able
to assume the form of any animal at pleasure, the tail was
always wanting. In “Macbeth” (i. 3), the first witch says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And, like a rat without a tail,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">One distinctive mark, also, of a were-wolf, or human being
changed into a wolf, was the absence of a tail. The cat was
said to be the form most commonly assumed by the familiar
spirits of witches; as, for instance, where the first witch says,
“I come, Graymalkin!”<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> (i. 1), and further on (iv. 1), “Thrice
the brinded cat hath mew’d.” In German legends and traditions
we find frequent notice of witches assuming the form
of a cat, and displaying their fiendish character in certain
diabolical acts. It was, however, the absence of the tail that
only too often was the cause of the witch being detected in
her disguised form. There were various other modes of
detecting witches: one being “the trial by the stool,” to
which an allusion is made in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1),
where Ajax says to Thersites,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou stool for a witch!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—a practice which is thus explained in Grey’s “Notes” (ii.
236): “In one way of trying a witch, they used to place her
upon a chair or a stool, with her legs tied cross, that all the
weight of her body might rest upon her seat, and by that
means, after some time, the circulation of the blood would
be much stopped, and her sitting would be as painful as the
wooden horse; and she must continue in this pain twenty-four
hours, without either sleep or meat; and it was no
wonder that, when they were tired out with such an ungodly
trial, they would confess themselves many times guilty
to free themselves from such torture.”</p>

<p>Again, it was a part of the system of witchcraft that drawing
blood from a witch rendered her enchantments ineffectual.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
Thus, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 5), Talbot says to the Maid of
Orleans:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“I’ll have a bout with thee;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">An instance of this superstition occurred some years ago in
a Cornish village, when a man was summoned before the
bench of magistrates and fined, for having assaulted the
plaintiff and scratched her with a pin. Indeed, this notion
has by no means died out. As recently as the year 1870, a
man eighty years of age was fined at Barnstaple, in Devonshire,
for scratching with a needle the arm of a young girl.
He pleaded that he had “suffered affliction” through her for
five years, had had four complaints on him at once, had lost
fourteen canaries, and about fifty goldfinches, and that his
neighbors told him this was the only way to break the spell
and get out of her power.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a></p>

<p>It was, also, a popular belief that a great share of faith was
a protection from witchcraft. Hence, in the “Comedy of
Errors” (iii. 2), Dromio of Syracuse says of Nell:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“if my breast had not been made of faith and my heart of steel,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She had transform’d me to a curtail-dog, and made me turn i’ the wheel.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In order, moreover, to check the power of witches, it was
supposed to be necessary to propitiate them, a ceremony
which was often performed. It is alluded to further on in
the same play (iv. 3), where Dromio of Syracuse says—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some devils ask but the parings of one’s nail,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A nut, a cherry-stone;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “Macbeth” we read of their being propitiated by
gifts of blood. Witches were supposed to have the power of
creating storms and other atmospheric disturbances—a notion
to which much prominence is given in “Macbeth.”
Thus, the witches elect to meet in thunder, lightning, or rain.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
They are represented as being able to loose and bind the
winds (v. 3), to cause vessels to be tempest-tossed at sea.
Hence Macbeth addresses them (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Though you untie the winds, and let them fight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Against the churches; though the yesty waves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Confound and swallow navigation up;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though castles topple on their warders’ heads;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though palaces and pyramids do slope<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of nature’s germins tumble all together,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even till destruction sicken.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Thus, by way of illustration, we may quote a curious confession
made in Scotland, about the year 1591, by Agnes
Sampson, a reputed witch. She vowed that “at the time his
majesty [James VI.] was in Denmark, she took a cat and
christened it, and afterwards bound to each part of that cat
the chiefest parts of a dead man, and several joints of his
body; and that in the night following, the said cat was conveyed
into the midst of the sea, by herself and other witches,
sailing in their riddles, or crieves, and so left the said cat
right before the town of Leith, in Scotland. This done, there
arose such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been
seen, which tempest was the cause of the perishing of a boat
or vessel coming from the town of Brunt Island to the town
of Leith, wherein were sundry jewels and rich gifts, which
should have been presented to the new Queen of Scotland
at his majesty’s coming to Leith. Again, it is confessed that
the said christened cat was the cause of the king’s majesty’s
ship, at his coming forth of Denmark, having a contrary
wind to the rest of the ships then being in his company,
which thing was most strange and true, as the king’s majesty
acknowledged.” It is to this circumstance that Shakespeare
probably alludes in “Macbeth” (i. 3), where he makes the
witch say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Though his bark cannot be lost,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Witches were also believed to be able to sell or give winds,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
a notion thus described in Drayton’s “Moon-Calf” (865):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She could sell winds to any one that would<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Buy them for money, forcing them to hold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What time she listed, tie them in a thread,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which ever as the seafarer undid<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They rose or scantled, as his sails would drive<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the same port whereas he would arrive.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, in “Macbeth” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>2 Witch.</i> I’ll give thee a wind.<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>1 Witch.</i> Thou’rt kind.<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>3 Witch.</i> And I another.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Singer quotes from Sumner’s “Last Will and Testament:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“In Ireland, and in Denmark both,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Witches for gold will sell a man a wind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, in the corner of a napkin wrapp’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall blow him safe unto what coast he will.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>At one time the Finlanders and Laplanders drove a profitable
trade by the sale of winds. After being paid they
knitted three magical knots, and told the buyer that when
he untied the first he would have a good gale; when the
second, a strong wind; and when the third, a severe tempest.<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a></p>

<p>The sieve, as a symbol of the clouds, has been regarded
among all nations of the Aryan stock as the mythical vehicle
used by witches, nightmares, and other elfish beings in
their excursions over land and sea.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> Thus, the first witch
in “Macbeth” (i. 3), referring to the scoff which she had
received from a sailor’s wife, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But in a sieve I’ll thither sail.”<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Stories of voyages performed in this way are common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
enough in Germany. A man, for instance, going through a
corn-field, finds a sieve on the path, which he takes with
him. He does not go far before a young lady hurries after
him, and hunts up and down as if looking for something,
ejaculating all the time, “How my children are crying in
England!” Thereupon the man lays down the sieve, and
has hardly done so ere sieve and lady vanish. In the case
of another damsel of the same species, mentioned by Mr.
Kelly, the usual exclamation is thus varied: “My sieve
rim! my sieve rim! how my mother is calling me in England!”
At the sound of her mother’s voice the daughter
immediately thinks of her sieve. Steevens quotes from the
“Life of Doctor Fian,” “a notable sorcerer,” burned at Edinburgh,
January, 1591, how that he and a number of witches
went to sea, “each one in a <i>riddle or cive</i>.” In the “Discovery
of Witchcraft,” Reginald Scot says it was believed
that “witches could sail in an egg-shell, a cockle or muscle-shell,
through and under the tempestuous seas.” Thus, in
“Pericles” (iv. 4), Gower says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thus time we waste, and longest leagues make short;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sail seas in cockles, have, and wish but for’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Their dance is thus noticed in “Macbeth” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll charm the air to give a sound<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While you perform your antic round.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Witches also were supposed to have the power of vanishing
at will, a notion referred to in “Macbeth” (i. 3), where,
in reply to Banquo’s inquiry as to whither the witches are
vanished, Macbeth replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Into the air; and what seem’d corporal melted<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As breath into the wind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In his letter to his wife he likewise observes: “They made
themselves air, into which they vanished.” Hecate, in the
third act, fifth scene, after giving instructions to the weird
host, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am for the air; this night I’ll spend<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unto a dismal and a fatal end.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>To this purpose they prepared various ointments, concerning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
which Reginald Scot<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> says: “The devil teacheth them
to make ointment of the bowels and members of children,
whereby they ride in the air and accomplish all their desires.
After burial they steal them out of their graves and seethe
them in a caldron till the flesh be made potable, of which
they make an ointment by which they ride in the air.”
Lord Bacon also informs us that the “ointment the witches
use is reported to be made of the fat of children digged out
of their graves, of the juices of smallage, wolf bane, and
cinquefoil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat; but I suppose
the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it, which
are henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade—or rather
nightshade—tobacco, opium, saffron,”<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> etc. These witch
recipes, which are very numerous, are well illustrated in
Shakespeare’s grim caldron scene, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1),
where the first witch speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“grease that’s sweaten<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the murderer’s gibbet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare a similar notion given by Apuleius, who,
in describing the process used by the witch, Milo’s wife, for
transforming herself into a bird, says: “That she cut the
lumps of flesh of such as were hanged.”<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>

<p>Another way by which witches exercise their power was
by looking into futurity, as in “Macbeth” (i. 3), where Banquo
says to them:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If you can look into the seeds of time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And say which grain will grow and which will not,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Speak then to me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Charles Knight, in his biography of Shakespeare, quotes a
witch trial, which aptly illustrates the passage above; the
case being that of Johnnet Wischert, who was “indicted for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
passing to the green-growing corn in May, twenty-two years
since, or thereby, sitting thereupon tymous in the morning
before the sun-rising; and being there found and demanded
what she was doing, thus answered, I shall tell thee; I have
been piling the blades of the corn. I find it will be a dear
year; the blade of the corn grows withersones [contrary to
the course of the sun], and when it grows sonegatis about
[with the course of the sun], it will be a good, cheap year.”</p>

<p>According to a common notion firmly believed in days
gone by, witches were supposed to make waxen figures of
those they intended to harm, which they stuck through with
pins, or melted before a slow fire. Then, as the figure wasted,
so the person it represented was said to waste away also.
Thus, in “Macbeth” (i. 3), the first witch says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Weary sev’n-nights, nine times nine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Referring to the histories of the Duchess of Gloucester
and of Jane Shore, who were accused of practising this mode
of witchcraft, Shakespeare, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 2), makes
the former address Hume thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What say’st thou, man? hast them as yet conferr’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With Margery Jourdain, the cunning witch,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With Roger Bolingbroke, the conjurer?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And will they undertake to do me good?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">She was afterwards, however, accused of consulting witches
concerning the mode of compassing the death of her husband’s
nephew, Henry VI. It was asserted that “there was
found in the possession of herself and accomplices a waxen
image of the king, which they melted in a magical manner
before a slow fire, with the intention of making Henry’s
force and vigor waste away by like insensible degrees.”</p>

<p>A similar charge was brought against Jane Shore, the mistress
of Edward IV., by Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Thus,
in “King Richard III.” (iii. 4), Gloucester asks Hastings:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I pray you all, tell me what they deserve<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That do conspire my death with devilish plots<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon my body with their hellish charms?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And he then further adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Look how I am bewitch’d; behold mine arm<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is, like a blasted sapling, wither’d up:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This superstition is further alluded to in “King John”
(v. 4) by Melun, who, wounded, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Have I not hideous death within my view,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Retaining but a quantity of life,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which bleeds away, even as a form of wax<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Resolveth from his figure ’gainst the fire?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 4), Proteus
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“for now my love is thaw’d;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, like a waxen image ’gainst a fire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bears no impression of the thing it was.”<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Images were frequently formed of other materials, and
maltreated in some form or other, to produce similar results—a
piece of superstition which still prevails to a great extent
in the East. Dubois, in his “People of India” (1825),
speaks of magicians who make small images in mud or clay,
and then write the names of their animosity on the breasts
thereof; these are otherwise pierced with thorns or mutilated,
“so as to communicate a corresponding injury to the
person represented.” They were also said to extract moisture
from the body, as in “Macbeth” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I will drain him dry as hay.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Referring to the other mischievous acts of witches, Steevens
quotes the following from “A Detection of Damnable
Driftes Practised by Three Witches, etc., arraigned at
Chelmisforde, in Essex, 1579:” “Item—Also she came on a
tyme to the house of one Robert Lathburie, who, dislyking
her dealyng, sent her home emptie; but presently after her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
departure his hogges fell sicke and died, to the number of
twentie.” Hence in “Macbeth” (i. 3) in reply to the inquiry
of the first witch:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Where hast thou been, sister?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the second replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Killing swine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It appears to have been their practice to destroy the cattle
of their neighbors, and the farmers have to this day
many ceremonies to secure their cows and other cattle from
witchcraft; but they seem to have been most suspected of
malice against swine. Harsnet observes how, formerly, “A
sow could not be ill of the measles, nor a girl of the sullens,
but some old woman was charged with witchcraft.”<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>

<p>Mr. Henderson, in his “Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties”
(1879, p. 182), relates how a few years ago a witch died
in the village of Bovey Tracey, Devonshire. She was accused
of “overlooking” her neighbors’ pigs, so that her
son, if ever betrayed into a quarrel with her, used always to
say, before they parted, “Mother, mother, spare my pigs.”</p>

<p>Multiples of three and nine were specially employed by
witches, ancient and modern. Thus, in “Macbeth” (i. 3),
the witches take hold of hands and dance round in a ring
nine times—three rounds for each witch, as a charm for the
furtherance of her purposes:<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thrice to thine and thrice to mine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thrice again, to make up nine.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Peace! the charm’s wound up.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The love of witches for odd numbers is further illustrated
(iv. 1), where one of them tells how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">this being the witches’ way of saying four times.</p>

<p>In Fairfax’s “Tasso” (book xiii. stanza 6) it is said that</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Witchcraft loveth numbers odd.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion is very old, and we may compare the following<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
quotations from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (xiv. 58):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ter novies carmen magico demurmurat ore.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again (vii. 189-191):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ter se convertit; ter sumtis flumine crinem<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Irroravit aquis; ternis ululatibus ora<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Solvit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Vergil, too, in his “Eclogues” (viii. 75), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Numero deus impare gaudet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The belief in the luck of odd numbers is noticed by Falstaff
in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death!”</p></div>

<p>In “King Lear” (iv. 2) when the Duke of Albany tells
Goneril,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She that herself will sliver and disbranch<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From her material sap, perforce must wither<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And come to deadly use”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">he alludes to the use that witches and enchanters were commonly
supposed to make of withered branches in their
charms.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a></p>

<p>Among other items of witch-lore mentioned by Shakespeare
may be noticed the common belief in the intercourse
between demons and witches, to which Prospero alludes in
the “Tempest” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion is seriously refuted by Scot in his “Discovery
of Witchcraft” (book iv.), where he shows it to be “flat
knavery.”</p>

<p>The offspring of a witch was termed “Hag-seed,” and as
such is spoken of by Prospero in the “Tempest” (i. 2).</p>

<p>Witches were also in the habit of saying their prayers
backwards: a practice to which Hero refers in “Much Ado<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
About Nothing” (iii. 1), where, speaking of Beatrice, she
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“I never yet saw man,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featured,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But she would spell him backward.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Familiar spirits<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> attending on magicians and witches were
always impatient of confinement.<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> So in the “Tempest”
(i. 2) we find an illustration of this notion in the following
dialogue:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Prospero.</i> What is’t thou canst demand?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Ariel.</i><span style="padding-left: 13em">My liberty.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Prospero.</i> Before the time be out? No more.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lastly, the term “Aroint thee” (“Macbeth,” i. 3), used
by the first witch, occurs again in “King Lear” (iii. 4),
“Aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.” That <i>aroint</i> is equivalent
to “away,” “begone,” seems to be agreed, though its etymology
is uncertain.<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> “Rynt thee” is used by milkmaids
in Cheshire to a cow, when she has been milked, to bid her
get out of the way. Ray, in his “Collection of North Country
Words” (1768, p. 52), gives “Rynt ye, by your leave,
stand handsomely, as rynt you witch, quoth Bessie Locket
to her mother. Proverb, Chesh.” Some connect it with the
adverb “aroume,” meaning “abroad,” found in Chaucer’s
“House of Fame” (book ii. stanza 32):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That I a-roume was in the field.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Other derivations are from the Latin <i>averrunco</i>: the Italian
<i>rogna</i>, a cutaneous disease, etc.</p>

<p>How thoroughly Shakespeare was acquainted with the
system of witchcraft is evident from the preceding pages,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
in which we have noticed his allusions to most of the prominent
forms of this species of superstition. Many other
items of witch-lore, however, are referred to by him, mention
of which is made in succeeding chapters.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a></p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> “Superstitions of Witchcraft,” 1865, p. 220.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> “Shakspere Primer,” 1877, p. 63.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> “Rationalism in Europe,” 1870, vol. i. p. 106.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> “Demonology and Witchcraft,” 1881, pp. 192, 193.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol ii. p. 161.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 51.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Webster’s Works, edited by Dyce, 1857, p. 238.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> “Illustrations of Scottish History, Life, and Superstition,” 1879,
p. 322.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Spalding’s “Elizabethan Demonology,” 1880, p. 86.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> “Notes to Macbeth” (Clark and Wright), 1877, p. 137.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, book iii. chap. 16. See
Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 235.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> “Elizabethan Demonology,” pp. 102, 103. See Conway’s “Demonology
and Devil-lore,” vol. ii. p. 253.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 8.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> Graymalkin—a gray cat.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” p. 181.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> Olaus Magnus’s “History of the Goths,” 1638, p. 47. See note to
“The Pirate.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> See Hardwick’s “Traditions and Folk-Lore,” pp. 108, 109; Kelly’s
“Indo-European Folk-Lore,” pp. 214, 215.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> In Greek, ἑπι ῥιπους πλειν, “to go to sea in a sieve,” was a proverbial
expression for an enterprise of extreme hazard or impossible of achievement.—Clark
and Wright’s “Notes to Macbeth,” 1877, p. 82.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, book iii. chap. i. p. 40; see Spalding’s
“Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 103.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii. pp. 8-10.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> Douce, “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 245, says: “See Adlington’s
Translation (1596, p. 49), a book certainly used by Shakespeare
on other occasions.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> See Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties,” 1879, p. 181.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> See <i>Pig</i>, chap. vi.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> “Notes to Macbeth,” by Clark and Wright, 1877, p. 84.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> See Jones’s “Credulities, Past and Present,” 1880, pp. 256-289.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> Allusions to this superstition occur in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”
(i. 2), “love is a familiar;” in “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), “I think her old
familiar is asleep;” and in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 7), “he has a familiar under
his tongue.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> See Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, p. 85.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Sec Dyce’s “Glossary,” pp. 18, 19.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> “Notes to Macbeth” (Clark and Wright), pp. 81, 82.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></h2>

<h3>GHOSTS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Few</span> subjects have, from time immemorial, possessed a
wider interest than ghosts, and the superstitions associated
with them in this and other countries form an extensive
collection in folk-lore literature. In Shakespeare’s day, it
would seem that the belief in ghosts was specially prevalent,
and ghost tales were told by the firelight in nearly every
household. The young, as Mr. Goadby, in his “England of
Shakespeare,” says (1881, p. 196), “were thus touched by the
prevailing superstitions in their most impressionable years.
They looked for the incorporeal creatures of whom they
had heard, and they were quick to invest any trick of moonbeam
shadow with the attributes of the supernatural.” A
description of one of these tale-tellings is given in the
“Winter’s Tale” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Her.</i> What wisdom stirs amongst you? Come, sir, now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I am for you again: pray you, sit by us,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And tell’s a tale.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mam.</i><span style="padding-left: 4em">Merry or sad shall’t be?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Her.</i> As merry as you will.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mam.</i><span style="padding-left: 8em">A sad tale’s best for winter:</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">I have one of sprites and goblins.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Her.</i><span style="padding-left: 11em">Let’s have that, good sir.</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come on, sit down: Come on, and do your best<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To fright me with your sprites: you’re powerful at it.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mam.</i> There was a man,—<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Her.</i><span style="padding-left: 8em">Nay, come, sit down; then on.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mam.</i> Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yond crickets shall not hear it.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Her.</i><span style="padding-left: 13em">Come on, then,</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">And give’t me in mine ear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The important part which Shakespeare has assigned to
the ghost in “Hamlet” has a special value, inasmuch as it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
illustrates many of the old beliefs current in his day respecting
their history and habits. Thus, according to a popular
notion, ghosts are generally supposed to assume the exact
appearance by which they were usually known when in the
material state, even to the smallest detail of their dress. So
Horatio tells Hamlet how, when Marcellus and Bernardo
were on their watch (i. 2),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“A figure like your father,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Arm’d at point, exactly, cap-a-pe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Appears before them, and with solemn march<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Goes slow and stately by them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Further on, when the ghost appears again, Hamlet addresses
it thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“What may this mean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Making night hideous.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the graphic description of Banquo’s ghost in “Macbeth”
(iii. 4), we have a further allusion to the same belief;
one, indeed, which is retained at the present day with as
much faith as in days of old.</p>

<p>Shakespeare has several allusions to the notion which prevailed
in days gone by, of certain persons being able to exorcise
or raise spirits. Thus, in “Cymbeline” (iv. 2), Guiderius
says over Fidele’s grave:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No exorciser harm thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), Ligarius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Soul of Rome!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Brave son, derived from honourable loins!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou, like an exorcist, hast conjured up<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My mortified spirit. Now bid me run,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I will strive with things impossible;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, get the better of them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3) the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Is there no exorcist<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is’t real that I see?”<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span></div></div>

<p>This superstition, it may be added, has of late years gained
additional notoriety since the so-called spiritualism has attracted
the attention and support of the credulous. As
learning was considered necessary for an exorcist, the schoolmaster
was often employed. Thus, in the “Comedy of Errors”
(iv. 4), the schoolmaster Pinch is introduced in this
capacity.</p>

<p>Within, indeed, the last fifty years the pedagogue was still
a reputed conjurer. In “Hamlet” (i. 1), Marcellus, alluding
to the ghost, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Benedick says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I would to God some scholar would conjure her.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>For the same reason exorcisms were usually practised by
the clergy in Latin; and so Toby, in the “Night Walker”
of Beaumont and Fletcher (ii. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let’s call the butler up, for he speaks Latin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And that will daunt the devil.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was also necessary that spirits, when evoked, should be
questioned quickly, as they were supposed to be impatient
of being interrogated. Hence in “Macbeth” (iv. 1) the apparition
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dismiss me. Enough!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The spirit, likewise, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 4) utters these
words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ask what thou wilt. That I had said and done!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Spirits were supposed to maintain an obdurate silence till
interrogated by the persons to whom they made their special
appearance.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Thus Hamlet, alluding to the appearance
of the ghost, asks Horatio (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Did you not speak to it?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Whereupon he replies:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“My lord, I did;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But answer made it none: yet once, methought<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It lifted up its head and did address<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Itself to motion, like as it would speak.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The walking of spirits seems also to have been enjoined
by way of penance. The ghost of Hamlet’s father (i. 5)
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am thy father’s spirit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are burnt and purg’d away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And further on (iii. 2) Hamlet exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It is a damned ghost that we have seen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This superstition is referred to by Spenser in his “Fairy
Queen” (book i. canto 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What voice of damned ghost from Limbo lake<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or guileful spright wand’ring in empty ayre,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sends to my doubtful eares these speeches rare?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to a universal belief prevalent from the earliest
times, it was supposed that ghosts had some particular reason
for quitting the mansions of the dead, “such as a desire
that their bodies, if unburied, should receive Christian rites
of sepulture, that a murderer might be brought to due punishment,”
etc.<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> On this account Horatio (“Hamlet,” i. 1)
invokes the ghost:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If there be any good thing to be done,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That may to thee do ease and grace to me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Speak to me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in a later scene (i. 4) Hamlet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Say, why is this? wherefore? What should we do?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral
rites would be excluded from Elysium; and thus the wandering
shade of Patroclus appears to Achilles in his sleep,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
and demands the performance of his funeral. The younger
Pliny tells a story of a haunted house at Athens, in which a
ghost played all kinds of pranks, owing to his funeral rites
having been neglected. A further reference to the superstition
occurs in “Titus Andronicus” (i. 1), where Lucius,
speaking of the unburied sons of Titus, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That we may hew his limbs, and, on a pile,<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Ad manes fratrum</i> sacrifice his flesh,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Before this earthy prison of their bones;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That so the shadows be not unappeased,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In olden times, spirits were said to have different allotments
of time, suitable to the variety and nature of their
agency. Prospero, in the “Tempest” (i. 2), says to Caliban:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“Be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall, for that vast<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> of night that they may work,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All exercise on thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to a popular notion, the presence of unearthly
beings was announced by an alteration in the tint of the
lights which happened to be burning—a superstition alluded
to in “Richard III.” (v. 3), where the tyrant exclaims, as he
awakens:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The lights burn blue.—It is now dead midnight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh—<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Came to my tent.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>So in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost
of Cæsar, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been a widespread belief from the most remote
period that ghosts cannot bear the light, and so disappear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
at the dawn of day; their signal being the cock-crow.<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> The
ghost of Hamlet’s father says (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Brief let me be”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Fare thee well at once.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), Edgar says: “This is the
foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks
till the first cock.”</p>

<p>The time of night, as the season wherein spirits wander
abroad, is further noticed by Gardiner in “Henry VIII.”
(v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Affairs, that walk,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As they say spirits do, at midnight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was a prevalent notion that a person who crossed the
spot on which a spectre was seen became subject to its malignant
influence. In “Hamlet” (i. 1), Horatio says, in reference
to the ghost:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll cross it, though it blast me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lodge, in his “Illustrations of British History” (iii. 48),
tells us that among the reasons for supposing the death of
Ferdinand, Earl of Derby (who died young, in 1594), to have
been occasioned by witchcraft, was the following: “On Friday
there appeared a tall man, who twice crossed him swiftly;
and when the earl came to the place where he saw this
man, he fell sick.”</p>

<p>Reginald Scot, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft” (1584),
enumerates the different kinds of spirits, and particularly
notices white, black, gray, and red spirits. So in “Macbeth”
(iv. 1), “black spirits” are mentioned—the charm
song referred to (like the one in act iv.) being found in Middleton’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
“Witch” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Black spirits and white,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Red spirits and gray;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mingle, mingle, mingle,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">You that mingle may.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A well-known superstition which still prevails in this and
foreign countries is that of the “spectre huntsman and his
furious host.” As night-time approaches, it is supposed that
this invisible personage rides through the air with his yelping
hounds; their weird sound being thought to forbode
misfortune of some kind. This popular piece of folk-lore
exists in the north of England under a variety of forms
among our peasantry, who tenaciously cling to the traditions
which have been handed down to them.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> It has been
suggested that Shakespeare had some of these superstitions
in view when he placed in the mouth of Macbeth (i. 7),
while contemplating the murder of Duncan, the following
metaphors:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And pity, like a naked new-born babe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon the sightless couriers of the air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That tears shall drown the wind!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “The Tempest” (iv. 1), Prospero and Ariel are
represented as setting on spirits, in the shape of hounds, to
hunt Stephano and Trinculo. This species of diabolical or
spectral chase was formerly a popular article of belief. As
Drake aptly remarks,<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> “the hell-hounds of Shakespeare appear
to be sufficiently formidable, for, not merely commissioned
to hunt their victims, they are ordered, likewise, as
goblins,” to—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“grind their joints<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With aged cramps; and more pinch-spotted make them<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Than pard or cat o’ mountain.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Ariel.</i>                  Hark, they roar!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Prospero.</i> Let them be hunted soundly.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<hr />

<h3>TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS.</h3>

<p>Shakespeare has several references to the old superstitious
belief in the transmigration of souls, traces of which may
still be found in the reverence paid to the robin, the wren,
and other birds. Thus, in “The Merchant of Venice” (iv. 1),
Gratiano says to Shylock:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou almost makest me waver in my faith<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hold opinion with Pythagoras<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That souls of animals infuse themselves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Infused itself in thee; for thy desires<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Caliban, when remonstrating with the drunken Stephano
and Trinculo, for delaying at the mouth of the cave of Prospero,
instead of taking the magician’s life (“Tempest,” iv. 1),
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I will have none on’t: we shall lose our time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all be turn’d to barnacles, or to apes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Hamlet” (iv. 5), in the scene where Ophelia, in her
mental aberration, quotes snatches of old ballads, she says:
“They say the owl was a baker’s daughter! Lord, we know
what we are, but know not what we may be.”<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a></p>

<p>Again, in “Twelfth Night” (iv. 2), there is another reference
in the amusing passage where the clown, under the
pretence of his being “Sir Topas, the curate,” questions
Malvolio, when confined in a dark room, as a presumed
lunatic:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Mal.</i> I am no more mad than you are: make the trial of it in any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
constant question.</p>

<p><i>Clo.</i> What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?</p>

<p><i>Mal.</i> That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.</p>

<p><i>Clo.</i> What thinkest thou of his opinion?</p>

<p><i>Mal.</i> I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.</p>

<p><i>Clo.</i> Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold
the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to
kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.”</p></div>

<p>Although this primitive superstition is almost effete
among civilized nations, yet it still retains an important
place in the religious beliefs of savage and uncivilized communities.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> We may compare the words “unquestionable spirit” in “As You
Like It” (iii. 2), which means “a spirit averse to conversation.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 450, 451.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Vast, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, space of night. So in “Hamlet” (i. 2):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In the dead waste and middle of the night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> See p. <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> See Hardwick’s “Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-lore,” 1872,
pp. 153-176.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> “Shakespeare and His Times,” vol. i. p. 378.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> See <a href="#Owl"><i>Owl</i></a>, chap. vi.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></h2>

<h3>DEMONOLOGY AND DEVIL-LORE.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">The</span> state of popular feeling in past centuries with regard
to the active agency of devils has been well represented by
Reginald Scot, who, in his work on Witchcraft, has shown
how the superstitious belief in demonology was part of the
great system of witchcraft. Many of the popular delusions
of this terrible form of superstition have been in a masterly
manner exposed by Shakespeare; and the scattered allusions
which he has given, illustrative of it, are indeed sufficient
to prove, if it were necessary, what a highly elaborate creed
it was. Happily, Shakespeare, like the other dramatists of
the period, has generally treated the subject with ridicule,
showing that he had no sympathy with the grosser opinions
shared by various classes in those times, whether held by
king or clown. According to an old belief, still firmly credited
in the poet’s day, it was supposed that devils could at
any moment assume whatever form they pleased that would
most conduce to the success of any contemplated enterprise
they might have in hand; and hence the charge of being a
devil, so commonly brought against innocent and harmless
persons in former years, can easily be understood. Among
the incidental allusions to this notion, given by Shakespeare,
Prince Hal (“1 Henry IV.,” ii. 4) tells Falstaff “there is a
devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man;” “an
old white-bearded Satan.” In the “Merchant of Venice”
(iii. 1) Salanio, on the approach of Shylock, says: “Let me
say ‘amen’ betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here
he comes in the likeness of a Jew.”</p>

<p>Indeed, “all shapes that man goes up and down in” seem
to have been at the devil’s control, a belief referred to in
“Timon of Athens” (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Var. Serv.</i> What is a whoremaster, fool?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>

<p><i>Fool.</i> A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. ’Tis a
spirit: sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer;
sometime like a philosopher, with two stones moe than’s artificial
one: he is very often like a knight; and, generally, in all shapes that
man goes up and down in from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks
in.”</p></div>

<p>A popular form assumed by evil spirits was that of a negro
or Moor, to which Iago alludes when he incites Brabantio
to search for his daughter, in “Othello” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Zounds, sir, you are robb’d; for shame, put on your gown;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even now, now, very now, an old black ram<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Arise, I say.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>On the other hand, so diverse were the forms which devils
were supposed to assume that they are said occasionally
to appear in the fairest form, even in that of a girl (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When devils will the blackest sins put on,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So in “The Comedy of Errors” (iv. 3) we have the following
dialogue:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Ant. S.</i> Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!</p>

<p><i>Dro. S.</i> Master, is this mistress Satan?</p>

<p><i>Ant. S.</i> It is the devil.</p>

<p><i>Dro. S.</i> Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam; and here she
comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the
wenches say, ‘God damn me;’ that’s as much as to say, ‘God make me
a light wench.’ It is written, they appear to men like angels of light.”</p></div>

<p class="ni">(Cf. also “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv. 3.) In “King John”
(iii. 1) even the fair Blanch seemed to Constance none other
than the devil tempting Lewis “in likeness of a new untrimmed
bride.”</p>

<p>Not only, too, were devils thought to assume any human
shape they fancied, but, as Mr. Spalding remarks,<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> “the forms
of the whole of the animal kingdom appear to have been at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
their disposal; and, not content with these, they seem to
have sought for unlikely shapes to appear in”—the same
characteristic belonging also to the fairy tribe.</p>

<p>Thus, when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester
that he has in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes
the being from whom he is supposed to have just
departed:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As I stood here below, methought his eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It was some fiend.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, Edgar says (“King Lear,” iii. 6): “The foul fiend
haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale”—the allusion
probably being to the following incident related by
Friswood Williams: “There was also another strange thing
happened at Denham about a bird. Mistris Peckham had
a nightingale which she kept in a cage, wherein Maister Dibdale
took great delight, and would often be playing with it.
The nightingale was one night conveyed out of the cage,
and being next morning diligently sought for, could not be
heard of, till Maister Mainie’s devil, in one of his fits (as it
was pretended), said that the wicked spirit which was in this
examinate’s sister had taken the bird out of the cage and
killed it in despite of Maister Dibdale.”<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a></p>

<p>Even the shape of a fly was a favorite one with evil spirits,
so much so, that the term “fly” was a popular synonym
for a familiar. In “Titus Andronicus” (iii. 2) there is an
allusion to this belief, where Marcus, being rebuked by Titus
for having killed a fly, gives as his reason:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“It was a black ill-favour’d fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like to the empress’ Moor: therefore I kill’d him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Spalding gives the following illustrations of the superstition:
“At the execution of Urban Grandier, the famous
magician of Loudun, in 1634, a large fly was seen buzzing
about the stake; and a priest promptly seizing the opportunity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
of improving the occasion for the benefit of the onlookers,
declared that Beelzebub had come in his own proper
person to carry off Grandier’s soul to hell. In 1664 occurred
the celebrated witch trials which took place before Sir Matthew
Hale. The accused were charged with bewitching two
children, and part of the evidence against them was that
flies and bees were seen to carry into their victims’ mouths
the nails and pins which they afterwards vomited.”</p>

<p>Once more, another form devils assumed was that of a
dead friend. Thus “Hamlet” (i. 4), when he confronts the
apparition, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou com’st in such a questionable shape<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That I will speak to thee”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">for, as Mr. Spalding remarks, “it cannot be imagined that
Hamlet imagined that a ‘goblin damned’ could actually be
the spirit of his dead father; and, therefore, the alternative
in his mind must be that he saw a devil assuming his father’s
likeness—a form which the Evil One knew would most incite
Hamlet to intercourse.”</p>

<p>The same idea seems present in Horatio’s mind:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What, if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That beetles o’er his base into the sea,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And there assume some other horrible form,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And draw you into madness?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, in the next act (ii. 2), Hamlet again expresses
his doubts:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“The spirit that I have seen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May be the devil: and the devil hath power<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out of my weakness and my melancholy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As he is very potent with such spirits,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Abuses me to damn me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the Elizabethan times, too, no superstitious belief exerted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
a more pernicious and baneful influence on the credulous
and ignorant than the notion that evil spirits from time
to time entered into human beings, and so completely gained
a despotic control over them as to render them perfectly
helpless. Harsnet, in his “Declaration of Egregious Popish
Impostures” (1603), has exposed this gross superstition;
and a comparison of the passages in “King Lear,” spoken
by Edgar when feigning madness, with those given by Harsnet,
will show that Shakespeare has accurately given the
contemporary belief on the subject. Mr. Spalding also considers
that nearly all the allusions in “King Lear” refer to
a youth known as Richard Mainey, a minute account of
whose supposed possession has been given by Harsnet.</p>

<p>Persons so possessed were often bound and shut up in a
dark room, occasionally being forced to submit to flagellation—a
treatment not unlike that described in “Romeo
and Juliet” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Not mad, but bound more than a madman is;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shut up in prison, kept without my food,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whipp’d and tormented.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 4) we have an amusing
scene, further illustrative, probably, of the kind of treatment
adopted in Shakespeare’s day:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Courtesan.</i> How say you now? is not your husband mad?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Adriana.</i> His incivility confirms no less—<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Good doctor Pinch, you are a conjurer;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Establish him in his true sense again,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">And I will please you what you will demand.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Luciana.</i> Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Courtesan.</i> Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Pinch.</i> Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Ant. E.</i> There is my hand, and let it feel your ear.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Pinch.</i> I charge thee, Satan, hous’d within this man,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">To yield possession to my holy prayers,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:<br /></span>
<span class="i3">I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Pinch further says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“They must be bound, and laid in some dark room.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As Brand remarks,<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> there is no vulgar story of the devil’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
having appeared anywhere without a cloven foot. In graphic
representations he is seldom or never pictured without one.
In the following passage, where Othello is questioning whether
Iago is a devil or not, he says (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I look down towards his feet;—but that’s a fable.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Dr. Johnson gives this explanation: “I look towards his
feet to see if, according to the common opinion, his feet be
cloven.”</p>

<p>In Massinger’s “Virgin Martyr” (iii. 3), Harpax, an evil
spirit, following Theophilus in the shape of a secretary,
speaks thus of the superstitious Christian’s description of
his infernal enemy:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“I’ll tell you what now of the devil:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He’s no such horrid creature; cloven-footed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Black, saucer-ey’d, his nostrils breathing fire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As these lying Christians make him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<hr />

<h3>GOOD AND EVIL DEMONS.</h3>

<p>It was formerly commonly believed that not only kingdoms
had their tutelary guardians, but that every person
had his particular genius or good angel, to protect and admonish
him by dreams, visions, etc.<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> Hence, in “Antony
and Cleopatra” (ii. 3), the soothsayer, speaking of Cæsar,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“O Antony, stay not by his side:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy demon,—that’s thy spirit which keeps thee,—is<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where Cæsar’s is not; but, near him, thy angel<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Becomes a fear, as being o’erpower’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Thus Macbeth (iii. 1) speaks in a similar manner in reference
to Banquo:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“There is none but he<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Whose being I do fear; and, under him,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My Genius is rebuked; as, it is said,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mark Antony’s was by Cæsar.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>So, too, in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), the Chief-justice says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You follow the young prince up and down, like his ill angel.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may quote a further reference in “Julius Cæsar”
(iii. 2), where Antony says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar’s angel.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“In the Roman world,” says Mr. Tylor, in his “Primitive
Culture” (1873, vol. ii. p. 202), “each man had his ‘genius
natalis,’ associated with him from birth to death, influencing
his action and his fate, standing represented by its proper
image, as a <i>lar</i> among the household gods and at weddings
and joyous times, and especially on the anniversary of the
birthday when genius and man began their united career,
worship was paid with song and dance to the divine image,
adorned with garlands, and propitiated with incense and
libations of wine. The demon or genius was, as it were, the
man’s companion soul, a second spiritual Ego. The Egyptian
astrologer warned Antonius to keep far from the young
Octavius, ‘For thy demon,’ said he, ‘is in fear of his.’”</p>

<p>The allusion by Lady Macbeth (i. 5), in the following passage,
is to the spirits of Revenge:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Come, you spirits<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of direst cruelty!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Nash’s “Pierce Pennilesse” we find a description of
these spirits and of their office. “The second kind of devils
which he most employeth are those northern <i>Martii</i>,
called the <i>Spirits of Revenge</i>, and the authors of massacres
and seed-men of mischief; for they have commission to incense
men to rapine, sacrilege, theft, murder, wrath, fury,
and all manner of cruelties; and they command certain of
the southern spirits to wait upon them, as also great Arioch,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
that is termed the Spirit of Revenge.” In another passage
we are further told how “the spirits of the aire will mixe
themselves with thunder and lightning, and so infect the
clime where they raise any tempest, that suddenly great
mortalitie shall ensue of the inhabitants.” “Aerial spirits
or devils,” according to Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,”
“are such as keep quarter most part in the aire, cause many
tempests, thunder and lightnings, tear oakes, fire steeples,
houses, strike men and beasts,” etc. Thus, in “King John”
(iii. 2), the Bastard remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some airy devil hovers in the sky,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And pours down mischief.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was anciently supposed that all mines of gold, etc., were
guarded by evil spirits. Thus Falstaff, in “2 Henry IV.”
(iv. 3), speaks of learning as “a mere hoard of gold kept by a
devil.” This superstition still prevails, and has been made
the subject of many a legend. Thus, it is believed by the
peasantry living near Largo-Law, Scotland, that a rich mine
of gold is concealed in the mountain. “A spectre once appeared
there, supposed to be the guardian of the mine, who,
being accosted by a neighboring shepherd, promised to tell
him at a certain time and on certain conditions, where ‘the
gowd mine is in Largo-Law,’ especially enjoining that the
horn sounded for the housing of the cows at the adjoining
farm of Balmain should not blow. Every precaution having
been taken, the ghost was true to his tryst; but, unhappily,
when he was about to divulge the desired secret, Tammie
Norrie, the cowherd of Balmain, blew a blast, whereupon
the ghost vanished, with the denunciation:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘Woe to the man that blew the horn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For out of the spot he shall ne’er be borne.’<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The unlucky horn-blower was struck dead, and, as it was
found impossible to remove the body, a cairn of stones was
raised over it.”<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a></p>

<p>Steevens considers that when Macbeth (iii. 2) says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">he refers to those demons who were supposed to remain in
their several places of confinement all day, but at the close
of it were released; such, indeed, as are mentioned in “The
Tempest” (v. 1), as rejoicing “to hear the solemn curfew,”
because it announced the hour of their freedom.</p>

<p>Among other superstitions we may quote one in the
“Merchant of Venice” (iii. 1), where Salanio says: “Let
me say ‘amen’ betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer.”</p>

<p>Of the devils mentioned by Shakespeare may be noted
the following:</p>

<p><i>Amaimon</i> is one of the chief, whose dominion is on the
north side of the infernal gulf. He might be bound or restrained
from doing hurt from the third hour till noon, and
from the ninth hour till evening. In the “Merry Wives of
Windsor” (ii. 2) Ford mentions this devil, and in “1 Henry
IV.” (ii. 4) Falstaff says: “That same mad fellow of the north,
Percy; and he of Wales, that gave Amaimon the bastinado,
and made Lucifer cuckold.”<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a></p>

<p>The north was always supposed to be the particular habitation
of bad spirits. Milton, therefore, assembles the rebel
angels in the north. In “1 Henry VI.” (v. 3), La Pucelle
invokes the aid of the spirits:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Under the lordly monarch of the north.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Barbason.</i> This demon would seem to be the same as
“Marbas, alias Barbas,” who, as Scot<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> informs us, “is a great
president, and appeareth in the forme of a mightie lion; but
at the commandment of a conjurer cometh up in the likeness
of man, and answereth fullie as touching anything which is
hidden or secret.” In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 2)
it is mentioned by Ford in connection with Lucifer, and
again in “Henry V.” (ii. 1) Nym tells Pistol: “I am not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
Barbason; you cannot conjure me.”</p>

<p>The names of the several fiends in “King Lear,” Shakespeare
is supposed to have derived from Harsnet’s “Declaration
of Egregious Popish Impostures” (1603).</p>

<p><i>Flibbertigibbet</i>, one of the fiends that possessed poor Tom,
is, we are told (iv. 1), the fiend “of mopping and mowing,
who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women.”
And again (iii. 4), “he begins at curfew, and walks till the
first cock; he gives the web and the pin.”</p>

<p><i>Frateretto</i> is referred to by Edgar (iii. 6): “Frateretto
calls me; and tells me, Nero is an angler in the lake of
darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.”</p>

<p><i>Hobbididance</i> is noticed as “prince of dumbness” (iv. 1),
and perhaps is the same as Hopdance (iii. 6), “who cries,”
says Edgar, “in Tom’s belly for two white herring.”</p>

<p><i>Mahu</i>, like <i>Modo</i>, would seem to be another name for “the
prince of darkness” (iii. 4), and further on (iv. 1) he is spoken
of as the fiend “of stealing;” whereas the latter is described
as the fiend “of murder.” Harsnet thus speaks of them:
“Maho was general dictator of hell; and yet, for good manners’
sake, he was contented of his good nature to make
show, that himself was under the check of Modu, the graund
devil in Ma(ister) Maynie.”</p>

<p><i>Obidicut</i>, another name of the fiend known as Haberdicut
(iv. 1).</p>

<p><i>Smulkin</i> (iii. 4). This is spelled Smolkin by Harsnet.</p>

<p>Thus, in a masterly manner, Shakespeare has illustrated
and embellished his plays with references to the demonology
of the period; having been careful in every case—while enlivening
his audience—to convince them of the utter absurdity
of this degraded form of superstition.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> “Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 49.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Harsnet’s “Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures,” p. 225.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 517-519.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> Ibid. vol. i. pp. 365-367.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> See Jones’s “Credulities, Past and Present,” 1880, p. 133.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> See Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, p. 393; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” p. 264.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Ibid. p. 378.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span></h2>

<h3>NATURAL PHENOMENA.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Many</span> of the most beautiful and graphic passages in
Shakespeare’s writings have pictured the sun in highly glowing
language, and often invested it with that sweet pathos
for which the poet was so signally famous. Expressions,
for instance, such as the following, are ever frequent: “the
glorious sun” (“Twelfth Night,” iv. 3); “heaven’s glorious
sun” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” i. 1); “gorgeous as the sun
at midsummer” (“1 Henry IV.,” iv. 1); “all the world is
cheered by the sun” (“Richard III.,” i. 2); “the sacred radiance
of the sun” (“King Lear,” i. 1); “sweet tidings of
the sun’s uprise” (“Titus Andronicus,” iii. 1), etc. Then,
again, how often we come across passages replete with
pathos, such as “thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west”
(“Richard II.,” ii. 4); “ere the weary sun set in the west”
(“Comedy of Errors,” i. 2); “the weary sun hath made a
golden set” (“Richard III.,” v. 3); “The sun, for sorrow, will
not show his head” (“Romeo and Juliet,” v. 3), etc. Although,
however, Shakespeare has made such constant mention
of the sun, yet his allusions to the folk-lore connected
with it are somewhat scanty.</p>

<p>According to the old philosophy the sun was accounted
a planet,<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> and thought to be whirled round the earth by the
motion of a solid sphere, in which it was fixed. In “Antony
and Cleopatra” (iv. 13), Cleopatra exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“O sun,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in! darkling stand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The varying shore o’ the world.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Supposing this sphere consumed, the sun must wander in
endless space, and, as a natural consequence, the earth be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
involved in endless night.</p>

<p>In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff, according to vulgar astronomy,
calls the sun a “wandering knight,” and by this
expression evidently alludes to some knight of romance.
Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> considered the allusion was to “The Voyage of
the Wandering Knight,” by Jean de Cathenay, of which the
translation, by W. Goodyeare, appeared about the year 1600.
The words may be a portion of some forgotten ballad.</p>

<p>A pretty fancy is referred to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5),
where Capulet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When the sun sets, the air doth drizzle dew;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But for the sunset of my brother’s son<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It rains downright.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And so, too, in the “Rape of Lucrece:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But as the earth doth weep, the sun being set.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“That Shakespeare thought it was the air,” says Singer,<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a>
“and not the earth, that drizzled dew, is evident from many
passages in his works. Thus, in ‘King John’ (ii. 1) he says:
‘Before the dew of evening fall.’” Steevens, alluding to the
following passage in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1),
“and when she [<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, the moon] weeps, weeps every little
flower,” says that Shakespeare “means that every little
flower is moistened with dew, as if with tears; and not that
the flower itself drizzles dew.”</p>

<p>By a popular fancy, the sun was formerly said to dance at
its rising on Easter morning—to which there may be an allusion
in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Romeo, addressing
Juliet, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“look, love, what envious streaks<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare the expression in “Coriolanus” (v. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Tabors, and cymbals, and the shouting Romans,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Make the sun dance.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Knight remarks, there was “something exquisitely
beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before
the sun had risen on Easter Day, to see him mounting
over the hills with tremulous motion, as if it were an animate
thing, bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind.”<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a></p>

<p>A cloudy rising of the sun has generally been regarded as
ominous—a superstition equally prevalent on the Continent
as in this country. In “Richard III.” (v. 3), King Richard
asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Who saw the sun to-day?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Ratcliff.</i><span style="padding-left: 11em">Not I, my lord.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>K. Richard.</i> Then he disdains to shine; for, by the book<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He should have braved the east an hour ago:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A black day will it be to somebody.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“The learned Moresin, in his ‘Papatus,’” says Brand,<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a>
“reckons among omens the cloudy rising of the sun.”
Vergil, too, in his first Georgic (441-449), considers it a sign
of stormy weather:<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ille ubi nascentem maculis variaverit ortum<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Conditus in nubem, medioque refugerit orbe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Suspecti tibi sint imbres; namque urget ab alto<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Arboribusque satisque Notus pecorique sinister,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Aut ubi sub lucem densa inter nubila sese<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Diversi rumpent radii, aut ubi pallida surget,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tithoni croceum linquens Aurora cubile,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Heu, male tum mitis defendet pampinus uvas:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tam multa in tectis crepitans salit horrida grando.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A red sunrise is also unpropitious, and, according to a well-known
rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If red the sun begins his race,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be sure the rain will fall apace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This old piece of weather-wisdom is mentioned by our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
Lord in St. Matthew, xvi. 2, 3: “When it is evening, ye say,
It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the
morning, It will be foul weather to-day, for the sky is red
and lowring.” Shakespeare, in his “Venus and Adonis,”
thus describes it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“a red morn, that ever yet betoken’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Swainson<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> shows that this notion is common on the
Continent. Thus, at Milan the proverb runs, “If the morn
be red, rain is at hand.”</p>

<p>Shakespeare, in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), alludes to another
indication of rain:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Witnessing storms to come, woe and unrest.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A “watery sunset” is still considered by many a forerunner
of wet. A red sunset, on the other hand, beautifully described
in “Richard III.” (v. 3)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The weary sun hath made a golden set.”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">is universally regarded as a prognostication of fine weather,
and we find countless proverbs illustrative of this notion,
one of the most popular being, “Sky red at night, is the
sailor’s delight.”</p>

<p>From the earliest times an eclipse of the sun was looked
upon as an omen of coming calamity; and was oftentimes
the source of extraordinary alarm as well as the occasion of
various superstitious ceremonies. In 1597, during an eclipse
of the sun, it is stated that, at Edinburgh, men and women
thought the day of judgment was come.<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> Many women
swooned, much crying was heard in the streets, and in fear
some ran to the kirk to pray. Mr. Napier says he remembers
“an eclipse about 1818, when about three parts of the sun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
was covered. The alarm in the village was very great, indoor
work was suspended for the time, and in several families
prayers were offered for protection, believing that it portended
some awful calamity; but when it passed off there
was a general feeling of relief.” In “King Lear” (i. 2),
Gloucester remarks: “These late eclipses in the sun and
moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature
can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged
by the sequent effects; love cools, friendship falls off, brothers
divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces,
treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father.”
Othello, too (v. 2), in his agony and despair, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“O heavy hour!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should yawn at alteration.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Francis Bernier<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> says that, in France, in 1654, at an eclipse
of the sun, “some bought drugs against the eclipse, others
kept themselves close in the dark in their caves and their
well-closed chambers, others cast themselves in great multitudes
into the churches; those apprehending some malign
and dangerous influence, and these believing that they were
come to the last day, and that the eclipse would shake the
foundations of nature.”<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a></p>

<p>In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 1), Shakespeare refers to a curious
circumstance in which, on a certain occasion, the sun is reported
to have appeared like three suns. Edward says, “do
I see three suns?” to which Richard replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not separated with the racking clouds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As if they vow’d some league inviolable:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
<span class="i0">In this the heaven figures some event.”<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This fact is mentioned both by Hall and Holinshed; the
latter says: “At which tyme the sun (as some write) appeared
to the Earl of March like <i>three sunnes</i>, and sodainely
joyned altogether in one, upon whiche sight hee tooke such
courage, that he fiercely setting on his enemyes put them to
flight.” We may note here that on Trinity Sunday three
suns are supposed to be seen. In the “Mémoires de
l’Académie Celtique” (iii. 447), it is stated that “Le jour de
la fête de la Trinité, quelques personne vont de grand matin
dans la campagne, pour y voir levre trois soleils à la fois.”</p>

<p>According to an old proverb, to quit a better for a worse
situation was spoken of as to go “out of God’s blessing into
the warm sun,” a reference to which we find in “King Lear”
(ii. 2), where Kent says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good king, that must approve the common saw,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou out of heaven’s benediction com’st<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the warm sun.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Dr. Johnson thinks that Hamlet alludes to this saying
(i. 2), for when the king says to him,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">he replies,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni"><i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, out of God’s blessing.</p>

<p>This expression, says Mr. Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> is found in various authors
from Heywood down to Swift. The former has:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In your running from him to me, yee runne<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out of God’s blessing into the warme sunne;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and the latter:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Lord Sparkish.</i> They say, marriages are made in heaven; but I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
doubt, when she was married, she had no friend there.</p>

<p><i>Neverout.</i> Well, she’s got out of God’s blessing into the warm sun.”<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a></p></div>

<p>There seems to have been a prejudice from time immemorial
against sunshine in March; and, according to a German
saying, it were “better to be bitten by a snake than to feel
the sun in March.” Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1), Hotspur
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“worse than the sun in March,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This praise doth nourish agues.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare employs the word “sunburned” in the sense
of uncomely, ill-favored. In “Much Ado” (ii. 1), Beatrice
says, “I am sunburnt;” and in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 3),
Æneas remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The Grecian dames are sunburnt, and not worth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The splinter of a lance.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Moon.</i> Apart from his sundry allusions to the “pale-faced,”
“silver moon,” Shakespeare has referred to many of the superstitions
associated with it, several of which still linger on
in country nooks. A widespread legend of great antiquity
informs us that the moon is inhabited by a man,<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> with a
bundle of sticks on his back, who has been exiled thither for
many centuries, and who is so far off that he is beyond the
reach of death. This tradition, which has given rise to
many superstitions, is still preserved under various forms in
most countries; but it has not been decided who the culprit
originally was, and how he came to be imprisoned in
his lonely abode. Dante calls him Cain; Chaucer assigns
his exile as a punishment for theft, and gives him a thorn-bush
to carry, while Shakespeare also loads him with the
thorns, but by way of compensation gives him a dog for a
companion. In “The Tempest” (ii. 2), Caliban asks Stephano
whether he has “not dropped from heaven?” to which
he answers, “Out o’ the moon, I do assure thee: I was the
man i’ the moon when time was.” Whereupon Caliban
says: “I have seen thee in her and I do adore thee: my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
mistress show’d me thee, and thy dog and thy bush.”
We may also compare the expression in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (v. 1), where, in the directions for the performance
of the play of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Moonshine
is represented “with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn.”
And further on, in the same scene, describing himself,
Moonshine says: “All that I have to say, is, to tell you
that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon;<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a>
this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.”</p>

<p>Ordinarily,<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> however, his offence is stated to have been
Sabbath-breaking—an idea derived from the Old Testament.
Like the man mentioned in the Book of Numbers (xv. 32),
he is caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath; and, as an
example to mankind, he is condemned to stand forever in
the moon, with his bundle on his back. Instead of a dog,
one German version places him with a woman, whose crime
was churning butter on Sunday. The Jews have a legend
that Jacob is the moon, and they believe that his face is
visible. Mr. Baring-Gould<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> says that the “idea of locating
animals in the two great luminaries of heaven is very ancient,
and is a relic of a primeval superstition of the Aryan
race.” The natives of Ceylon, instead of a man, have placed
a hare in the moon; and the Chinese represent the moon
by “a rabbit pounding rice in a mortar.”<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a></p>

<p>From the very earliest times the moon has not only been
an object of popular superstition, but been honored by various
acts of adoration. In Europe,<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> in the fifteenth century,
“it was a matter of complaint that some still worshipped
the new moon with bended knee, or hood or hat removed.
And to this day we may still see a hat raised to her, half in
conservatism and half in jest. It is with deference to silver<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
as the lunar metal that money is turned when the act of
adoration is performed, while practical peasant wit dwells
on the ill-luck of having no piece of silver when the new
moon is first seen.” Shakespeare often incidentally alludes
to this form of superstition. To quote one or two out of
many instances, Enobarbus, in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(iv. 9), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be witness to me, O thou blessed moon!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Vouchsafe, bright moon, and these thy stars, to shine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those clouds, removed, upon our watery eyne.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Indeed, it was formerly a common practice for people to address
invocations to the moon,<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> and even at the present day
we find remnants of this practice both in this country and
abroad. Thus, in many places it is customary for young
women to appeal to the moon to tell them of their future
prospects in matrimony,<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> the following or similar lines being
repeated on the occasion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“New moon, new moon, I hail thee:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">New moon, new moon, be kind to me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If I marry man or man marry me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Show me how many moons it will be.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was also the practice to swear by the moon, to which we
find an allusion in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 2), where Juliet
reproves her lover for testifying his affections by this means:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That monthly changes in her circled orb,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And again, in “The Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where
Gratiano exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By yonder moon I swear you do me wrong.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may note here that the inconstancy<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> of the moon is
the subject of various myths, of which Mr. Tylor has given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
the following examples: Thus, an Australian legend says
that Mityan, the moon, was a native cat, who fell in love
with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander
ever since. A Slavonic legend tells us that the moon, king
of night, and husband of the sun, faithlessly loved the morning
star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment,
as we see him in the sky. The Khasias of the Himalaya
say that the moon falls monthly in love with his mother-in-law,
who throws ashes in his face, whence his spots.<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a></p>

<p>As in the case of the sun, an eclipse of the moon was formerly
considered ominous. The Romans<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> supposed it was
owing to the influence of magical charms, to counteract
which they had recourse to the sound of brazen instruments
of all kinds. Juvenal alludes to this practice in his sixth
Satire (441), when he describes his talkative woman:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Jam nemo tubas, nemo æra fatiget,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Una laboranti poterit succurrere lunæ.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Indeed, eclipses, which to us are well-known phenomena
witnessing to the exactness of natural laws, were, in the earlier
stages of civilization, regarded as “the very embodiment
of miraculous disaster.” Thus, the Chinese believed that
during eclipses of the sun and moon these celestial bodies
were attacked by a great serpent, to drive away which they
struck their gongs or brazen drums. The Peruvians, entertaining
a similar notion, raised a frightful din when the moon
was eclipsed,<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> while some savages would shoot up arrows to
defend their luminaries against the enemies they fancied
were attacking them. It was also a popular belief that the
moon was affected by the influence of witchcraft, a notion
referred to by Prospero in “The Tempest” (v. 1), who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His mother was a witch, and one so strong<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That could control the moon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In a former scene (ii. 1) Gonzalo remarks: “You are gentlemen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
of brave mettle; you would lift the moon out of her
sphere.” Douce<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> quotes a marginal reference from Adlington’s
translation of “Apuleius” (1596), a book well known
to Shakespeare: “Witches in old time were supposed to be
of such power that they could put downe the moone by
their inchantment.”<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> One of the earliest references to
this superstition among classical authorities is that in the
“Clouds” of Aristophanes, where Strepsiades proposes the
hiring of a Thessalian witch, to bring down the moon and
shut her up in a box, that he might thus evade paying his
debts by a month. Ovid, in his “Metamorphoses” (bk. xii.
263), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mater erat Mycale; quam deduxisse canendo<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sæpe reluctanti constabat cornua lunæ.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Horace, in his fifth Epode (45), tells us:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Quæ sidera excantata voce Thessala,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Lunamque cælo deripit.”<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Reverting again to the moon’s eclipse, such a season, being
considered most unlucky for lawful enterprises, was held
suitable for evil designs. Thus, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), one
of the witches, speaking of the ingredients of the caldron,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Gall of goat, and slips of yew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As a harbinger of misfortune it is referred to in “Antony
and Cleopatra,” where (iii. 13), Antony says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Alack, our terrene moon<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is now eclipsed; and it portends alone<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The fall of Antony!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Milton, in his “Paradise Lost” (bk. i. 597), speaks much in
the same strain:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“as when the sun new-risen<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Looks through the horizontal misty air<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On half the nations.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Lycidas,” he says of the unlucky ship that was
wrecked:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It was that fatal and perfidious bark<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Built in the eclipse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Its sanguine color is also mentioned as an indication of
coming disasters in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), where the Welsh
captain remarks how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And its paleness, too, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
(ii. 2), is spoken of as an unpropitious sign.</p>

<p>According to a long-accepted theory, insane persons are
said to be influenced by the moon: and many old writers
have supported this notion. Indeed, Shakespeare himself,
in “Othello” (v. 2), tells how the moon when</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And makes men mad.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Dr. Forbes Winslow, in his “Light: its Influence on Life
and Health,” says that “it is impossible altogether to ignore
the evidence of such men as Pinel, Daquin, Guislain, and others,
yet the experience of modern psychological physicians
is to a great degree opposed to the deductions of these eminent
men.” He suggests that the alleged changes observed
among the insane at certain phases of the moon may arise,
not from the direct, but the indirect, influence of the planet.
It is well known that certain important meteorological phenomena
result from the various phases of the moon, such as
the rarity of the air, the electric conditions of the atmosphere,
the degree of heat, dryness, moisture, and amount of
wind prevailing. It is urged, then, that those suffering from
diseases of the brain and nervous system, affecting the mind,
cannot be considered as exempt from the operation of agencies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
that are admitted to affect patients afflicted with other
maladies. Dr. Winslow further adds, that “an intelligent
lady, who occupied for about five years the position of matron
in my establishment for insane ladies, has remarked
that she invariably observed among them a greater agitation
when the moon was at its full.” A correspondent of
“Notes and Queries” (2d series, xii. 492) explains the apparent
aggravated symptoms of madness at the full moon by the
fact that the insane are naturally more restless on light than
on dark nights, and that in consequence loss of sleep makes
them more excitable. We may note here, that in “Antony
and Cleopatra” (iv. 9) Enobarbus invokes the moon as the
“sovereign mistress of true melancholy.”</p>

<p>The moisture of the moon is invariably noticed by Shakespeare.
In “Hamlet” (i. 1) Horatio tells how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“the moist star,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1) Titania says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pale in her anger, washes all the air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That rheumatic diseases do abound.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “The Winter’s Tale” (i. 2) Polixenes commences by
saying how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nine changes of the watery star hath been<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The shepherd’s note, since we have left our throne<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Without a burthen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare, too, the words of Enobarbus in “Antony
and Cleopatra” (iv. 9), who, after addressing the moon, says:
“The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me.” And
once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), we read of the
“moonshine’s watery beams.”</p>

<p>The same idea is frequently found in old writers. Thus,
for instance, in Newton’s “Direction for the Health of Magistrates
and Studentes” (1574), we are told that “the moone
is ladye of moisture.” Bartholomæus, in “De Proprietate
Rerum,” describes the moon as “mother of all humours,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
minister and ladye of the sea.”<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> In Lydgate’s prologue to
his “Story of Thebes” there are two lines not unlike those
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” already quoted:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Of Lucina the moone, moist and pale,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That many shoure fro heaven made availe.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Of course, the moon is thus spoken of as governing the tides,
and from its supposed influence on the weather.<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> In “1 Henry
IV.” (i. 2) Falstaff alludes to the sea being governed “by
our noble and chaste mistress, the moon;” and in “Richard
III.” (ii. 2) Queen Elizabeth says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That I, being govern’d by the watery moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May send forth plenteous tears to drown the world.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare, too, what Timon says (“Timon of Athens,”
iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The moon into salt tears.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The expression of Hecate, in “Macbeth” (iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Upon the corner of the moon<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There hangs a vaporous drop profound,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">seems to have been meant for the same as the <i>virus lunare</i>
of the ancients, being a foam which the moon was supposed
to shed on particular herbs, when strongly solicited by enchantment.
Lucan introduces Erictho using it (“Pharsalia,”
book vi. 669): “Et virus large lunare ministrat.”</p>

<p>By a popular astrological doctrine the moon was supposed
to exercise great influence over agricultural operations, and
also over many “of the minor concerns of life, such as the
gathering of herbs, the killing of animals for the table, and
other matters of a like nature.” Thus the following passage
in the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), it has been suggested,
has reference to the practices of the old herbalists who attributed
particular virtues to plants gathered during particular
phases of the moon and hours of the night. After Lorenzo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
has spoken of the moon shining brightly, Jessica adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“In such a night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Medea gather’d the enchanted herbs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That did renew old Æson.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Hamlet” (iv. 7) the description which Laertes gives
of the weapon-poison refers to the same notion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I bought an unction of a mountebank,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Collected from all simples that have virtue<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Under the moon, can save the thing from death.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The sympathy of growing and declining nature with the
waxing and waning moon is a superstition widely spread,
and is as firmly believed in by many as when Tusser, in his
“Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry,” under “February”
gave the following advice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sow peason and beans in the wane of the moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That they with the planet may rest and arise,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And flourish, with bearing most plentifull wise.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Warburton considers that this notion is alluded to by Shakespeare
in “Troilus and Cressida” (iii. 2), where Troilus, speaking
of the sincerity of his love, tells Cressida it is,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As sun to day, as turtle to her mate.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There is a little doubt as to the exact meaning of plantage
in this passage. Nares observes that it probably means anything
that is planted; but Mr. Ellacombe, in his “Plant-lore
of Shakespeare” (1878, p. 165), says “it is doubtless the
same as plantain.”</p>

<p>It appears that, in days gone by, “neither sowing, planting,
nor grafting was ever undertaken without a scrupulous
attention to the increase or waning of the moon.”<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> Scot, in
his “Discovery of Witchcraft,” notes how “the poore husbandman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
perceiveth that the increase of the moone maketh
plants fruitful, so as in the full moone they are in best
strength; decaieing in the wane, and in the conjunction do
utterlie wither and vade.”</p>

<p>It was a prevailing notion that the moon had an attending
star—Lilly calls it “Lunisequa;” and Sir Richard Hawkins,
in his “Observations in a Voyage to the South Seas in 1593,”
published in 1622, remarks: “Some I have heard say, and
others write, that there is a starre which never separateth
itself from the moon, but a small distance.” Staunton considers
that there is an allusion to this idea in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (iv. 3), where the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My love, her mistress, is a gracious moon:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She an attending star, scarce seen a light.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The sharp ends of the new moon are popularly termed
horns—a term which occurs in “Coriolanus” (i. 1)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“they threw their caps<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is made use of in Decker’s “Match me in London” (i.):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My lord, doe you see this change i’ the moone?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sharp hornes doe threaten windy weather.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">When the horns of the moon appear to point upwards the
moon is said to be like a boat, and various weather prognostications
are drawn from this phenomenon.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a> According to
sailors, it is an omen of fine weather, whereas others affirm it
is a sign of rain—resembling a basin full of water about to
fall.</p>

<p>Among other items of folk-lore connected with the moon
we may mention the moon-calf, a false conception, or fœtus
imperfectly formed, in consequence, as was supposed, of the
influence of the moon. The best account of this fabulous
substance may be found in Drayton’s poem with that title.
Trinculo, in “The Tempest” (ii. 2), supposes Caliban to be a
moon-calf: “I hid me under the dead moon-calf’s gaberdine.”
It has been suggested that in calling Caliban a moon-calf<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
Shakespeare alluded to a superstitious belief formerly current,
in the intercourse of demons and other non-human beings
with mankind. In the days of witchcraft, it was supposed
that a class of devils called Incubi and Succubi roamed the
earth with the express purpose of tempting people to abandon
their purity of life. Hence, all badly deformed children
were suspected of having had such an undesirable parentage.<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a></p>

<p>A curious expression, “a sop o’ the moonshine,” occurs in
“King Lear” (ii. 2), which probably alludes to some dish so
called. Kent says to the steward, “Draw, you rogue; for,
though it be night, yet the moon shines; I’ll make a sop o’
the moonshine of you.”</p>

<p>There was a way of dressing eggs, called “eggs in moonshine,”
of which Douce<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> gives the following description:
“Eggs were broken and boiled in salad oil till the yolks became
hard. They were eaten with slices of onion fried in
oil, butter, verjuice, nutmeg, and salt.” “A sop in the moonshine”
must have been a sippet in this dish.<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a></p>

<p><i>Planets.</i> The irregular motion of the planets was supposed
to portend some disaster to mankind. Ulysses, in “Troilus
and Cressida” (i. 3), declares how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“when the planets<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In evil mixture, to disorder wander,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Divert and crack, rend and deracinate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The unity and married calm of states<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quite from their fixture.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Indeed, the planets themselves were not thought, in days
gone by, to be confined in any fixed orbit of their own, but
ceaselessly to wander about, as the etymology of their name
demonstrates. A popular name for the planets was “wandering
stars,” of which Cotgrave says, “they bee also called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
wandering starres, because they never keep one certain place
or station in the firmament.” Thus Hamlet (v. 1), approaching
the grave of Ophelia, addresses Laertes:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“What is he, whose grief<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like wonder-wounded hearers?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Tomkis’s “Albumazar” (i. 1) they are called “wanderers:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Your patron Mercury, in his mysterious character<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Holds all the marks of the other wanderers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to vulgar astrology, the planets, like the stars, were
supposed to affect, more or less, the affairs of this world, a
notion frequently referred to by old writers. In “Winter’s
Tale” (ii. 1), Hermione consoles herself in the thought—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“There’s some ill planet reigns:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I must be patient till the heavens look<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With an aspect more favourable.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “1 Henry VI.” (i. 1), the Duke of Exeter asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What! shall we curse the planets of mishap<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That plotted thus our glory’s overthrow?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, King Richard (“Richard III.,” iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be opposite all planets of good luck<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To my proceeding.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, in “Hamlet” (i. 1), Marcellus, speaking of the
season of our Saviour’s birth, says, “then no planets strike.”</p>

<p>That diseases, too, are dependent upon planetary influence
is referred to in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be as a planetary plague, when Jove<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the sick air: let not thy sword skip one.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Fiery Trigon” was a term in the old judicial astrology,
when the three upper planets met in a fiery sign—a phenomenon
which was supposed to indicate rage and contention.
It is mentioned in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>P. Hen.</i> Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! what says
the almanac to that?</p>

<p><i>Poins.</i> And, look, whether the fiery Trigon, his man, be not lisping
to his master’s old tables.”</p></div>

<p>Dr. Nash, in his notes to Butler’s “Hudibras,” says: “The
twelve signs in astrology are divided into four <i>trigons</i> or triplicities,
each denominated from the connatural element; so
they are three fiery [signs], three airy, three watery, and three
earthy:”</p>

<ul style="line-height: 130%; margin-left: 5%"><li>Fiery—Aries, Leo, Sagittarius.</li>
<li>Airy—Gemini, Libra, Aquarius.</li>
<li>Watery—Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.</li>
<li>Earthly—Taurus, Virgo, Capricornus.</li></ul>


<p>Thus, when the three superior planets met in Aries, Leo,
or Sagittarius, they formed a <i>fiery trigon</i>; when in Cancer,
Scorpio, and Pisces, a watery one.</p>

<p><i>Charles’s Wain</i> was the old name for the seven bright stars
of the constellation Ursa Major. The constellation was so
named in honor of Charlemagne; or, according to some, it
is a corruption of chorles or churl’s, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, rustic’s, wain. Chorl
is frequently used for a countryman, in old books, from the
Saxon ceorl. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1), the Carrier says,
“Charles’ wain is over the new chimney.”</p>

<p><i>Music of the spheres.</i> Pythagoras was the first who suggested
this notion, so beautifully expressed by Shakespeare
in the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But in his motion like an angel sings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Plato says that a siren sits on each planet, who carols a
most sweet song, agreeing to the motion of her own particular
planet, but harmonizing with the other seven. Hence
Milton, in his “Arcades,” speaks of the “celestial Sirens’
harmony, that sit upon the nine enfolded spheres.”</p>

<p><i>Stars.</i> An astrological doctrine, which has kept its place
in modern popular philosophy, asserts that mundane events
are more or less influenced by the stars. That astronomers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
should have divided the sun’s course into imaginary signs of
the Zodiac, was enough, says Mr. Tylor,<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> to originate astrological
rules “that these celestial signs have an actual effect
on real earthly rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins.” Hence we
are told that a child born under the sign of the Lion will be
courageous; but one born under the Crab will not go forth
well in life; one born under the Waterman is likely to be
drowned, and so forth. Shakespeare frequently alludes to
this piece of superstition, which, it must be remembered, was
carried to a ridiculous height in his day. In “Julius Cæsar”
(i. 2), Cassius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the following passage in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Sir Tob.</i><span style="padding-left: 6em">Were we not born under Taurus?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Sir And.</i> Taurus! that’s sides and heart.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Sir Tob.</i> No, sir; it is legs and thighs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“Both the knights,” says Mr. Douce (“Illustrations of Shakespeare,”
p. 54), “are wrong in their astrology, according to
the almanacs of the time, which make Taurus govern the
neck and throat.”</p>

<p>Beatrice, in “Much Ado about Nothing” (ii. 1), says:
“there was a star danced, and under that was I born;”
Kent, in “King Lear” (iv. 3), remarks,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“It is the stars,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The stars above us, govern our conditions;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and once more, in “Pericles” (i. 1), King Antiochus, speaking
of the charming qualities of his daughter, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bring in our daughter, clothed like a bride,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For the embracements even of Jove himself:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At whose conception, till Lucina reign’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nature this dowry gave, to glad her presence,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The senate-house of planets all did sit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To knit in her their best perfections.”<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Throughout the East, says Mr. Tylor,<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> “astrology even now<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
remains a science in full esteem. The condition of mediæval
Europe may still be perfectly realized by the traveller in
Persia, where the Shah waits for days outside the walls of his
capital till the constellations allow him to enter; and where,
on the days appointed by the stars for letting blood, it literally
flows in streams from the barbers’ shops in the streets.
Professor Wuttke declares that there are many districts in
Germany where the child’s horoscope is still regularly kept
with the baptismal certificate in the family chest.” Astrology
is ridiculed in a masterly manner in “King Lear” (i. 2); and
Warburton suggests that if the date of the first performance
of “King Lear” were well considered, “it would be found that
something or other had happened at that time which gave a
more than ordinary run to this deceit, as these words seem
to indicate—‘I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read
this other day, what should follow these eclipses.’” Zouch,<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a>
speaking of Queen Mary’s reign, tells us that “Judicial astrology
was much in use long after this time. Its predictions
were received with reverential awe: and even men of
the most enlightened understandings were inclined to believe
that the conjunctions and oppositions of the planets
had no little influence in the affairs of the world.”</p>

<p>The pretence, also, of predicting events, such as pestilence,
from the aspect of the heavenly bodies—one form of medical
astrology—is noticed in “Venus and Adonis:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Long may they kiss each other, for this cure!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O, never let their crimson liveries wear!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And as they last, their verdure still endure,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To drive infection from the dangerous year!<br /></span>
<span class="i1">That the star-gazers, having writ on death,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Heroes were in ancient times immortalized by being
placed among the stars, a custom to which Bedford refers in
“1 Henry VI.” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A far more glorious star thy soul will make<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Than Julius Cæsar.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, “Pericles” (v. 3) exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Heavens make a star of him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>On a medal of Hadrian, the adopted son of Trajan and
Plotina, the divinity of his parents is expressed by placing a
star over their heads; and in like manner the medals of
Faustina the Elder exhibit her on an eagle, her head surrounded
with stars.<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a></p>

<p>In “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 3) a ludicrous term for the stars is,
“cinders of the elements;” and in “Merchant of Venice”
(v. 1) they are designated “candles of the night.”</p>

<p><i>Meteors.</i> An elegant description of a meteor well known
to sailors is given by Ariel in “The Tempest” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“sometime I’d divide<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And burn in many places; on the topmast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then meet and join.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is called, by the French and Spaniards inhabiting the
coasts of the Mediterranean, St. Helme’s or St. Telme’s fire;
by the Italians, the fire of St. Peter and St. Nicholas. It is
also known as the fire of St. Helen, St. Herm, and St. Clare.
Douce<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> tells us that whenever it appeared as a single flame
it was supposed by the ancients to be Helena, the sister of
Castor and Pollux, and in this state to bring ill luck, from the
calamities which this lady is known to have caused in the
Trojan war. When it came as a double flame it was called
Castor and Pollux, and accounted a good omen. It has been
described as a little blaze of fire, sometimes appearing by
night on the tops of soldiers’ lances, or at sea on masts and
sailyards, whirling and leaping in a moment from one place
to another. According to some, it never appears but after
a tempest, and is supposed to lead people to suicide by
drowning. Shakespeare in all probability consulted Batman’s
“Golden Books of the Leaden Goddes,” who, speaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
of Castor and Pollux, says: “They were figured like two
lampes or cresset lightes—one on the toppe of a maste, the
other on the stemme or foreshippe.” He adds that if the
first light appears in the stem or foreship and ascends upwards,
it is a sign of good luck; if “either lights begin at the
topmast, bowsprit,” or foreship, and descends towards the
sea, it is a sign of a tempest. In taking, therefore, the latter
position, Ariel had fulfilled the commands of Prospero, and
raised a storm.<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> Mr. Swainson, in his “Weather-Lore” (1873,
p. 193), quotes the following, which is to the same purport:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Last night I saw Saint Elmo’s stars,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With their glittering lanterns all at play,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the tops of the masts and the tips of the spars,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I knew we should have foul weather that day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Capell, in his “School of Shakespeare” (1779, iii. 7), has
pointed out a passage in Hakluyt’s “Voyages” (1598, iii. 450),
which strikingly illustrates the speech of Ariel quoted above:
“I do remember that in the great and boysterous storme of
this foule weather, in the night, there came vpon the toppe
of our maine yarde and maine maste, a certaine little light,
much like unto the light of a little candle, which the Spaniards
called the Cuerpo-Santo, and said it was St. Elmo, whom
they take to bee the aduocate of sailers.... This light continued
aboord our ship about three houres, flying from maste
to maste, and from top to top; and sometimes it would be
in two or three places at once.” This meteor was by some
supposed to be a spirit; and by others “an exhalation of
moyst vapours, that are ingendered by foul and tempestuous
weather.”<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a> Mr. Thoms, in his “Notelets on Shakespeare”
(1865, p. 59), says that, no doubt, Shakespeare had in mind
the will-o’-the-wisp.<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a></p>

<p><i>Fire-Drake</i>, which is jocularly used in “Henry VIII.” (v. 4)
for a man with a red face, was one of the popular terms for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
the will-o’-the-wisp,<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> and Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,”
says: “Fiery spirits or devils are such as commonly
work by fire-drakes, or ignes fatui, which lead men often in
flumina et præcipitia.” In Bullokar’s “English Expositor”
(1616), we have a quaint account of this phenomenon: “Fire-drake;
a fire sometimes seen flying in the night like a dragon.
Common people think it a spirit that keepeth some treasure
hid, but philosophers affirme it to be a great unequal exhalation
inflamed betweene two clouds, the one hot, the other
cold, which is the reason that it also smoketh, the middle
part whereof, according to the proportion of the hot cloud
being greater than the rest, maketh it seem like a bellie, and
both ends like unto a head and taill.”<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> White, however, in
his “Peripateticall Institutions” (p. 156), calls the fiery-dragon
or fire-drake, “a weaker kind of lightning. Its livid colors,
and its falling without noise and slowly, demonstrate a great
mixture of watery exhalation in it.... ’Tis sufficient for its
shape, that it has some resemblance of a dragon, not the expresse
figure.”</p>

<p>Among other allusions to the will-o’-the-wisp by Shakespeare,
Mr. Hunter<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> notices one in “King Lear” (iii. 4),
where Gloster’s torch being seen in the distance, the fool
says, “Look, here comes a walking fire.” Whereupon Edgar
replies, “This is the foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet; he begins
at curfew, and walks till the first cock.” “From which,”
observes Mr. Hunter, “Flibbertigibbet seems to be a name
for the will-o’-the-wisp. Hence the propriety of ‘He <i>begins
at curfew</i>, and walks till the crowing of the cock,’ that is, is
seen in all the dark of the night.” It appears that when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
Shakespeare wrote, “a walking fire” was a common name
for the <i>ignis fatuus</i>, as we learn from the story of “How
Robin Goodfellow lead a company of fellows out of their
way:” “A company of young men, having been making
merry with their sweethearts, were, at their coming home,
to come over a heath; Robin Goodfellow, knowing of it, met
them, and to make some pastime hee led them up and downe
the heathe a whole night, so that they could not get out of
it, for hee went before them in the shape of a <i>walking fire</i>,
which they all saw and followed till the day did appeare;
then Robin left them, and at his departure spake these
words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘Get you home, you merry lads,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tell your mammies and your dads,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all those that newes desire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How you saw a walking fire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wenches, that doe smile and lispe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Use to call me willy-wispe.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another allusion to this subject occurs in “The Tempest”
(iv. 1), where Stephano, after Ariel has led him and his drunken
companions through “tooth’d briers, sharp furzes, pricking
goss and thorns,” and at last “left them i’ the filthy
mantled pool,” reproaches Caliban in these words: “Monster,
your fairy, which you say is a harmless fairy, has done
little better than played the Jack with us”—that is, to quote
Dr. Johnson’s explanation of this passage, “he has played
Jack-with-a-lanthorn, has led us about like an <i>ignis fatuus</i>,
by which travellers are decoyed into the mire.”<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Once
more, when Puck, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1),
speaks of the various forms he assumes in order to “mislead
night wanderers, laughing at their harm,” he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare, no doubt, here alludes to the will-o’-the wisp,
an opinion shared by Mr. Joseph Ritson,<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> who says: “This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, seems likewise to be the illusory
candle-holder, so fatal to travellers, and who is more usually
called ‘Jack-a-lantern,’<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> or ‘Will-with-a-wisp,’ and ‘Kit-with-the-candlestick.’”
Milton, in “Paradise Lost” (book ix.),
alludes to this deceptive gleam in the following lines:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“A wandering fire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Condenses, and the cold environs round,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kindled through agitation to a flame,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hovering and blazing with delusive light,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Misleads th’ amaz’d night-wanderer from his way<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To bogs and mires, and oft through pond and pool.”<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This appearance has given rise to a most extensive folk-lore,
and is embodied in many of the fairy legends and superstitions
of this and other countries. Thus, in Germany,
Jack-o’-lanterns are said to be the souls of unbaptized children,
that have no rest in the grave, and must hover between
heaven and earth. In many places they are called land-measurers,
and are seen like figures of fire, running to and
fro with a red-hot measuring rod. These are said to be persons
who have falsely sworn away land, or fraudulently measured
it, or removed landmarks.<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> In the neighborhood of
Magdeburg, they are known as “Lüchtemannekens;” and to
cause them to appear, it is sufficient to call out “Ninove,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
Ninove.” In the South Altmark they are termed “Dickepôten;”
and if a person only prays as soon as he sees one,
he draws it to him; if he curses, it retires. In some parts,
too, a popular name is “Huckepôten,” and “Tuckbolde.”
The Jack-o’-lanterns of Denmark<a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> are the spirits of unrighteous
men, who, by a false glimmer, seek to mislead the traveller,
and to decoy him into bogs and moors. The best safeguard
against them, when they appear, is to turn one’s cap
inside out. A similar notion occurs in Devonshire with regard
to the Pixies, who delight in leading astray such persons
as they find abroad after nightfall; the only remedy to
escape them being to turn some part of the dress. In Normandy
these fires are called “Feux Follets,” and they are
believed to be cruel spirits, whom it is dangerous to encounter.
Among the superstitions which prevail in connection
with them, two, says Mr. Thoms,<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a> are deserving of notice:
“One is, that the <i>ignis fatuus</i> is the spirit of some unhappy
woman, who is destined to run <i>en furolle</i>, to expiate her intrigues
with a minister of the church, and it is designated
from that circumstance La Fourlore, or La Fourolle.” Another
opinion is, that Le Feu Follet is the soul of a priest,
who has been condemned thus to expiate his broken vows
of perpetual chastity; and it is very probable that it is to
some similar belief existing in this country, at the time when
he wrote, that Milton alludes in “L’Allegro,” when he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She was pinched and pulled, she said,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And he by Friar’s Lanthorn led.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Brittany the “Porte-brandon” appears in the form of a
child bearing a torch, which he turns like a burning wheel;
and with this, we are told, he sets fire to the villages, which
are suddenly, sometimes in the middle of the night, wrapped
in flames.</p>

<p>The appearance of meteors Shakespeare ranks among
omens, as in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where Bardolph says:
“My lord, do you see these meteors? do you behold these exhalations?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
What think you they portend?” And in “King
John” (iii. 4), Pandulph speaks of meteors as “prodigies and
signs.” The Welsh captain, in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis thought the king is dead; we will not stay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Comet.</i> From the earliest times comets have been superstitiously
regarded, and ranked among omens. Thus Thucydides
tells us that the Peloponnesian war was heralded by
an abundance of earthquakes and comets; and Vergil, in
speaking of the death of Cæsar, declares that at no other
time did comets and other supernatural prodigies appear in
greater numbers. It is probably to this latter event that
Shakespeare alludes in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 2), where he represents
Calpurnia as saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When beggars die, there are no comets seen;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 1), the play opens with the following
words, uttered by the Duke of Bedford:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Comets, importing change of times and states,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And with them scourge the bad revolting stars<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That have consented unto Henry’s death!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Taming of the Shrew” (iii. 2), too, Petruchio, when he
makes his appearance on his wedding-day, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Gentles, methinks you frown:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And wherefore gaze this goodly company,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As if they saw some wondrous monument,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some comet, or unusual prodigy?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 2), the king, when telling his son
how he had always avoided making himself “common-hackney’d
in the eyes of men,” adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By being seldom seen, I could not stir<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, like a comet, I was wonder’d at.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Arcite, in the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1), when addressing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
the altar of Mars, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“Whose approach<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Comets forewarn.”<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Dew.</i> Among the many virtues ascribed to dew was its
supposed power over the complexion, a source of superstition
which still finds many believers, especially on May morning.
All dew, however, does not appear to have possessed
this quality, some being of a deadly or malignant quality.
Thus Ariel, in “The Tempest” (i. 2), speaks of the “deep
brook” in the harbor:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“where once<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the still vex’d Bermoothes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Caliban (i. 2), when venting his rage on Prospero and
Miranda, can find no stronger curse than the following:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Drop on you both!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been suggested that in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(iii. 12) Shakespeare may refer to an old notion whereby the
sea was considered the source of dews as well as rain. Euphronius
is represented as saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Such as I am, I come from Antony:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I was of late as petty to his ends<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As is the morn-dew on the myrtle leaf<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To his grand sea.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to an erroneous notion formerly current, it was
supposed that the air, and not the earth, drizzled dew—a
notion referred to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When the sun sets, the air doth drizzle dew.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “King John” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Before the dew of evening fall.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Then there is the celebrated honey-dew, a substance which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
has furnished the poet with a touching simile, which he has
put into the mouth of “Titus Andronicus” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stood on her cheeks; as doth the honey-dew<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon a gather’d lily almost wither’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to Pliny, “honey-dew” is the saliva of the stars,
or a liquid produced by the purgation of the air. It is, however,
a secretion deposited by a small insect, which is distinguished
by the generic name of aphis.<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a></p>

<p><i>Rainbow.</i> Secondary rainbows, the watery appearance in
the sky accompanying the rainbow, are in many places
termed “water-galls”—a term we find in the “Rape of
Lucrece” (1586-89):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And round about her tear-distained eye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blue circles stream’d, like rainbows in the sky:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">These water-galls in her dim element<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Foretell new storms to those already spent.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Horace Walpole several times makes use of the word:
“False good news are always produced by true good, like
the water-gall by the rainbow;” and again, “Thank heaven
it is complete, and did not remain imperfect, like a water-gall.”<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a>
In “The Dialect of Craven” we find “Water-gall,
a secondary or broken rainbow. <i>Germ.</i> Wasser-galle.”</p>

<p><i>Thunder.</i> According to an erroneous fancy the destruction
occasioned by lightning was effected by some solid body
known as the thunder-stone or thunder-bolt. Thus, in the
beautiful dirge in “Cymbeline” (iv. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Guid.</i> Fear no more the lightning flash,<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Arv.</i> Or the all-dreaded thunder-stone.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Othello asks (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Are there no stones in heaven<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But what serve for the thunder?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “Julius Cæsar” (i. 3), Cassius says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The thunder-stone is the imaginary product of the thunder,
which the ancients called <i>Brontia</i>, mentioned by Pliny
(“Nat. Hist.” xxxvii. 10) as a species of gem, and as that
which, falling with the lightning, does the mischief. It is
the fossil commonly called the Belemnite, or finger-stone,
and now known to be a shell.</p>

<p>A superstitious notion prevailed among the ancients that
those who were stricken with lightning were honored by Jupiter,
and therefore to be accounted holy. It is probably to
this idea that Shakespeare alludes in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(ii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.”<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The bodies of such were supposed not to putrefy; and,
after having been exhibited for a certain time to the people,
were not buried in the usual manner, but interred on
the spot where the lightning fell, and a monument erected
over them. Some, however, held a contrary opinion. Thus
Persius (sat. ii. l. 27) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Triste jaces lucis evitandumque bidental.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The ground, too, that had been smitten by a thunder-bolt
was accounted sacred, and afterwards enclosed; nor did any
one even presume to walk on it. Such spots were, therefore,
consecrated to the gods, and could not in future become
the property of any one.</p>

<p>Among the many other items of folk-lore associated
with thunder is a curious one referred to in “Pericles”
(iv. 3): “Thunder shall not so awake the bed of eels.”
The notion formerly being that thunder had the effect of
rousing eels from their mud, and so rendered them more
easy to be taken in stormy weather. Marston alludes to
this superstition in his satires (“Scourge of Villainie,” sat.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
vii.):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“They are nought but eeles, that never will appeare<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till that tempestuous winds or thunder teare<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their slimy beds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The silence that often precedes a thunder-storm is thus
graphically described in “Hamlet” (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“‘we often see, against some storm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bold winds speechless, and the orb below<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth rend the region.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Earthquakes</i>, around which so many curious myths and
superstitions have clustered,<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> are scarcely noticed by Shakespeare.
They are mentioned among the ominous signs of
that terrible night on which Duncan is so treacherously
slain (“Macbeth,” ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“the obscure bird<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was feverous and did shake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1) Hotspur assigns as a reason
for the earthquakes the following theory:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By the imprisoning of unruly wind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Steeples, and moss-grown towers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Equinox.</i> The storms that prevail in spring at the vernal
equinox are aptly alluded to in “Macbeth” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As whence the sun ’gins his reflection<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So from that spring, whence comfort seem’d to come,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Discomfort swells.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the meaning being: the beginning of the reflection of the
sun is the epoch of his passing from the severe to the milder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
season, opening, however, with storms.</p>

<p><i>Wind.</i> An immense deal of curious weather-lore<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> has been
associated with the wind from the earliest period; and in
our own and foreign countries innumerable proverbs are
found describing the future state of the weather from the
position of the wind, for, according to an old saying, “every
wind has its weather.” Shakespeare has introduced some
of these, showing how keen an observer he was of those
every-day sayings which have always been much in use, especially
among the lower classes. Thus the proverbial wet
which accompanies the wind when in the south is mentioned
in “As You Like It” (iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“The southern wind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth play the trumpet to his [<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, the sun’s] purposes;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And by his hollow whistling in the leaves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Foretells a tempest, and a blustering day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A popular saying to the same effect, still in use, tells us that:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When the wind is in the south,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It is in the rain’s mouth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in days gone by, the southerly winds were generally
supposed to be bearers of noxious fogs and vapors, frequent
allusions to which are given by Shakespeare. Thus, in “The
Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“a south-west blow on ye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And blister you all o’er.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A book,<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> too, with which, as already noticed, Shakespeare
appears to have been familiar, tells us, “This southern wind
is hot and moist. Southern winds corrupt and destroy;
they heat, and make men fall into the sickness.” Hence, in
“Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites speaks of “the rotten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
diseases of the south;” and in “Coriolanus” (i. 4), Marcius
exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“All the contagion of the south light on you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, in “Cymbeline” (ii. 3), Cloten speaks in the same
strain: “The south fog rot him.”</p>

<p><i>Flaws.</i> These are sudden gusts of wind. It was the
opinion, says Warburton, “of some philosophers that the
vapors being congealed in the air by cold (which is the most
intense in the morning), and being afterwards rarefied and
let loose by the warmth of the sun, occasion those sudden
and impetuous gusts of wind which were called ‘flaws.’”
Thus he comments on the following passage in “2 Henry
IV.” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As humorous as winter, and as sudden<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As flaws congealed in the spring of day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1) these outbursts of wind are further
alluded to:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Until the golden circuit on my head,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like to the glorious sun’s transparent beams,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Venus and Adonis” (425), there is an additional
reference:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the Cornish dialect a <i>flaw</i> signifies primitively a cut.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a>
But it is also there used in a secondary sense for those sudden
or cutting gusts of wind.<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a></p>

<p><i>Squalls.</i> There is a common notion that “the sudden
storm lasts not three hours,” an idea referred to by John of
Gaunt in “Richard II.” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Thus, in Norfolk, the peasantry say that “the faster the rain,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
the quicker the hold up,” which is only a difference in words
from the popular adage, “after a storm comes a calm.”</p>

<p><i>Clouds.</i> In days gone by, clouds floating before the wind,
like a reek or vapor, were termed racking clouds. Hence in
“3 Henry VI.” (ii. 1), Richard speaks of:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not separated with the racking clouds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This verb, though now obsolete, was formerly in common
use; and in “King Edward III.,” 1596, we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Like inconstant clouds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That, rack’d upon the carriage of the winds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Increase,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>At the present day one may often hear the phrase, the
rack of the weather, in our agricultural districts; many, too,
of the items of weather-lore noticed by Shakespeare being
still firmly credited by our peasantry.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. x. p. 292.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 255, 256.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. viii. p. 208.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> See Knight’s “Life of Shakespeare,” 1843, p. 63.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 241.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, p. 176, for popular adages on
the Continent.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> “Weather-Lore,” pp. 175, 176.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> Napier’s “Folk-Lore of West of Scotland,” 1879, p. 141.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> Quoted in Southey’s “Commonplace Book,” 1849, 2d series, p. 462.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> See Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” 1871, vol. i. pp. 261, 296, 297, 321.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 1), Edward says:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“henceforward will I bear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon my target three fair shining suns.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 283.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> Ray gives the Latin equivalent “Ab equis ad asinos.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> Baring-Gould’s “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,” 1877, p. 190.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> Cf. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2): “Yet still she is the moon, and
I the man.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> Fiske, “Myths and Mythmakers,” 1873, p. 27.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,” 1877, p. 197.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 10.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> For further information on this subject, see Tylor’s “Primitive
Culture,” 1873, vol. i. pp. 288, 354-356; vol. ii. pp. 70, 202, 203.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii. pp. 142, 143.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> See “English Folk-lore,” pp. 43, 44.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” 1873, vol. i. pp. 354, 355.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> The words “moonish” (“As You Like It,” iii. 2) and “moonlike”
(“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv. 3) are used in the sense of inconstant.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 18.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 329.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 16.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> See Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” 1584, pp. 174, 226, 227, 250.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> For further examples, see Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,”
p. 17.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 116.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, pp. 182-192.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> See Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” 1873, vol. i. p. 130; “English Folk-Lore,”
1878, pp. 41, 42.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” pp. 182, 183.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> See Williams’s “Superstitions of Witchcraft,” pp. 123-125; Scot’s
“Discovery of Witchcraft,” bk. iv. p. 145.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 405.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” 1872, vol. ii. p. 580.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 131.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> Cf. “Richard III.” (iv. 4); “1 Henry IV.” (i. 1, iii. 1); “Antony
and Cleopatra” (iii. 13); “The Tempest” (i. 2); “Hamlet” (i. 4);
“Cymbeline” (v. 4); “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 2); “Richard II.” (iv. 1).</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 131; see Brand’s “Popular Antiquities,”
1849, vol. iii. pp. 341-348.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> “Walton’s Lives,” 1796, p. 113, note.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 397.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> Ibid. p. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 400.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Purchas, “His Pilgrimes” (1625, pt. i. lib. iii. p. 133), quoted by Mr.
Aldis Wright in his “Notes to The Tempest,” 1875, p. 86.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> See <a href="#The_allusion_by">Puck as Will-o’-the-Wisp</a>; chapter on “Fairy-Lore.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> See “Notes and Queries,” 5th series, vol. x. p. 499; Brand’s “Pop.
Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 410; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 309.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> A “fire-drake” appears to have been also an artificial firework,
perhaps what is now called a serpent. Thus, in Middleton’s “Your
Five Gallants” (1607):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“But, like fire-drakes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mounted a little, gave a crack and fell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> “New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare,”
vol. ii. p. 272.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> See Thoms’s “Notelets on Shakespeare,” p. 59.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> “Fairy Mythology,” edited by Hazlitt, 1875, p. 40.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> Among the many other names given to this appearance may be
mentioned the following: “Will-a-wisp,” “Joan-in-the-wad,” “Jacket-a-wad,”
“Peg-a-lantern,” “Elf-fire,” etc. A correspondent of “Notes
and Queries” (5th series, vol. x. p. 499) says: “The wandering meteor of
the moss or fell appears to have been personified as Jack, Gill, Joan,
Will, or Robin, indifferently, according as the supposed spirit of the
lamp seemed to the particular rustic mind to be a male or female apparition.”
In Worcestershire it is called “Hob-and-his-lanthorn,”
and “Hobany’s” or “Hobnedy’s Lanthorn.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> Mr. Ritson says that Milton “is frequently content to pilfer a happy
expression from Shakespeare—on this occasion, ‘night-wanderer.’”
He elsewhere calls it “the friar’s lantern.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> Thorpe, “Northern Mythology,” 1852, vol. iii. pp. 85, 158, 220.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> “Notelets on Shakespeare,” pp. 64, 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> Ibid.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> See Proctor’s “Myths of Astronomy;” Chambers’s “Domestic
Annals of Scotland,” 1858, vol. ii. pp. 410-412; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” pp. 364, 365.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> See Patterson’s “Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare,” 1841, p. 145.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> “Letters,” vol. i. p. 310; vol. vi. pp. 1, 187.—Ed. Cunningham.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 369.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> See Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. pp. 364-367.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> Batman upon Bartholomæus—“De Proprietatibus Rerum,” lib. xi.
c. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> Polwhele’s “Cornish Vocabulary.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> Cf. “Macbeth,” iii. 4, “O, these flaws and starts.”</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></h2>

<h3>BIRDS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the present chapter we have not only a striking proof
of Shakespeare’s minute acquaintance with natural history,
but of his remarkable versatility as a writer. While displaying
a most extensive knowledge of ornithology, he has further
illustrated his subject by alluding to those numerous
legends, popular sayings, and superstitions which have, in
this and other countries, clustered round the feathered race.
Indeed, the following pages are alone sufficient to show, if
it were necessary, how fully he appreciated every branch of
antiquarian lore; and what a diligent student he must have
been in the pursuit of that wide range of information, the
possession of which has made him one of the most many-sided
writers that the world has ever seen. The numerous
incidental allusions, too, by Shakespeare, to the folk-lore of
bygone days, while showing how deeply he must have read
and gathered knowledge from every available source, serve
as an additional proof of his retentive memory, and marvellous
power of embellishing his ideas by the most apposite
illustrations. Unfortunately, however, these have, hitherto,
been frequently lost sight of through the reader’s unacquaintance
with that extensive field of folk-lore which was so well
known to the poet. For the sake of easy reference, the
birds with which the present chapter deals are arranged alphabetically.</p>

<p><i>Barnacle-Goose.</i> There was a curious notion, very prevalent
in former times, that this bird (<i>Anser bernicla</i>) was generated
from the barnacle (<i>Lepas anatifera</i>), a shell-fish, growing
on a flexible stem, and adhering to loose timber, bottoms
of ships, etc., a metamorphosis to which Shakespeare alludes
in “The Tempest” (iv. 1), where he makes Caliban say:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“we shall lose our time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all be turn’d to barnacles.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This vulgar error, no doubt, originated in mistaking the
fleshy peduncle of the shell-fish for the neck of a goose, the
shell for its head, and the tentacula for a tuft of feathers.
These shell-fish, therefore, bearing, as seen out of the water,
a resemblance to the goose’s neck, were ignorantly, and without
investigation, confounded with geese themselves. In
France, the barnacle-goose may be eaten on fast days, by
virtue of this old belief in its fishy origin.<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> Like other fictions
this one had its variations,<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a> for sometime the barnacles
were supposed to grow on trees, and thence to drop into the
sea, and become geese, as in Drayton’s account of Furness
(“Polyolb.” 1622, song 27, l. 1190). As early as the 12th century
this idea<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a> was promulgated by Giraldus Cambrensis in
his “Topographia Hiberniæ.” Gerarde, who in the year
1597 published his “Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes,”
narrates the following: “There are found in the north parts
of Scotland, and the isles adjacent called Orcades, certain
trees, whereon do grow certain shell-fishes, of a white color,
tending to russet, wherein are contained little living creatures;
which shells in time of maturity do open, and out of
them grow those little living things which, falling into the
water, do become fowls, whom we call barnacles, in the north
of England brant geese, and in Lancashire tree geese; but
the others that do fall upon the land perish, and do come to
nothing. Thus much of the writings of others, and also
from the mouths of people of those parts, which may very
well accord with truth. But what our eyes have seen and
hands have touched, we shall declare. There is a small
island in Lancashire called the Pile of Foulders, wherein are
found the broken pieces of old ships, some whereof have
been cast thither by shipwreck, and also the trunks or bodies,
with the branches, of old rotten trees, cast up there likewise,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
whereon is found a certain spume or froth, that in time
breedeth into certain shells, in shape like those of the mussel,
but sharper pointed, and of a whitish color: wherein is
contained a thing in form like a lace of silk, one end whereof
is fastened unto the inside of the shell, even as the fish of
oysters and mussels are. The other end is made fast unto
the belly of a rude mass or lump, which in time cometh to
the shape and form of a bird; when it is perfectly formed
the shell gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is
the foresaid lace or string; next come the legs of the bird
hanging out, and as it groweth greater it openeth the shell
by degrees, till at length it is all come forth and hangeth
only by the bill. In short space after it cometh to full maturity,
and falleth into the sea, where it gathereth feathers
and groweth to a fowl, bigger than a mallard, and lesser than
a goose; having black legs and bill, or beak, and feathers
black and white, spotted in such a manner as is our magpie,
which the people of Lancashire call by no other name than
a tree goose.” An interesting cut of these birds so growing
is given by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps from a manuscript of the
14th century, who is of opinion that the barnacle mentioned
by Caliban was the tree-goose. It is not to be supposed,
however, that there were none who doubted this marvellous
story, or who took steps to refute it. Belon, so long ago as
1551, says Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> and others after him, treated it with
ridicule, and a refutation may be found in Willughby’s “Ornithology,”
which was edited by Ray in 1678.<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a> This vulgar
error is mentioned by many of the old writers. Thus Bishop
Hall, in his “Virgidemiarum” (lib. iv. sat. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The Scottish barnacle, if I might choose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That of a worme doth waxe a winged goose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Butler, too, in his “Hudibras” (III. ii. l. 655), speaks of it;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
and Marston, in his “Malecontent” (1604), has the following:
“Like your Scotch barnacle, now a block, instantly a worm,
and presently a great goose.”</p>

<p><i>Blackbird.</i> This favorite is called, in the “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (iii. 1) an ousel (old French, <i>oisel</i>), a term
still used in the neighborhood of Leeds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The ousel cock, so black of hue,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With orange-tawny bill.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2) when Justice Shallow inquires
of Justice Silence, “And how doth my cousin?” he is answered:
“Alas, a black ousel,<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a> cousin Shallow,” a phrase
which, no doubt, corresponded to our modern one, “a black
sheep.” In Spenser’s “Epithalamium” (l. 82), the word occurs:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The ousel shrills, the ruddock warbles soft.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Buzzard.</i> Mr. Staunton suggests that in the following
passage of the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1) a play is intended
upon the words, and that in the second line “buzzard”
means a beetle, from its peculiar buzzing noise:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Pet.</i> O slow-wing’d turtle! shall a buzzard take thee?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Kath.</i> Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The beetle was formerly called a buzzard; and in Staffordshire,
a cockchafer is termed a hum-buz. In Northamptonshire
we find a proverb, “I’m between a hawk and a buzzard,”
which means, “I don’t know what to do, or how to
act.”<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a></p>

<p><i>Chaffinch.</i> Some think that this bird is alluded to in the
song in the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1), where the
expression “finch” is used; the chaffinch having always
been a favorite cage-bird with the lower classes.<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> In “Troilus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
and Cressida” (v. 1) Thersites calls Patroclus a “finch-egg,”
which was evidently meant as a term of reproach. Others,
again, consider the phrase as equivalent to coxcomb.</p>

<p><i>Chough.</i> In using this word Shakespeare probably, in
most cases, meant the jackdaw;<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a> for in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (iii. 2) he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“russet-pated choughs, many in sort,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rising and cawing at the gun’s report;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the term russet-pated being applicable to the jackdaw, but
not to the real chough. In “1 Henry IV.” (v. 1). Prince Henry
calls Falstaff <i>chewet</i>—“Peace, chewet, peace”—in allusion,
no doubt, to the chough or jackdaw, for common birds have
always had a variety of names.<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> Such an appellation would
be a proper reproach to Falstaff, for his meddling and impertinent
talk. Steevens and Malone, however, finding that
<i>chewets</i> were little round pies made of minced meat, thought
that the Prince compared Falstaff, for his unseasonable chattering,
to a minced pie. Cotgrave<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> describes the French
<i>chouette</i> as an owlet; also, a “chough,” which many consider
to be the simple and satisfactory explanation of <i>chewet</i>.
Belon, in his “History of Birds” (Paris, 1855), speaks of the
<i>chouette</i> as the smallest kind of chough or crow. Again, in
“1 Henry IV.” (ii. 2), in the amusing scene where Falstaff,
with the Prince and Poins, meet to rob the travellers at Gadshill,
Falstaff calls the victims “fat chuffs,” probably, says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
Mr. Harting, who connects the word with chough, from their
strutting about with much noise. Nares,<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a> too, in his explanation
of <i>chuff</i>, says, that some suppose it to be from chough,
which is similarly pronounced, and means a kind of sea-bird,
generally esteemed a stupid one. Various other meanings
are given. Thus, Mr. Gifford<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> affirms that <i>chuff</i> is always
used in a bad sense, and means “a coarse, unmannered clown,
at once sordid and wealthy;” and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
explains it as spoken in contempt for a fat person.<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a> In
Northamptonshire,<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> we find the word chuff used to denote a
person in good condition, as in Clare’s “Village Minstrel:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His chuff cheeks dimpling in a fondling smile.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare alludes to the practice of teaching choughs
to talk, although from the following passages he does not
appear to have esteemed their talking powers as of much
value; for in “All’s Well That Ends Well” (iv. 1), he says:
“Choughs’ language, gabble enough, and good enough.”
And in “The Tempest” (ii. 1), he represents Antonio as
saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“There be that can rule Naples<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As amply and unnecessarily<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As this Gonzalo; I myself could make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A chough of as deep chat.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare always refers to the jackdaw as the “daw.”<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a>
The chough or jackdaw was one of the birds considered
ominous by our forefathers, an allusion to which occurs in
“Macbeth” (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Augurs and understood relations have,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
<span class="i0">By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The secret’st man of blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>At the present day this bird is not without its folk-lore,
and there is a Norwich rhyme to the following effect:<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When three daws are seen on St. Peter’s vane together,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then we’re sure to have bad weather.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the north of England,<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a> too, the flight of jackdaws down
the chimney is held to presage death.</p>

<p><i>Cock.</i> The beautiful notion which represents the cock as
crowing all night long on Christmas Eve, and by its vigilance
dispelling every kind of malignant spirit<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a> and evil influence
is graphically mentioned in “Hamlet” (i. 1), where Marcellus,
speaking of the ghost, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It faded on the crowing of the cock.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bird of dawning singeth all night long.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="in">In short, there is a complete prostration of the powers of
darkness; and thus, for the time being, mankind is said to
be released from the influence of all those evil forces which
otherwise exert such sway. The notion that spirits fly at
cock-crow is very ancient, and is mentioned by the Christian
poet Prudentius, who flourished in the beginning of the
fourth century. There is also a hymn, said to have been
composed by St. Ambrose, and formerly used in the Salisbury
Service, which so much resembles the following speech
of Horatio (i. 1), that one might almost suppose Shakespeare
had seen it:<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The extravagant and erring spirit hies<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To his confine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This disappearance of spirits at cock-crow is further alluded
to (i. 2):<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“the morning cock crew loud,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And at the sound it shrunk in haste away,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And vanished from our sight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Blair, too, in his “Grave,” has these graphic words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“the tale<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O’er some new-open’d grave, and, strange to tell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Evanishes at crowing of the cock.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This superstition has not entirely died out in England,
and a correspondent of “Notes and Queries”<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> relates an
amusing legend current in Devonshire: “Mr. N. was a
squire who had been so unfortunate as to sell his soul to
the devil, with the condition that after his funeral the fiend
should take possession of his skin. He had also persuaded
a neighbor to be present on the occasion of the flaying. On
the death of Mr. N. this man went, in a state of great alarm,
to the parson of the parish, and asked his advice. By him
he was told to fulfil his engagement, but he must be sure
and carry a cock into the church with him. On the night
after the funeral the man proceeded to the church, armed
with the cock, and, as an additional security, took up his
position in the parson’s pew. At twelve o’clock the devil
arrived, opened the grave, took the corpse from the coffin,
and flayed it. When the operation was concluded, he held
the skin up before him and remarked, ‘Well, ’twas not worth
coming for after all, for it is all full of holes!’ As he said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
this the cock crew, whereupon the fiend, turning round to
the man, exclaimed, ‘If it had not been for the bird you
have got there under your arm, I would have your skin too!’
But, thanks to the cock, the man got home safe again.”
Various origins have been assigned to this superstition,
which Hampson<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> regards as a misunderstood tradition of
some Sabæan fable. The cock, he adds, which seems by its
early voice to call forth the sun, was esteemed a sacred solar
bird; hence it was also sacred to Mercury, one of the personifications
of the sun.</p>

<p>A very general amusement, up to the end of the last century,
was cock-fighting, a diversion of which mention is occasionally
made by Shakespeare, as in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His cocks do win the battle still of mine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When it is all to nought.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again Hamlet says (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“O, I die, Horatio;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">meaning, the poison triumphs over him, as a cock over his
beaten antagonist. Formerly, cock-fighting entered into the
occupations of the old and young.<a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> Schools had their cock-fights.
Travellers agreed with coachmen that they were to
wait a night if there was a cock-fight in any town through
which they passed. When country gentlemen had sat long
at table, and the conversation had turned upon the relative
merits of their several birds, a cock-fight often resulted, as
the birds in question were brought for the purpose into the
dining-room. Cock-fighting was practised on Shrove Tuesday
to a great extent, and in the time of Henry VII. seems
to have been practised within the precincts of court. The
earliest mention of this pastime in England is by Fitzstephens,
in 1191. Happily, nowadays, cock-fighting is, by law,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
a misdemeanor, and punishable by penalty. One of the popular
terms for a cock beaten in a fight was “a craven,” to
which we find a reference in the “Taming of the Shrew”
(ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No cock of mine; you crow too like a craven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare the expression in “Henry V.” (iv. 7):
“He is a craven and a villain else.” In the old appeal or
wager of battle,<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> in our common law, we are told, on the authority
of Lord Coke, that the party who confessed himself
wrong, or refused to fight, was to pronounce the word <i>cravent</i>,
and judgment was at once given against him. Singer<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a>
says the term may be satisfactorily traced from <i>crant</i>, <i>creant</i>,
the old French word for an act of submission. It is so written
in the old metrical romance of “Ywaine and Gawaine”
(Ritson, i. 133):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Or yelde the til us als creant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Richard Cœur de Lion” (Weber, ii. 208):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“On knees he fel down, and cryde, crêaunt.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It then became <i>cravant</i>, <i>cravent</i>, and at length <i>craven</i>.</p>

<p>In the time of Shakespeare the word <i>cock</i> was used as a
vulgar corruption or purposed disguise of the name of God,
an instance of which occurs in “Hamlet” (iv. 5): “By cock,
they are to blame.” This irreverent alteration of the sacred
name is found at least a dozen times<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a> in Heywood’s “Edward
the Fourth,” where one passage is,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Herald.</i> Sweare on this booke, King Lewis, so help you God,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You mean no otherwise then you have said.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>King Lewis.</i> So helpe me Cock as I dissemble not.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We find, too, other allusions to the sacred name, as in “cock’s
passion,” “cock’s body;” as in “Taming of the Shrew” (iv.
1): “Cock’s passion, silence!” A not uncommon oath, too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
in Shakespeare’s time was “Cock and pie”—<i>cock</i> referring
to God, and <i>pie</i> being supposed to mean the service-book of
the Romish Church; a meaning which, says Mr. Dyce, seems
much more probable than Douce’s<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a> supposition that this
oath was connected with the making of solemn vows by
knights in the days of chivalry, during entertainments at
which a roasted peacock was served up. It is used by Justice
Shallow (“2 Henry IV.,” v. 1): “By cock and pye, sir,
you shall not away to-night.” We may also compare the
expression in the old play of “Soliman and Perseda” (1599):
“By cock and pye and mousefoot.” Mr. Harting<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a> says the
“Cock and Pye” (<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, magpie) was an ordinary ale-house
sign, and may have thus become a subject for the vulgar to
swear by.</p>

<p>The phrase, “Cock-a-hoop”<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a>—which occurs in “Romeo
and Juliet” (i. 5),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You’ll make a mutiny among my guests!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You will set cock-a-hoop! you’ll be the man!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—no doubt refers to a reckless person, who takes the cock or
tap out of a cask, and lays it on the top or hoop of the barrel,
thus letting all the contents of the cask run out. Formerly,
a quart pot was called a hoop, being formed of staves
bound together with hoops like barrels. There were generally
three hoops to such a pot; hence, in “2 Henry VI.”
(iv. 2), one of Jack Cade’s popular reformations was to increase
their number: “the three-hooped pot shall have ten
hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer.”
Some, however, consider the term Cock-a-hoop<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a> refers to
the boastful crowing of the cock.</p>

<p>In “King Lear” (iii. 2) Shakespeare speaks of the “cataracts
and hurricanoes” as having</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Vanes on the tops of steeples were in days gone by made in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
the form of a cock—hence weathercocks—and put up, in papal
times, to remind the clergy of watchfulness.<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> Apart, too,
from symbolism, the large tail of the cock was well adapted
to turn with the wind.<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a></p>

<p><i>Cormorant.</i> The proverbial voracity of this bird<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> gave
rise to a man of large appetite being likened to it, a sense
in which Shakespeare employs the word, as in “Coriolanus”
(i. 1): “the cormorant belly;” in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”
(i. 1): “cormorant devouring Time;” and in “Troilus and
Cressida” (ii. 2): “this cormorant war.” “Although,” says
Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a> “Shakespeare mentions the cormorant in several
of his plays, he has nowhere alluded to the sport of using
these birds, when trained, for fishing; a fact which is
singular, since he often speaks of the then popular pastime
of hawking, and he did not die until some years after
James I. had made fishing with cormorants a fashionable
amusement.”</p>

<p><i>Crow.</i> This has from the earliest times been reckoned a
bird of bad omen; and in “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1), Cassius, on
the eve of battle, predicted a defeat, because, to use his own
words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“crows and kites<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A canopy most fatal, under which<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Allusions to the same superstition occur in “Troilus
and Cressida” (i. 2); “King John” (v. 2), etc. Vergil (“Bucolic,”
i. 18) mentions the croaking of the crow as a bad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
omen:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sæpe sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice cornix.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Butler, in his “Hudibras” (part ii. canto 3), remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Is it not ominous in all countries,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When crows and ravens croak upon trees.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Even children, nowadays, regard with no friendly feelings
this bird of ill-omen;<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> and in the north of England there is
a rhyme to the following effect:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Crow, crow, get out of my sight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else I’ll eat thy liver and lights.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among other allusions made by Shakespeare to the
crow may be noticed the crow-keeper—a person employed
to drive away crows from the fields. At present,<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> in all the
midland counties, a boy set to drive away the birds is said
to keep birds; hence, a stuffed figure, now called a <i>scarecrow</i>,
was also called a crow-keeper, as in “King Lear” (iv. 6):
“That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper.”</p>

<p>One of Tusser’s directions for September is:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No sooner a-sowing, but out by-and-by,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With mother or boy that alarum can cry:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let them be armed with a sling or a bow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To scare away pigeon, the rook, or the crow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4) a scarecrow seems meant:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Scaring the ladies like a crow-keeper.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among further references to this practice is that in
“1 Henry VI.” (i. 4), where Lord Talbot relates that, when
a prisoner in France, he was publicly exhibited in the market-place:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Here, said they, is the terror of the French,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The scarecrow that affrights our children so.”<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, in “Measure for Measure” (ii. 1):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We must not make a scarecrow of the law,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let it keep one shape, till custom make it<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their perch and not their terror.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The phrase “to pluck a crow” is to complain good-naturedly,
but reproachfully, and to threaten retaliation.<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> It
occurs in “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 1): “We’ll pluck a crow
together.” Sometimes the word <i>pull</i> is substituted for pluck,
as in Butler’s “Hudibras” (part ii. canto 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If not, resolve before we go<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That you and I must pull a crow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The crow has been regarded as the emblem of darkness,
which has not escaped the notice of Shakespeare, who, in
“Pericles” (iv. introd.), speaking of the white dove, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“With the dove of Paphos might the crow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Vie feathers white.”<a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cuckoo.</i> Many superstitions have clustered round the
cuckoo, and both in this country and abroad it is looked
upon as a mysterious bird, being supposed to possess the
gift of second-sight, a notion referred to in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cuckoo, cuckoo:<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> O word of fear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unpleasing to a married ear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1), Bottom
sings:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“The plain-song cuckoo gray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose note full many a man doth mark,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And dares not answer nay.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is still a common idea that the cuckoo, if asked, will
tell any one, by the repetition of its cries, how long he has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
to live. The country lasses in Sweden count the cuckoo’s
call to ascertain how many years they have to remain unmarried,
but they generally shut their ears and run away on
hearing it a few times.<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a> Among the Germans the notes of
the cuckoo, when heard in spring for the first time, are considered
a good omen. Cæsarius (1222) tells us of a convertite
who was about to become a monk, but changed his
mind on hearing the cuckoo’s call, and counting twenty-two
repetitions of it. “Come,” said he, “I have certainly twenty-two
years still to live, and why should I mortify myself
during all that time? I will go back to the world, enjoy its
delights for twenty years, and devote the remaining two to
penitence.”<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a> In England the peasantry salute the cuckoo
with the following invocation:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Cuckoo, cherry-tree,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Good bird, tell me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How many years have I to live”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the allusion to the cherry-tree having probably originated
in the popular fancy that before the cuckoo ceases its song
it must eat three good meals of cherries. Pliny mentions
the belief that when the cuckoo came to maturity it devoured
the bird which had reared it, a superstition several
times alluded to by Shakespeare. Thus, in “King Lear”
(i. 4), the Fool remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That it had its head bit off by its young.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 1), Worcester says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And being fed by us you used us so<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo’s bird,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Useth the sparrow; did oppress our nest;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Grew by our feeding to so great a bulk<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That even our love durst not come near your sight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For fear of swallowing.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, the opinion that the cuckoo made no nest of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
its own, but laid its eggs in that of another bird, is mentioned
in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 6):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou dost o’er-count me of my father’s house;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, since the cuckoo builds not for himself,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Remain in’t as thou may’st.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It has been remarked,<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a> however, in reference to the common
idea that the young cuckoo ill-treats its foster-mother, that
if we watch the movements of the two birds, when the
younger is being fed, we cannot much wonder at this piece
of folk-lore. When the cuckoo opens its great mouth, the
diminutive nurse places her own head so far within its precincts
that it has the exact appearance of a voluntary surrender
to decapitation.</p>

<p>The notion<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a> “which couples the name of the cuckoo with
the character of the man whose wife is unfaithful to him
appears to have been derived from the Romans, and is first
found in the Middle Ages in France, and in the countries of
which the modern language is derived from the Latin. But
the ancients more correctly gave the name of the bird, not
to the husband of the faithless wife, but to her paramour,
who might justly be supposed to be acting the part of the
cuckoo. They applied the name of the bird in whose nest
the cuckoo’s eggs were usually deposited—‘carruca’—to the
husband. It is not quite clear how, in the passage from
classic to mediæval, the application of the term was transferred
to the husband.” In further allusion to this bird, we
may quote the following from “All’s Well That Ends Well”
(i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For I the ballad will repeat,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Which men full true shall find,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your marriage comes by destiny,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Your cuckoo sings by kind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The cuckoo has generally been regarded as the harbinger
of spring, and, according to a Gloucester rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The cuckoo comes in April,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Sings a song in May;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then in June another tune,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And then she flies away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 2), the king, alluding to his predecessor,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So, when he had occasion to be seen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He was but as the cuckoo is in June,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Heard, not regarded.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) spring is maintained by
the cuckoo, in those charming sonnets descriptive of the
beauties of the country at this season.</p>

<p>The word cuckoo has, from the earliest times, been used
as a term of reproach;<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> and Plautus<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a> has introduced it on
more than one occasion. In this sense we find it quoted by
Shakespeare in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4): “O’ horseback, ye
cuckoo.” The term <i>cuckold</i>, too, which so frequently occurs
throughout Shakespeare’s plays, is generally derived from
cuculus,<a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> from the practice already alluded to of depositing
its eggs in other birds’ nests.</p>

<p><i>Domestic Fowl.</i> In “The Tempest” (v. 1), the word chick
is used as a term of endearment: “My Ariel; chick,” etc.;
and in “Macbeth” (iv. 3) Macduff speaks of his children as
“all my pretty chickens.” In “Coriolanus” (v. 3), hen is
applied to a woman: “poor hen, fond of no second brood;”
and in “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Petruchio says: “so
Kate will be my hen;” and, once more, “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3),
Falstaff says, “How now, Dame Partlet the hen?” In
“Othello” (i. 3) Iago applies the term “guinea-hen” to
Desdemona, a cant phrase in Shakespeare’s day for a fast
woman.</p>

<p><i>Dove.</i> Among the many beautiful allusions to this bird
we may mention one in “Hamlet” (v. 1), where Shakespeare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
speaks of the dove only laying two eggs:<a name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“as patient as the female dove<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When that her golden couplets are disclosed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The young nestlings, when first disclosed, are only covered
with a yellow down, and the mother rarely leaves the nest,
in consequence of the tenderness of her young; hence the
dove has been made an emblem of patience. In “2 Henry
IV.” (iv. 1), it is spoken of as the symbol of peace:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The dove and very blessed spirit of peace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its love, too, is several times referred to, as in “Romeo and
Juliet” (ii. 1), “Pronounce but—love and dove;” and in
“1 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Burgundy says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like to a pair of loving turtle-doves,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That could not live asunder, day or night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This bird has also been regarded as the emblem of fidelity,
as in the following graphic passage in “Troilus and Cressida”
(iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As sun to day, as turtle to her mate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As iron to adamant, as earth to the centre;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“turtles pair,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That never mean to part.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its modesty is alluded to in the “Taming of the Shrew”
(ii. 1): “modest as the dove;” and its innocence in “2 Henry
VI.” (iii. 1) is mentioned, where King Henry says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our kinsman Gloster is as innocent<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From meaning treason to our royal person<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The duke is virtuous, mild and too well given<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To dream on evil, or to work my downfall.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The custom of giving a pair of doves or pigeons as a present
or peace-offering is alluded to in “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 4),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
where the clown says, “God and Saint Stephen give you
good den: I have brought you a letter and a couple of
pigeons here;” and when Gobbo tried to find favor with
Bassanio, in “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), he began by saying,
“I have here a dish of doves, that I would bestow upon
your worship.” Shakespeare alludes in several places to the
“doves of Venus,” as in “Venus and Adonis:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thus weary of the world, away she [Venus] hies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their mistress, mounted, through the empty skies<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In her light chariot quickly is conveyed;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Means to immure herself and not be seen;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), where Hermia
speaks of “the simplicity of Venus’ doves.” This will also
explain, says Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> the reference to “the dove of
Paphos,” in “Pericles” (iv. Introd.). The towns of Old
and New Paphos are situated on the southwest extremity
of the coast of Cyprus. Old Paphos is the one generally referred
to by the poets, being the peculiar seat of the worship
of Venus, who was fabled to have been wafted thither
after her birth amid the waves. The “dove of Paphos”
may therefore be considered as synonymous with the “dove
of Venus.”</p>

<p>Mahomet, we are told, had a dove, which he used to feed
with wheat out of his ear; when hungry, the dove lighted
on his shoulder, and thrust its bill in to find its breakfast,
Mahomet persuading the rude and simple Arabians that it
was the Holy Ghost, that gave him advice.<a name="FNanchor_202_202" id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> Hence, in
“1 Henry VI.” (i. 2), the question is asked:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Was Mahomet inspired with a dove?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Duck.</i> A barbarous pastime in Shakespeare’s time was
hunting a tame duck in the water with spaniels. For the
performance of this amusement<a name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a> it was necessary to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
recourse to a pond of water sufficiently extensive to give
the duck plenty of room for making its escape from the
dogs when closely pursued, which it did by diving as often
as any of them came near it, hence the following allusion in
“Henry V.” (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And hold-fast is the only dog, my duck.”<a name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“To swim like a duck” is a common proverb, which occurs
in “The Tempest” (ii. 2), where Trinculo, in reply to
Stephano’s question how he escaped, says: “Swam ashore,
man, like a duck; I can swim like a duck, I’ll be sworn.”</p>

<p><i>Eagle.</i> From the earliest time this bird has been associated
with numerous popular fancies and superstitions, many
of which have not escaped the notice of Shakespeare. A
notion of very great antiquity attributes to it the power of
gazing at the sun undazzled, to which Spenser, in his “Hymn
of Heavenly Beauty” refers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And like the native brood of eagle’s kind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On that bright sun of glory fix thine eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3) Biron says of Rosaline:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What peremptory eagle-sighted eye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That is not blinded by her majesty?”<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 1) Richard says to his brother
Edward:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, if thou be that princely eagle’s bird,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Show thy descent by gazing ’gainst the sun.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The French naturalist, Lacepede,<a name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> has calculated that the
clearness of vision in birds is nine times more extensive than
that of the farthest-sighted man. The eagle, too, has always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
been proverbial for its great power of flight, and on this account
has had assigned to it the sovereignty of the feathered
race. Aristotle and Pliny both record the legend of
the wren disputing for the crown, a tradition which is still
found in Ireland:<a name="FNanchor_207_207" id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> “The birds all met together one day, and
settled among themselves that whichever of them could fly
highest was to be the king of them all. Well, just as they
were starting, the little rogue of a wren perched itself on the
eagle’s tail. So they flew and flew ever so high, till the
eagle was miles above all the rest, and could not fly another
stroke, for he was so tired. Then says he, ‘I’m the king
of the birds,’ says he; ‘hurroo!’ ‘You lie,’ says the wren,
darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. The
eagle was so angry to think how he was outwitted by the
wren, that when the latter was coming down he gave him a
stroke of his wing, and from that day the wren has never
been able to fly higher than a hawthorn bush.” The swiftness
of the eagle’s flight is spoken of in “Timon of Athens,”
(i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Leaving no tract behind.”<a name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The great age, too, of the eagle is well known; and the
words of the Psalmist are familiar to most readers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Apemantus, however, asks of Timon (“Timon of Athens,”
iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“will these moss’d trees,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And skip when thou point’st out?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Turbervile, in his “Booke of Falconrie,” 1575, says that
the great age of this bird has been ascertained from the circumstance
of its always building its eyrie or nest in the same
place. The Romans considered the eagle a bird of good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
omen, and its presence in time of battle was supposed to
foretell victory. Thus, in “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Coming from Sardis, on our former ensign<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Two mighty eagles fell; and there they perch’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gorging and feeding from our soldiers’ hands.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was selected for the Roman legionary standard,<a name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> through
being the king and most powerful of all birds. As a bird
of good omen it is mentioned also in “Cymbeline” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“I chose an eagle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And did avoid a puttock;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in another scene (iv. 2) the Soothsayer relates how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Last night the very gods show’d me a vision,<br /></span>
<span class="i11">... thus:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, wing’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the spungy south to this part of the west,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There vanish’d in the sunbeams: which portends<br /></span>
<span class="i0">(Unless my sins abuse my divination),<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Success to the Roman host.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The conscious superiority<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> of the eagle is depicted by Tamora
in “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The eagle suffers little birds to sing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And is not careful what they mean thereby,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Knowing that with the shadow of his wing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He can at pleasure stint their melody.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Goose.</i> This bird was the subject<a name="FNanchor_211_211" id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a> of many quaint proverbial
phrases often used in the old popular writers. Thus,
a <i>tailor’s goose</i> was a jocular name for his pressing-iron, probably
from its being often roasting before the fire, an allusion
to which occurs in “Macbeth” (ii. 3): “come in, tailor; here
you may roast your goose.” The “wild-goose chase,”
which is mentioned in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4)—“Nay,
if thy wits run the wild-goose chase, I have done”—was
a kind of horse-race, which resembled the flight of wild<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
geese. Two horses were started together, and whichever
rider could get the lead, the other was obliged to follow
him over whatever ground the foremost jockey chose to
go. That horse which could distance the other won the
race. This reckless sport is mentioned by Burton, in his
“Anatomy of Melancholy,” as a recreation much in vogue
in his time among gentlemen. The term “Winchester
goose” was a cant phrase for a certain venereal disease, because
the stews in Southwark were under the jurisdiction
of the Bishop of Winchester, to whom Gloster tauntingly
applies the term in the following passage (“1 Henry VI.,”
i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Winchester goose! I cry—a rope! a rope!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 10) there is a further allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Ben Jonson<a name="FNanchor_212_212" id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a> calls it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“the Winchestrian goose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bred on the banke in time of Popery,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When Venus there maintain’d the mystery.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Plucking geese” was formerly a barbarous sport of boys
(“Merry Wives of Windsor,” v. 1), which consisted in stripping
a living goose of its feathers.<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a></p>

<p>In “Coriolanus” (i. 4), the goose is spoken of as the emblem
of cowardice. Marcius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“You souls of geese,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That bear the shapes of men, how have you run<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From slaves that apes would beat!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Goldfinch.</i> The Warwickshire name<a name="FNanchor_214_214" id="FNanchor_214_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_214_214" class="fnanchor">[214]</a> for this bird is
“Proud Tailor,” to which, some commentators think, the
words in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1) refer:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Lady P.</i> I will not sing.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Hotsp.</i> ’Tis the next way to turn tailor, or be red-breast teacher.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It has, therefore, been suggested that the passage should be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
read thus: “’Tis the next way to turn tailor, or red-breast
teacher,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, “to turn teacher of goldfinches or redbreasts.”<a name="FNanchor_215_215" id="FNanchor_215_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_215_215" class="fnanchor">[215]</a>
Singer,<a name="FNanchor_216_216" id="FNanchor_216_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_216_216" class="fnanchor">[216]</a> however, explains the words thus: “Tailors, like
weavers, have ever been remarkable for their vocal skill.
Percy is jocular in his mode of persuading his wife to sing;
and this is a humorous turn which he gives to his argument,
‘Come, sing.’ ‘I will not sing.’ ‘’Tis the next [<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, the
readiest, nearest] way to turn tailor, or redbreast teacher’—the
meaning being, to sing is to put yourself upon a level
with tailors and teachers of birds.”</p>

<p><i>Gull.</i> Shakespeare often uses this word as synonymous
with fool. Thus in “Henry V.” (iii. 6) he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, ’tis a gull, a fool.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The same play upon the word occurs in “Othello” (v. 2),
and in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 1). In “Twelfth Night”
(v. 1) Malvolio asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And made the most notorious geck and gull<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That e’er invention played on? tell me why.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is also used to express a trick or imposition, as in “Much
Ado About Nothing” (ii. 3): “I should think this a gull,
but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it.”<a name="FNanchor_217_217" id="FNanchor_217_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_217_217" class="fnanchor">[217]</a> “Gull-catchers,”
or “gull-gropers,” to which reference is made in
“Twelfth Night” (ii. 5), where Fabian, on the entry of Maria,
exclaims: “Here comes my noble gull-catcher,” were the
names by which sharpers<a name="FNanchor_218_218" id="FNanchor_218_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_218_218" class="fnanchor">[218]</a> were known in Shakespeare’s
time.<a name="FNanchor_219_219" id="FNanchor_219_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_219_219" class="fnanchor">[219]</a> The “gull-catcher” was generally an old usurer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
who lent money to a gallant at an ordinary, who had been
unfortunate in play.<a name="FNanchor_220_220" id="FNanchor_220_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_220_220" class="fnanchor">[220]</a> Decker devotes a chapter to this
character in his “Lanthorne and Candle-light,” 1612. According
to him, “the gull-groper is commonly an old mony-monger,
who having travailed through all the follyes of the
world in his youth, knowes them well, and shunnes them in
his age, his whole felicitie being to fill his bags with golde
and silver.” The person so duped was termed a gull, and
the trick also. In that disputed passage in “The Tempest”
(ii. 2), where Caliban, addressing Trinculo, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“sometimes I’ll get thee<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Young scamels from the rock.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">some think that the sea-mew, or sea-gull, is intended,<a name="FNanchor_221_221" id="FNanchor_221_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_221_221" class="fnanchor">[221]</a> sea-mall,
or sea-mell, being still a provincial name for this bird.
Mr. Stevenson, in his “Birds of Norfolk” (vol. ii. p. 260), tells
us that “the female bar-tailed godwit is called a ‘scammell’
by the gunners of Blakeney. But as this bird is not a rock-breeder,<a name="FNanchor_222_222" id="FNanchor_222_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_222_222" class="fnanchor">[222]</a>
it cannot be the one intended in the present passage,
if we regard it as an accurate description from a naturalist’s
point of view.” Holt says that “scam” is a limpet,
and scamell probably a diminutive. Mr. Dyce<a name="FNanchor_223_223" id="FNanchor_223_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_223_223" class="fnanchor">[223]</a> reads “scamels,”
<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, the kestrel, stannel, or windhover, which breeds in
rocky situations and high cliffs on our coasts. He also
further observes that this accords well with the context
“from the rock,” and adds that staniel or stannyel occurs in
“Twelfth Night” (ii. 5), where all the old editions exhibit
the gross misprint “stallion.”</p>

<p><i>Hawk.</i> The diversion of catching game with hawks was
very popular in Shakespeare’s time,<a name="FNanchor_224_224" id="FNanchor_224_224"></a><a href="#Footnote_224_224" class="fnanchor">[224]</a> and hence, as might be
expected, we find many scattered allusions to it throughout<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
his plays. The training of a hawk for the field was an essential
part of the education of a young Saxon nobleman;
and the present of a well-trained hawk was a gift to be welcomed
by a king. Edward the Confessor spent much of his
leisure time in either hunting or hawking; and in the reign
of Edward III. we read how the Bishop of Ely attended the
service of the church at Bermondsey, Southwark, leaving his
hawk in the cloister, which in the meantime was stolen—the
bishop solemnly excommunicating the thieves. On one occasion
Henry VIII. met with a serious accident when pursuing
his hawk at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. In jumping
over a ditch his pole broke, and he fell headlong into the
muddy water, whence he was with some difficulty rescued by
one of his followers. Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign
of Henry VIII., describing the state of manhood, makes a
young man say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Man-hod I am, therefore I me delyght<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hunt and hawke, to nourish up and fede<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The greyhounde to the course, the hawke to th’ flight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And to bestryde a good and lusty stede.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In noticing, then, Shakespeare’s allusions to this sport, we
have a good insight into its various features, and also gain a
knowledge of the several terms associated with it. Thus
frequent mention is made of the word “haggard”—a wild,
untrained hawk—and in the following allegory (“Taming of
the Shrew,” iv. 1), where it occurs, much of the knowledge
of falconry is comprised:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My falcon now is sharp, and passing empty;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged,<a name="FNanchor_225_225" id="FNanchor_225_225"></a><a href="#Footnote_225_225" class="fnanchor">[225]</a><br /></span>
<span class="i0">For then she never looks upon her lure.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Another way I have to man my haggard,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make her come, and know her keeper’s call;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not.”<a name="FNanchor_226_226" id="FNanchor_226_226"></a><a href="#Footnote_226_226" class="fnanchor">[226]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Further allusions occur in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 1), where
Viola says of the Clown:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And to do that well craves a kind of wit:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He must observe their mood on whom he jests,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The quality of persons, and the time;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, like the haggard, check at every feather<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That comes before his eye.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1), Hero, speaking
of Beatrice, says that:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“her spirits are as coy and wild<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As haggards of the rock.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Othello (iii. 3), mistrusting Desdemona, and likening
her to a hawk, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“if I do prove her haggard,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’d whistle her off.”<a name="FNanchor_227_227" id="FNanchor_227_227"></a><a href="#Footnote_227_227" class="fnanchor">[227]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The word “check” alluded to above was a term in falconry
applied to a hawk when she forsook her proper game and
followed some other of inferior kind that crossed her in her
flight<a name="FNanchor_228_228" id="FNanchor_228_228"></a><a href="#Footnote_228_228" class="fnanchor">[228]</a>—being mentioned again in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), where
the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“If he be now return’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As checking at his voyage.”<a name="FNanchor_229_229" id="FNanchor_229_229"></a><a href="#Footnote_229_229" class="fnanchor">[229]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another common expression used in falconry is “tower,”
applied to certain hawks, etc., which tower aloft, soar spirally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
to a height in the air, and thence swoop upon their prey.
In “Macbeth” (ii. 4) we read of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A falcon, towering in her pride of place;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">in “2 Henry VI.” (ii. 1) Suffolk says,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My lord protector’s hawks do tower so well;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “King John” (v. 2) the Bastard says,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And like an eagle o’er his aery<a name="FNanchor_230_230" id="FNanchor_230_230"></a><a href="#Footnote_230_230" class="fnanchor">[230]</a> towers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The word “quarry,” which occurs several times in Shakespeare’s
plays, in some instances means the “game or prey
sought.” The etymology has, says Nares, been variously
attempted, but with little success. It may, perhaps, originally
have meant the square, or enclosure (<i>carrée</i>), into which
the game was driven (as is still practised in other countries),
and hence the application of it to the game there caught
would be a natural extension of the term. Randle Holme,
in his “Academy of Armory” (book ii. c. xi. p. 240), defines
it as “the fowl which the hawk flyeth at, whether dead or
alive.” It was also equivalent to a heap of slaughtered game,
as in the following passages. In “Coriolanus” (i. 1), Caius
Marcius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“I’d make a quarry<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With thousands of these quarter’d slaves.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Macbeth” (iv. 3)<a name="FNanchor_231_231" id="FNanchor_231_231"></a><a href="#Footnote_231_231" class="fnanchor">[231]</a> we read “the quarry of these murder’d
deer;” and in “Hamlet” (v. 2), “This quarry cries on
havock.”</p>

<p>Another term in falconry is “stoop,” or “swoop,” denoting
the hawk’s violent descent from a height upon its prey.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
In “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 1) the expression occurs, “till
she stoop, she must not be full-gorged.” In “Henry V.” (iv. 1),
King Henry, speaking of the king, says, “though his affections
are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop,
they stoop with the like wing.” In “Macbeth” (iv. 3), too,
Macduff, referring to the cruel murder of his children, exclaims,
“What! ... at one fell swoop?”<a name="FNanchor_232_232" id="FNanchor_232_232"></a><a href="#Footnote_232_232" class="fnanchor">[232]</a> Webster, in the
“White Devil,”<a name="FNanchor_233_233" id="FNanchor_233_233"></a><a href="#Footnote_233_233" class="fnanchor">[233]</a> says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If she [<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, Fortune] give aught, she deals it in small parcels,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That she may take away all at one swoop.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare gives many incidental allusions to the hawk’s
trappings. Thus, in “Lucrece” he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon’s bells.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “As You Like It” (iii. 3),<a name="FNanchor_234_234" id="FNanchor_234_234"></a><a href="#Footnote_234_234" class="fnanchor">[234]</a> Touchstone says, “As
the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon
her bells, so man hath his desires.” The object of these bells
was to lead the falconer to the hawk when in a wood or out
of sight. In Heywood’s play entitled “A Woman Killed
with Kindness,” 1617, is a hawking scene, containing a striking
allusion to the hawk’s bells. The dress of the hawk
consisted of a close-fitting hood of leather or velvet, enriched
with needlework, and surmounted with a tuft of colored
feathers, for use as well as ornament, inasmuch as they assisted
the hand in removing the hood when the birds for
the hawk’s attack came in sight. Thus in “Henry V.” (iii. 7),
the Constable of France, referring to the valor of the Dauphin,
says, “’Tis a hooded valour; and when it appears, it
will bate.”<a name="FNanchor_235_235" id="FNanchor_235_235"></a><a href="#Footnote_235_235" class="fnanchor">[235]</a> And again, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 2), Juliet
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hood my unmann’d<a name="FNanchor_236_236" id="FNanchor_236_236"></a><a href="#Footnote_236_236" class="fnanchor">[236]</a> blood, bating in my cheeks.”<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The “jesses” were two short straps of leather or silk, which
were fastened to each leg of a hawk, to which was attached
a swivel, from which depended the leash or strap which the
falconer<a name="FNanchor_237_237" id="FNanchor_237_237"></a><a href="#Footnote_237_237" class="fnanchor">[237]</a> twisted round his hand. Othello (iii. 3) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We find several allusions to the training of hawks.<a name="FNanchor_238_238" id="FNanchor_238_238"></a><a href="#Footnote_238_238" class="fnanchor">[238]</a> They
were usually trained by being kept from sleep, it having
been customary for the falconers to sit up by turns and
“watch” the hawk, and keep it from sleeping, sometimes
for three successive nights. Desdemona, in “Othello” (iii. 3),
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“my lord shall never rest;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll watch him tame and talk him out of patience;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll intermingle everything he does<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With Cassio’s suit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>So, in Cartwright’s “Lady Errant” (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We’ll keep you as they do hawks,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Watching until you leave your wildness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), where Page
says,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, do not fly: I think we have watch’d you now,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the allusion is, says Staunton, to this method employed to
tame or “reclaim” hawks.</p>

<p>Again, in “Othello” (iii. 3),<a name="FNanchor_239_239" id="FNanchor_239_239"></a><a href="#Footnote_239_239" class="fnanchor">[239]</a> Iago exclaims:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She that, so young, could give out such a seeming,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To seel her father’s eyes up close as oak;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">in allusion to the practice of seeling a hawk, or sewing up her
eyelids, by running a fine thread through them, in order to
make her tractable and endure the hood of which we have
already spoken.<a name="FNanchor_240_240" id="FNanchor_240_240"></a><a href="#Footnote_240_240" class="fnanchor">[240]</a> King Henry (“2 Henry IV.” iii. 1), in his
soliloquy on sleep, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In cradle of the rude imperious surge.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” (I. vii. 23), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mine eyes no more on vanity shall feed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But sealed up with death, shall have their deadly meed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was a common notion that if a dove was let loose with
its eyes so closed it would fly straight upwards, continuing
to mount till it fell down through mere exhaustion.<a name="FNanchor_241_241" id="FNanchor_241_241"></a><a href="#Footnote_241_241" class="fnanchor">[241]</a></p>

<p>In “Cymbeline” (iii. 4), Imogen, referring to Posthumus,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“I grieve myself<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To think, when thou shalt be disedged by her<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That now thou tir’st on,”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">this passage containing two metaphorical expressions from
falconry. A bird was said to be <i>disedged</i> when the keenness
of its appetite was taken away by <i>tiring</i>, or feeding upon
some tough or hard substance given to it for that purpose.
In “3 Henry VI.” (i. 1), the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“that hateful duke,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose haughty spirit, winged with desire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will cost my crown, and like an empty eagle<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tire on the flesh of me and of my son.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Timon of Athens” (iii. 6), one of the lords says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
“Upon that were my thoughts tiring, when we encountered.”</p>

<p>In “Venus and Adonis,” too, we find a further allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among other allusions to the hawk may be mentioned
one in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“This outward-sainted deputy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose settled visage and deliberate word<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nips youth i’ the head, and follies doth <i>emmew</i>,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As falcon doth the fowl”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the word “emmew” signifying the place where hawks
were shut up during the time they moulted. In “Romeo
and Juliet” (iii. 4), Lady Capulet says of Juliet:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To-night she’s mew’d up to her heaviness;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 1), Gremio, speaking of
Bianca to Signor Baptista, says: “Why will you mew her?”</p>

<p>When the wing or tail feathers of a hawk were dropped,
forced out, or broken, by any accident, it was usual to supply
or repair as many as were deficient or damaged, an operation
called “to imp<a name="FNanchor_242_242" id="FNanchor_242_242"></a><a href="#Footnote_242_242" class="fnanchor">[242]</a> a hawk.” Thus, in “Richard II.”
(ii. 1), Northumberland says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If, then, we shall shake off our slavish yoke,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Imp out our drooping country’s broken wing.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So Massinger, in his “Renegado” (v. 8), makes Asambeg
say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“strive to imp<br /></span>
<span class="i0">New feathers to the broken wings of time.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Hawking was sometimes called birding.<a name="FNanchor_243_243" id="FNanchor_243_243"></a><a href="#Footnote_243_243" class="fnanchor">[243]</a> In the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iii. 3) Master Page says: “I do invite
you to-morrow morning to my house to breakfast; after,
we’ll a-birding together, I have a fine hawk for the bush.”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
In the same play (iii. 5) Dame Quickly, speaking of Mistress
Ford, says: “Her husband goes this morning a-birding;”
and Mistress Ford says (iv. 2): “He’s a-birding, sweet Sir
John.” The word hawk, says Mr. Harting, is invariably
used by Shakespeare in its generic sense; and in only two
instances does he allude to a particular species. These are
the kestrel and sparrow-hawk. In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 5)
Sir Toby Belch, speaking of Malvolio, as he finds the letter
which Maria has purposely dropped in his path, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And with what wing the staniel<a name="FNanchor_244_244" id="FNanchor_244_244"></a><a href="#Footnote_244_244" class="fnanchor">[244]</a> checks at it”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—staniel being a corruption of stangdall, a name for the
kestrel hawk.<a name="FNanchor_245_245" id="FNanchor_245_245"></a><a href="#Footnote_245_245" class="fnanchor">[245]</a> “Gouts” is the technical term for the spots
on some parts of the plumage of a hawk, and perhaps Shakespeare
uses the word in allusion to a phrase in heraldry.
Macbeth (ii. 1), speaking of the dagger, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“I see thee still,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Heron.</i> This bird was frequently flown at by falconers.
Shakespeare, in “Hamlet” (ii. 2), makes Hamlet say, “I am
but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I
know a hawk from a handsaw;” handsaw being a corruption
of “heronshaw,” or “hernsew,” which is still used, in
the provincial dialects, for a heron. In Suffolk and Norfolk
it is pronounced “harnsa,” from which to “handsaw” is but
a single step.<a name="FNanchor_246_246" id="FNanchor_246_246"></a><a href="#Footnote_246_246" class="fnanchor">[246]</a> Shakespeare here alludes to a proverbial
saying, “He knows not a hawk from a handsaw.”<a name="FNanchor_247_247" id="FNanchor_247_247"></a><a href="#Footnote_247_247" class="fnanchor">[247]</a> Mr. J.&nbsp;C.
Heath<a name="FNanchor_248_248" id="FNanchor_248_248"></a><a href="#Footnote_248_248" class="fnanchor">[248]</a> explains the passage thus: “The expression obviously
refers to the sport of hawking. Most birds, especially
one of heavy flight like the heron, when roused by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
falconer or his dog, would fly down or with the wind, in order
to escape. When the wind is from the north the heron
flies towards the south, and the spectator may be dazzled
by the sun, and be unable to distinguish the hawk from the
heron. On the other hand, when the wind is southerly the
heron flies towards the north, and it and the pursuing hawk
are clearly seen by the sportsman, who then has his back to
the sun, and without difficulty knows the hawk from the
hernsew.”</p>

<p><i>Jay.</i> From its gay and gaudy plumage this bird has
been used for a loose woman, as “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(iii. 3): “we’ll teach him to know turtles from jays,”
<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, to distinguish honest women from loose ones. Again,
in “Cymbeline” (iii. 4), Imogen says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“Some jay of Italy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose mother was her painting,<a name="FNanchor_249_249" id="FNanchor_249_249"></a><a href="#Footnote_249_249" class="fnanchor">[249]</a> hath betray’d him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><a name="Kestrel" id="Kestrel"></a><i>Kestrel.</i> A hawk of a base, unserviceable breed,<a name="FNanchor_250_250" id="FNanchor_250_250"></a><a href="#Footnote_250_250" class="fnanchor">[250]</a> and
therefore used by Spenser, in his “Fairy Queen” (II. iii. 4),
to signify base:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ne thought of honour ever did assay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His baser breast, but in his kestrell kynd<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A pleasant veine of glory he did fynd.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">By some<a name="FNanchor_251_251" id="FNanchor_251_251"></a><a href="#Footnote_251_251" class="fnanchor">[251]</a> it is derived from “coystril,” a knave or peasant,
from being the hawk formerly used by persons of inferior
rank. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), we find “coystrill,”
and in “Pericles” (iv. 6) “coystrel.” The name kestrel,
says Singer,<a name="FNanchor_252_252" id="FNanchor_252_252"></a><a href="#Footnote_252_252" class="fnanchor">[252]</a> for an inferior kind of hawk, was evidently a
corruption of the French <i>quercelle</i> or <i>quercerelle</i>, and originally
had no connection with coystril, though in later times
they may have been confounded. Holinshed<a name="FNanchor_253_253" id="FNanchor_253_253"></a><a href="#Footnote_253_253" class="fnanchor">[253]</a> classes coisterels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
with lackeys and women, the unwarlike attendants
on an army. The term was also given as a nickname to the
emissaries employed by the kings of England in their French
wars. Dyce<a name="FNanchor_254_254" id="FNanchor_254_254"></a><a href="#Footnote_254_254" class="fnanchor">[254]</a> also considers kestrel distinct from coistrel.</p>

<p><i>Kingfisher.</i> It was a common belief in days gone by that
during the days the halcyon or kingfisher was engaged in
hatching her eggs, the sea remained so calm that the sailor
might venture upon it without incurring risk of storm or
tempest; hence this period was called by Pliny and Aristotle
“the halcyon days,” to which allusion is made in “1
Henry VI.” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Dryden also refers to this notion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Amidst our arms as quiet you shall be,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As halcyons brooding on a winter’s sea.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Another superstition connected with this bird occurs in
“King Lear” (ii. 2), where the Earl of Kent says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“turn their halcyon beaks<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With every gale and vary of their masters;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the prevalent idea being that a dead kingfisher, suspended
from a cord, would always turn its beak in that direction
from whence the wind blew. Marlowe, in his “Jew of Malta”
(i. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But now how stands the wind?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Occasionally one may still see this bird hung up in cottages,
a remnant, no doubt, of this old superstition.<a name="FNanchor_255_255" id="FNanchor_255_255"></a><a href="#Footnote_255_255" class="fnanchor">[255]</a></p>

<p><i>Kite.</i> This bird was considered by the ancients to be unlucky.
In “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1) Cassius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“ravens, crows, and kites,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fly o’er our heads, and downward look on us.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Cymbeline” (i. 2), too, Imogen says,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“I chose an eagle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And did avoid a puttock,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">puttock, here, being a synonym sometimes applied to the
kite.<a name="FNanchor_256_256" id="FNanchor_256_256"></a><a href="#Footnote_256_256" class="fnanchor">[256]</a> Formerly the kite became a term of reproach from
its ignoble habits. Thus, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii.
13), Antony exclaims, “you kite!” and King Lear (i. 4)
says to Goneril, “Detested kite! thou liest.” Its intractable
disposition is alluded to in “Taming of the Shrew,” by Petruchio
(iv. 1). A curious peculiarity of this bird is noticed
in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3), where Autolycus says: “My traffic
is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen”—meaning
that his practice was to steal sheets; leaving the
smaller linen to be carried away by the kites, who will occasionally
carry it off to line their nests.<a name="FNanchor_257_257" id="FNanchor_257_257"></a><a href="#Footnote_257_257" class="fnanchor">[257]</a> Mr. Dyce<a name="FNanchor_258_258" id="FNanchor_258_258"></a><a href="#Footnote_258_258" class="fnanchor">[258]</a> quotes
the following remarks of Mr. Peck on this passage: “Autolycus
here gives us to understand that he is a thief of the
first class. This he explains by an allusion to an odd vulgar
notion. The common people, many of them, think that
if any one can find a kite’s nest when she hath young, before
they are fledged, and sew up their back doors, so as
they cannot mute, the mother-kite, in compassion to their
distress, will steal lesser linen, as caps, cravats, ruffles, or any
other such small matters as she can best fly with, from off
the hedges where they are hanged to dry after washing, and
carry them to her nest, and there leave them, if possible to
move the pity of the first comer, to cut the thread and ease
them of their misery.”</p>

<p><i>Lapwing.</i> Several interesting allusions are made by Shakespeare
to this eccentric bird. It was a common notion that
the young lapwings ran out of the shell with part of it sticking
on their heads, in such haste were they to be hatched.
Horatio (“Hamlet,” v. 2) says of Osric: “This lapwing runs
away with the shell on his head.”</p>

<p>It was, therefore, regarded as the symbol of a forward fellow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
Webster,<a name="FNanchor_259_259" id="FNanchor_259_259"></a><a href="#Footnote_259_259" class="fnanchor">[259]</a> in the “White Devil” (1857, p. 13), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“forward lapwing!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He flies with the shell on’s head.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The lapwing, like the partridge, is also said to draw pursuers
from her nest by fluttering along the ground in an opposite
direction or by crying in other places. Thus, in the
“Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2), Shakespeare says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Far from her nest the lapwing cries away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Measure for Measure” (i. 4), Lucio exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“though ’tis my familiar sin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tongue far from heart.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Close by the ground, to hear our conference.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Several, too, of our older poets refer to this peculiarity.
In Ben Jonson’s “Underwoods” (lviii.) we are told:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Where he that knows will like a lapwing fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Farre from the nest, and so himself belie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Through thus alluring intruders from its nest, the lapwing
became a symbol of insincerity; and hence originated the
proverb, “The lapwing cries tongue from heart,” or, “The
lapwing cries most, farthest from her nest.”<a name="FNanchor_260_260" id="FNanchor_260_260"></a><a href="#Footnote_260_260" class="fnanchor">[260]</a></p>

<p><i>Lark.</i> Shakespeare has bequeathed to us many exquisite
passages referring to the lark, full of the most sublime pathos
and lofty conceptions. Most readers are doubtless acquainted
with that superb song in “Cymbeline” (ii. 3), where
this sweet songster is represented as singing “at heaven’s
gate;” and again, as the bird of dawn, it is described in
“Venus and Adonis,” thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
<span class="i0">From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The sun ariseth in his majesty.”<a name="FNanchor_261_261" id="FNanchor_261_261"></a><a href="#Footnote_261_261" class="fnanchor">[261]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2, song) we have a graphic
touch of pastoral life:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The words of Portia, too, in “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), to
sing “as sweetly as the lark,” have long ago passed into a
proverb.</p>

<p>It was formerly a current saying that the lark and toad
changed eyes, to which Juliet refers in “Romeo and Juliet”
(iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some say, the lark and loathed toad change eyes;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Warburton says this popular fancy originated in the toad
having very fine eyes, and the lark very ugly ones. This
tradition was formerly expressed in a rustic rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“to heav’n I’d fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But that the toad beguil’d me of mine eye.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Henry VIII.” (iii. 2) the Earl of Surrey, in denouncing
Wolsey, alludes to a curious method of capturing larks,
which was effected by small mirrors and red cloth. These,
scaring the birds, made them crouch, while the fowler drew
his nets over them:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“let his grace go forward,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And dare us with his cap, like larks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In this case the cap was the scarlet hat of the cardinal, which
it was intended to use as a piece of red cloth. The same
idea occurs in Skelton’s “Why Come Ye not to Court?” a
satire on Wolsey:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The red hat with his lure<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bringeth all things under cure.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The words “tirra-lirra” (“Winter’s Tale,” iv. 3) are a fanciful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
combination of sounds,<a name="FNanchor_262_262" id="FNanchor_262_262"></a><a href="#Footnote_262_262" class="fnanchor">[262]</a> meant to imitate the lark’s
note; borrowed, says Nares, from the French <i>tire-lire</i>.
Browne, “British Pastorals” (bk. i. song 4), makes it “teery-leery.”
In one of the Coventry pageants there is the following
old song sung by the shepherds at the birth of Christ,
which contains the expression:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As I out rode this endenes night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of three joli sheppards I sawe a syght,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all aboute there fold a stare shone bright,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They sang terli terlow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So mereli the sheppards their pipes can blow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Scotland<a name="FNanchor_263_263" id="FNanchor_263_263"></a><a href="#Footnote_263_263" class="fnanchor">[263]</a> and the north of England the peasantry say
that if one is desirous of knowing what the lark says, he
must lie down on his back in the field and listen, and he
will then hear it say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Up in the lift go we,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tehee, tehee, tehee, tehee!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There’s not a shoemaker on the earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Can make a shoe to me, to me!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Why so, why so, why so?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Because my heel is as long as my toe.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Magpie.</i> It was formerly known as magot-pie, probably
from the French <i>magot</i>, a monkey, because the bird chatters
and plays droll tricks like a monkey. It has generally been
regarded with superstitious awe as a mysterious bird,<a name="FNanchor_264_264" id="FNanchor_264_264"></a><a href="#Footnote_264_264" class="fnanchor">[264]</a> and
is thus alluded to in “Macbeth” (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Augurs and understood relations, have<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The secret’st man of blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), it is said:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“chattering pies in dismal discords sung.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There are numerous rhymes<a name="FNanchor_265_265" id="FNanchor_265_265"></a><a href="#Footnote_265_265" class="fnanchor">[265]</a> relating to the magpie, of
which we subjoin, as a specimen, one prevalent in the north<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
of England:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“One is sorrow, two mirth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Three a wedding, four a birth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Five heaven, six hell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seven the de’il’s ain sell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Devonshire, in order to avert the ill-luck from seeing a
magpie, the peasant spits over his right shoulder three times,
and in Yorkshire various charms are in use. One is to raise
the hat as a salutation, and then to sign the cross on the
breast; and another consists in making the same sign by
crossing the thumbs. It is a common notion in Scotland
that magpies flying near the windows of a house portend a
speedy death to one of its inmates. The superstitions associated
with the magpie are not confined to this country, for
in Sweden<a name="FNanchor_266_266" id="FNanchor_266_266"></a><a href="#Footnote_266_266" class="fnanchor">[266]</a> it is considered the witch’s bird, belonging to the
evil one and the other powers of night. In Denmark, when
a magpie perches on a house it is regarded as a sign that
strangers are coming.</p>

<p><i>Martin.</i> The martin, or martlet, which is called in “Macbeth”
(i. 6) the “guest of summer,” as being a migratory
bird, has been from the earliest times treated with superstitious
respect—it being considered unlucky to molest or in
any way injure its nest. Thus, in the “Merchant of Venice”
(ii. 9), the Prince of Arragon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“the martlet<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Builds in the weather, on the outward wall,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even in the force and road of casualty.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Forster<a name="FNanchor_267_267" id="FNanchor_267_267"></a><a href="#Footnote_267_267" class="fnanchor">[267]</a> says that the circumstance of this bird’s nest being
built so close to the habitations of man indicates that it
has long enjoyed freedom from molestation. There is a
popular rhyme still current in the north of England:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The martin and the swallow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are God Almighty’s bow and arrow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Nightingale.</i> The popular error that the nightingale sings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
with its breast impaled upon a thorn is noticed by Shakespeare,
who makes Lucrece say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And whiles against a thorn thou bear’st thy part<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To keep thy sharp woes waking.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Passionate Pilgrim” (xxi.) there is an allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Everything did banish moan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Save the nightingale alone.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She, poor bird, as all forlorn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lean’d her breast up-till a thorn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And there sung the dolefull’st ditty,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That to hear it was great pity.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Beaumont and Fletcher, in “The Faithful Shepherdess”
(v. 3), speak of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The nightingale among the thick-leaved spring,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That sits alone in sorrow, and doth sing<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whole nights away in mourning.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Sir Thomas Browne<a name="FNanchor_268_268" id="FNanchor_268_268"></a><a href="#Footnote_268_268" class="fnanchor">[268]</a> asks “Whether the nightingale’s sitting
with her breast against a thorn be any more than that
she placeth some prickles on the outside of her nest, or
roosteth in thorny, prickly places, where serpents may least
approach her?”<a name="FNanchor_269_269" id="FNanchor_269_269"></a><a href="#Footnote_269_269" class="fnanchor">[269]</a> In the “Zoologist” for 1862 the Rev. A.&nbsp;C.
Smith mentions “the discovery, on two occasions, of a
strong thorn projecting upwards in the centre of the nightingale’s
nest.” Another notion is that the nightingale never
sings by day; and thus Portia, in “Merchant of Venice”
(v. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“I think,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The nightingale, if she should sing by day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When every goose is cackling, would be thought<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No better a musician than the wren.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Such, however, is not the case, for this bird often sings as
sweetly in the day as at night-time. There is an old superstition<a name="FNanchor_270_270" id="FNanchor_270_270"></a><a href="#Footnote_270_270" class="fnanchor">[270]</a>
that the nightingale sings all night, to keep itself
awake, lest the glow-worm should devour her. The classical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
fable<a name="FNanchor_271_271" id="FNanchor_271_271"></a><a href="#Footnote_271_271" class="fnanchor">[271]</a> of the unhappy Philomela turned into a nightingale,
when her sister Progne was changed to a swallow, has doubtless
given rise to this bird being spoken of as <i>she</i>; thus
Juliet tells Romeo (iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It was the nightingale, and not the lark,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Sometimes the nightingale is termed Philomel, as in “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 2, song):<a name="FNanchor_272_272" id="FNanchor_272_272"></a><a href="#Footnote_272_272" class="fnanchor">[272]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Philomel, with melody,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sing in our sweet lullaby.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Osprey.</i> This bird,<a name="FNanchor_273_273" id="FNanchor_273_273"></a><a href="#Footnote_273_273" class="fnanchor">[273]</a> also called the sea-eagle, besides having
a destructive power of devouring fish, was supposed
formerly to have a fascinating influence, both which qualities
are alluded to in the following passage in “Coriolanus”
(iv. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“I think he’ll be to Rome,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By sovereignty of nature.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Drayton, in his “Polyolbion” (song xxv.), mentions the
same fascinating power of the osprey:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The osprey, oft here seen, though seldom here it breeds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which over them the fish no sooner do espy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, betwixt him and them by an antipathy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turning their bellies up, as though their death they saw,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They at his pleasure lie, to stuff his gluttonous maw.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Ostrich.</i> The extraordinary digestion of this bird<a name="FNanchor_274_274" id="FNanchor_274_274"></a><a href="#Footnote_274_274" class="fnanchor">[274]</a> is said
to be shown by its swallowing iron and other hard substances.<a name="FNanchor_275_275" id="FNanchor_275_275"></a><a href="#Footnote_275_275" class="fnanchor">[275]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
In “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10), the rebel Cade says to
Alexander Iden: “Ah, villain, thou wilt betray me, and get
a thousand crowns of the king by carrying my head to him;
but I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my
sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part.” Cuvier,<a name="FNanchor_276_276" id="FNanchor_276_276"></a><a href="#Footnote_276_276" class="fnanchor">[276]</a> speaking
of this bird, says, “It is yet so voracious, and its senses
of taste and smell are so obtuse, that it devours animal and
mineral substances indiscriminately, until its enormous
stomach is completely full. It swallows without any choice,
and merely as it were to serve for ballast, wood, stones, grass,
iron, copper, gold, lime, or, in fact, any other substance equally
hard, indigestible, and deleterious.” Sir Thomas Browne,<a name="FNanchor_277_277" id="FNanchor_277_277"></a><a href="#Footnote_277_277" class="fnanchor">[277]</a>
writing on this subject, says, “The ground of this conceit in
its swallowing down fragments of iron, which men observing,
by a forward illation, have therefore conceived it digesteth
them, which is an inference not to be admitted, as being a
fallacy of the consequent.” In Loudon’s “Magazine of Natural
History” (No. 6, p. 32) we are told of an ostrich having
been killed by swallowing glass.</p>

<p><a name="Owl" id="Owl"></a><i>Owl.</i> The dread attached to this unfortunate bird is frequently
spoken of by Shakespeare, who has alluded to several
of the superstitions associated with it. At the outset,
many of the epithets ascribed to it show the prejudice with
which it was regarded—being in various places stigmatized
as “the vile owl,” in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. I); and the
“obscure bird,” in “Macbeth” (ii. 3), etc. From the earliest
period it has been considered a bird of ill-omen, and Pliny
tells us how, on one occasion, even Rome itself underwent a
lustration, because one of them strayed into the Capitol.
He represents it also as a funereal bird, a monster of the night,
the very abomination of human kind. Vergil<a name="FNanchor_278_278" id="FNanchor_278_278"></a><a href="#Footnote_278_278" class="fnanchor">[278]</a> describes its
death-howl from the top of the temple by night, a circumstance
introduced as a precursor of Dido’s death. Ovid,<a name="FNanchor_279_279" id="FNanchor_279_279"></a><a href="#Footnote_279_279" class="fnanchor">[279]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
too, constantly speaks of this bird’s presence as an evil omen;
and indeed the same notions respecting it may be found
among the writings of most of the ancient poets. This superstitious
awe in which the owl is held may be owing to
its peculiar look, its occasional and uncertain appearance, its
loud and dismal cry,<a name="FNanchor_280_280" id="FNanchor_280_280"></a><a href="#Footnote_280_280" class="fnanchor">[280]</a> as well as to its being the bird of
night.<a name="FNanchor_281_281" id="FNanchor_281_281"></a><a href="#Footnote_281_281" class="fnanchor">[281]</a> It has generally been associated with calamities and
deeds of darkness.<a name="FNanchor_282_282" id="FNanchor_282_282"></a><a href="#Footnote_282_282" class="fnanchor">[282]</a> Thus, its weird shriek pierces the ear of
Lady Macbeth (ii. 2), while the murder is being committed:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Hark!—Peace!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which gives the stern’st good night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And when the murderer rushes in, exclaiming,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">she answers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I heard the owl scream.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its appearance at a birth has been said to foretell ill-luck to
the infant, a superstition to which King Henry, in “3 Henry
VI.” (v. 6), addressing Gloster, refers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The owl shriek’d at thy birth, an evil sign.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its cries<a name="FNanchor_283_283" id="FNanchor_283_283"></a><a href="#Footnote_283_283" class="fnanchor">[283]</a> have been supposed to presage death, and, to
quote the words of the <i>Spectator</i>, “a screech-owl at midnight
has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers.”
Thus, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), we are told
how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“the screech-owl, screeching loud,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Puts the wretch that lies in woe<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In remembrance of a shroud;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “1 Henry VI.” (iv. 2), it is called the “ominous and
fearful owl of death.” Again, in “Richard III.” (iv. 4), where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
Richard is exasperated by the bad news, he interrupts the
third messenger by saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Out on ye, owls! nothing but songs of death?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The owl by day is considered by some equally ominous, as
in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“the owl by day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If he arise, is mock’d and wonder’d at.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Julius Cæsar” (i. 3), Casca says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And yesterday the bird of night did sit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘These are their reasons,—they are natural;’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For, I believe, they are portentous things<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unto the climate that they point upon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Considering, however, the abhorrence with which the owl is
generally regarded, it is not surprising that the “owlet’s
wing”<a name="FNanchor_284_284" id="FNanchor_284_284"></a><a href="#Footnote_284_284" class="fnanchor">[284]</a> should form an ingredient of the caldron in which
the witches in “Macbeth” (iv. 1) prepared their “charm of
powerful trouble.” The owl is, too, in all probability, represented
by Shakespeare as a witch,<a name="FNanchor_285_285" id="FNanchor_285_285"></a><a href="#Footnote_285_285" class="fnanchor">[285]</a> a companion of the fairies
in their moonlight gambols. In “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 2),
Dromio of Syracuse says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is the fairy land: O, spite of spites!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprites.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If we obey them not, this will ensue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Singer, in his Notes on this passage (vol. ii. p. 28) says: “It
has been asked, how should Shakespeare know that screech-owls
were considered by the Romans as witches?” Do these
cavillers think that Shakespeare never looked into a book?
Take an extract from the Cambridge Latin Dictionary (1594,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
8vo), probably the very book he used: “Strix, a <i>scritche
owle</i>; an unluckie kind of bird (as they of olde time said)
which sucked out the blood of infants lying in their cradles;
a witch, that changeth the favour of children; an hagge or
fairie.” So in the “London Prodigal,” a comedy, 1605:
“Soul, I think I am sure crossed or witch’d with an owl.”<a name="FNanchor_286_286" id="FNanchor_286_286"></a><a href="#Footnote_286_286" class="fnanchor">[286]</a>
In “The Tempest” (v. 1) Shakespeare introduces Ariel as
saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In a cowslip’s bell I lie,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There I couch when owls do cry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Ariel,<a name="FNanchor_287_287" id="FNanchor_287_287"></a><a href="#Footnote_287_287" class="fnanchor">[287]</a> who sucks honey for luxury in the cowslip’s bell, retreats
thither for quiet when owls are abroad and screeching.
According to an old legend, the owl was originally a baker’s
daughter, to which allusion is made in “Hamlet” (iv. 5),
where Ophelia exclaims: “They say the owl was a baker’s
daughter. Lord! we know what we are, but know not what
we may be.” Douce<a name="FNanchor_288_288" id="FNanchor_288_288"></a><a href="#Footnote_288_288" class="fnanchor">[288]</a> says the following story was current
among the Gloucestershire peasantry: “Our Saviour went
into a baker’s shop where they were baking, and asked for
some bread to eat; the mistress of the shop immediately
put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but
was reprimanded by her daughter, who, insisting that the
piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size;
the dough, however, immediately began to swell, and presently
became a most enormous size, whereupon the baker’s
daughter cried out, ‘Heugh, heugh, heugh!’ which owl-like
noise probably induced our Saviour to transform her into
that bird for her wickedness.” Another version of the same
story, as formerly known in Herefordshire, substitutes a fairy
in the place of our Saviour. Similar legends are found on
the Continent.<a name="FNanchor_289_289" id="FNanchor_289_289"></a><a href="#Footnote_289_289" class="fnanchor">[289]</a></p>

<p><i>Parrot.</i> The “popinjay,” in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3), is another<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
name for the parrot—from the Spanish <i>papagayo</i>—a
term which occurs in Browne’s “Pastorals” (ii. 65):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Or like the mixture nature dothe display<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon the quaint wings of the popinjay.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its supposed restlessness before rain is referred to in “As
You Like It” (iv. 1): “More clamorous than a parrot against
rain.” It was formerly customary to teach the parrot unlucky
words, with which, when any one was offended, it was
the standing joke of the wise owner to say, “Take heed, sir,
my parrot prophesies”—an allusion to which custom we find
in “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 4), where Dromio of Ephesus
says: “prophesy like the parrot, <i>beware the rope’s end</i>.” To
this Butler hints, where, speaking of Ralpho’s skill in augury,
he says:<a name="FNanchor_290_290" id="FNanchor_290_290"></a><a href="#Footnote_290_290" class="fnanchor">[290]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Could tell what subtlest parrots mean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That speak and think contrary clean;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What member ’tis of whom they talk,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When they cry <i>rope</i>, and <i>walk, knave, walk</i>.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The rewards given to parrots to encourage them to speak
are mentioned in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 2):<a name="FNanchor_291_291" id="FNanchor_291_291"></a><a href="#Footnote_291_291" class="fnanchor">[291]</a> “the parrot
will not do more for an almond.” Hence, a proverb for
the greatest temptation that could be put before a man
seems to have been “An almond for a parrot.” To “talk
like a parrot” is a common proverb, a sense in which it occurs
in “Othello” (ii. 3).</p>

<p><i>Peacock.</i> This bird was as proverbially used for a proud,
vain fool as the lapwing for a silly one. In this sense some
would understand it in the much-disputed passage in “Hamlet”
(iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For thou dost know, O Damon dear,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">This realm dismantled was<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of Jove himself; and now reigns here<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A very, very—peacock.”<a name="FNanchor_292_292" id="FNanchor_292_292"></a><a href="#Footnote_292_292" class="fnanchor">[292]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The third and fourth folios read <i>pajock</i>,<a name="FNanchor_293_293" id="FNanchor_293_293"></a><a href="#Footnote_293_293" class="fnanchor">[293]</a> the other editions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
have “paiock,” “paiocke,” or “pajocke,” and in the later
quartos the word was changed to “paicock” and “pecock,”
whence Pope printed peacock.</p>

<p>Dyce says that in Scotland the peacock is called the peajock.
Some have proposed to read <i>paddock</i>, and in the last
scene Hamlet bestows this opprobrious name upon the king.
It has been also suggested to read <i>puttock</i>, a kite.<a name="FNanchor_294_294" id="FNanchor_294_294"></a><a href="#Footnote_294_294" class="fnanchor">[294]</a> The peacock
has also been regarded as the emblem of pride and arrogance,
as in “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 3):<a name="FNanchor_295_295" id="FNanchor_295_295"></a><a href="#Footnote_295_295" class="fnanchor">[295]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let frantic Talbot triumph for a while,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, like a peacock, sweep along his tail;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We’ll pull his plumes, and take away his train.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Pelican.</i> There are several allusions by Shakespeare to
the pelican’s piercing her own breast to feed her young.
Thus, in “Hamlet” (iv. 5), Laertes says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And like the kind life-rendering pelican,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Repast them with my blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “King Lear,” where the young pelicans are represented
as piercing their mother’s breast to drink her blood,
an illustration of filial impiety (iii. 4), the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Judicious punishment! ’Twas this flesh begot<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those pelican daughters.”<a name="FNanchor_296_296" id="FNanchor_296_296"></a><a href="#Footnote_296_296" class="fnanchor">[296]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is a common notion that the fable here alluded to is a
classical one, but this is an error. Shakespeare, says Mr.
Harting, “was content to accept the story as he found it, and
to apply it metaphorically as the occasion required.” Mr.
Houghton, in an interesting letter to “Land and Water”<a name="FNanchor_297_297" id="FNanchor_297_297"></a><a href="#Footnote_297_297" class="fnanchor">[297]</a>
on this subject, remarks that the Egyptians believed in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
bird feeding its young with its blood, and this bird is none
other than the vulture. He goes on to say that the fable of
the pelican doubtless originated in the Patristic annotations
on the Scriptures. The ecclesiastical Fathers transferred the
Egyptian story from the vulture to the pelican, but magnified
the story a hundredfold, for the blood of the parent was
not only supposed to serve as food for the young, but was
also able to reanimate the dead offspring. Augustine, commenting
on Psalm cii. 6—“I am like a pelican of the wilderness”—remarks:
“These birds [male pelicans] are said to
kill their offspring by blows of their beaks, and then to bewail
their death for the space of three days. At length,
however, it is said that the mother inflicts a severe wound on
herself, pouring the flowing blood over the dead young ones,
which instantly brings them to life.” To the same effect
write Eustathius, Isidorus, Epiphanius, and a host of other
writers.<a name="FNanchor_298_298" id="FNanchor_298_298"></a><a href="#Footnote_298_298" class="fnanchor">[298]</a></p>

<p>According to another idea<a name="FNanchor_299_299" id="FNanchor_299_299"></a><a href="#Footnote_299_299" class="fnanchor">[299]</a> pelicans are hatched dead, but
the cock pelican then wounds his breast, and lets one drop
of blood fall upon each, and this quickens them.</p>

<p><i>Pheasant.</i> This bird is only once alluded to, in “Winter’s
Tale” (iv. 4), where the Clown jokingly says to the Shepherd,
“Advocate’s the court-word for a pheasant; say, you
have none.”</p>

<p><i>Phœnix.</i> Many allusions are made to this fabulous bird,
which is said to rise again from its own ashes. Thus, in
“Henry VIII.” (v. 4), Cranmer tells how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“when<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phœnix,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her ashes new create another heir,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As great in admiration as herself.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “3 Henry VI.” (i. 4), the Duke of York exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My ashes, as the phœnix, may bring forth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A bird that will revenge upon you all.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, in “1 Henry VI.” (iv. 7), Sir William Lucy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
speaking of Talbot and those slain with him, predicts that</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“from their ashes shall be rear’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A phœnix that shall make all France afeard.”<a name="FNanchor_300_300" id="FNanchor_300_300"></a><a href="#Footnote_300_300" class="fnanchor">[300]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Sir Thomas Browne<a name="FNanchor_301_301" id="FNanchor_301_301"></a><a href="#Footnote_301_301" class="fnanchor">[301]</a> tells us that there is but one phœnix
in the world, “which after many hundred years burns herself,
and from the ashes thereof ariseth up another.” From
the very earliest times there have been countless traditions
respecting this wonderful bird. Thus, its longevity has been
estimated from three hundred to fifteen hundred years; and
among the various localities assigned as its home are Ethiopia,
Arabia, Egypt, and India. In “The Phœnix and Turtle,”
it is said,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let the bird of loudest lay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the sole Arabian tree,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Herald sad and trumpet be.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Pliny says of this bird, “Howbeit, I cannot tell what to
make of him; and first of all, whether it be a tale or no, that
there is never but one of them in the whole world, and the
same not commonly seen.” Malone<a name="FNanchor_302_302" id="FNanchor_302_302"></a><a href="#Footnote_302_302" class="fnanchor">[302]</a> quotes from Lyly’s
“Euphues and his England” (p. 312, ed. Arber): “For as
there is but one phœnix in the world, so is there but one
tree in Arabia wherein she buyldeth;” and Florio’s “New
Worlde of Wordes” (1598), “Rasin, a tree in Arabia, whereof
there is but one found, and upon it the phœnix sits.”</p>

<p><i>Pigeon.</i> As carriers, these birds have been used from a
very early date, and the Castle of the Birds, at Bagdad, takes
its name from the pigeon-post which the old monks of the
convent established. The building has crumbled into ruins
long ago by the lapse of time, but the bird messengers of
Bagdad became celebrated as far westward as Greece, and
were a regular commercial institution between the distant
parts of Asia Minor, Arabia, and the East.<a name="FNanchor_303_303" id="FNanchor_303_303"></a><a href="#Footnote_303_303" class="fnanchor">[303]</a> In ancient Egypt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
also, the carrier breed was brought to great perfection, and,
between the cities of the Nile and the Red Sea, the old traders
used to send word of their caravans to each other by letters
written on silk, and tied under the wings of trained
doves. In “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 3) Titus, on seeing a
clown enter with two pigeons, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“News, news from heaven! Marcus, the post is come.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sirrah, what tidings? have you any letters?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">From the same play we also learn that it was customary
to give a pair of pigeons as a present. The Clown says to
Saturninus (iv. 4), “I have brought you a letter and a couple
of pigeons here.”<a name="FNanchor_304_304" id="FNanchor_304_304"></a><a href="#Footnote_304_304" class="fnanchor">[304]</a></p>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3) the dove is used synonymously
for pigeon, where the nurse is represented as</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Mr. Darwin, in his “Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication” (vol. i. pp. 204, 205), has shown that from
the very earliest times pigeons have been kept in a domesticated
state. He says: “The earliest record of pigeons in a
domesticated condition occurs in the fifth Egyptian dynasty,
about 3000 <small>B.C.</small>; but Mr. Birch, of the British Museum, informs
me that the pigeon appears in a bill of fare in the previous
dynasty. Domestic pigeons are mentioned in Genesis,
Leviticus, and Isaiah. Pliny informs us that the Romans
gave immense prices for pigeons; ‘nay, they are come
to this pass that they can reckon up their pedigree and race.’
In India, about the year 1600, pigeons were much valued by
Akbar Khan; 20,000 birds were carried about with the
court.” In most countries, too, the breeding and taming
of pigeons has been a favorite recreation. The constancy
of the pigeon has been proverbial from time immemorial,
allusions to which occur in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3), and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
“As You Like It” (iii. 3).</p>

<p><i>Quail.</i> The quail was thought to be an amorous bird,
and hence was metaphorically used to denote people of a
loose character.<a name="FNanchor_305_305" id="FNanchor_305_305"></a><a href="#Footnote_305_305" class="fnanchor">[305]</a> In this sense it is generally understood in
“Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1): “Here’s Agamemnon, an
honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails.” Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_306_306" id="FNanchor_306_306"></a><a href="#Footnote_306_306" class="fnanchor">[306]</a>
however, thinks that the passage just quoted refers to
the practice formerly prevalent of keeping quails, and making
them fight like game-cocks. The context of the passage
would seem to sanction the former meaning. Quail fighting<a name="FNanchor_307_307" id="FNanchor_307_307"></a><a href="#Footnote_307_307" class="fnanchor">[307]</a>
is spoken of in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 3), where
Antony, speaking of the superiority of Cæsar’s fortunes to
his own, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“if we draw lots, he speeds;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His cocks do win the battle still of mine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When it is all to nought; and his quails ever<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beat mine, inhoop’d, at odds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It appears that cocks as well as quails were sometimes
made to fight within a broad hoop—hence the term <i>inhoop’d</i>—to
keep them from quitting each other. Quail-fights were
well known among the ancients, and especially at Athens.<a name="FNanchor_308_308" id="FNanchor_308_308"></a><a href="#Footnote_308_308" class="fnanchor">[308]</a>
Julius Pollux relates that a circle was made, in which the
birds were placed, and he whose quail was driven out of this
circle lost the stake, which was sometimes money, and occasionally
the quails themselves. Another practice was to
produce one of these birds, which being first smitten with
the middle finger, a feather was then plucked from its head.
If the quail bore this operation without flinching, his master
gained the stake, but lost it if he ran away. Some doubt
exists as to whether quail-fighting prevailed in the time of
Shakespeare. At the present day<a name="FNanchor_309_309" id="FNanchor_309_309"></a><a href="#Footnote_309_309" class="fnanchor">[309]</a> the Sumatrans practise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
these quail combats, and this pastime is common in some
parts of Italy, and also in China. Mr. Douce has given a
curious print, from an elegant Chinese miniature painting,
which represents some ladies engaged at this amusement,
where the quails are actually inhooped.</p>

<p><i>Raven.</i> Perhaps no bird is so universally unpopular as
the raven, its hoarse croak, in most countries, being regarded
as ominous. Hence, as might be expected, Shakespeare
often refers to it, in order to make the scene he depicts all
the more vivid and graphic. In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3),
Tamora, describing “a barren detested vale,” says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Julius Cæsar” (v. 1), Cassius tells us how ravens</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fly o’er our heads, and downward look on us,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As we were sickly prey.”<a name="FNanchor_310_310" id="FNanchor_310_310"></a><a href="#Footnote_310_310" class="fnanchor">[310]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It seems that the superstitious dread<a name="FNanchor_311_311" id="FNanchor_311_311"></a><a href="#Footnote_311_311" class="fnanchor">[311]</a> attaching to this
bird has chiefly arisen from its supposed longevity,<a name="FNanchor_312_312" id="FNanchor_312_312"></a><a href="#Footnote_312_312" class="fnanchor">[312]</a> and its
frequent mention and agency in Holy Writ. By the Romans
it was consecrated to Apollo, and was believed to
have a prophetic knowledge—a notion still very prevalent.
Thus, its supposed faculty<a name="FNanchor_313_313" id="FNanchor_313_313"></a><a href="#Footnote_313_313" class="fnanchor">[313]</a> of “smelling death” still renders
its presence, or even its voice, ominous. Othello (iv. 1) exclaims,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“O, it comes o’er my memory,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As doth the raven o’er the infected house,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Boding to all.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There is no doubt a reference here to the fanciful notion
that it was a constant attendant on a house infected with
the plague. Most readers, too, are familiar with that famous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
passage in “Macbeth” (i. 5) where Lady Macbeth, having
heard of the king’s intention to stay at the castle, exclaims,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“the raven himself is hoarse<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Under my battlements. Come, you spirits<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of direst cruelty!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may compare Spenser’s language in the “Fairy Queen”
(bk. ii. c. vii. l. 23):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“After him owles and night ravens flew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The hateful messengers of heavy things,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of death and dolor telling sad tidings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And once more the following passage from Drayton’s “Barons’
Wars” (bk. v. stanza 42) illustrates the same idea:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The ominous raven often he doth hear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose croaking him of following horror tells.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 3), the “night-raven”
is mentioned. Benedick observes to himself: “I had as
lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could
have come after it.” This inauspicious bird, according to
Steevens, is the owl; but this conjecture is evidently wrong,
“being at variance with sundry passages in our early writers,
who make a distinction between it and the night-raven.”<a name="FNanchor_314_314" id="FNanchor_314_314"></a><a href="#Footnote_314_314" class="fnanchor">[314]</a></p>

<p>Thus Johnson, in his “Seven Champions of Christendom”
(part i.), speaks of “the dismal cry of night-ravens, ... and
the fearefull sound of schriek owles.” Cotgrave regarded the
“night-crow” and the “night-raven” as synonymous; and
Mr. Yarrell considered them only different names for the
night-heron.<a name="FNanchor_315_315" id="FNanchor_315_315"></a><a href="#Footnote_315_315" class="fnanchor">[315]</a> In “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6) King Henry says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Goldsmith, in his “Animated Nature,” calls the bittern the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
night-raven, and says: “I remember, in the place where I
was a boy, with what terror the bird’s note affected the
whole village; they consider it as the presage of some sad
event, and generally found or made one to succeed it. If
any person in the neighborhood died, they supposed it could
not be otherwise, for the night-raven had foretold it; but if
nobody happened to die, the death of a cow or a sheep gave
completion to the prophecy.”</p>

<p>According to an old belief the raven deserts its own young,
to which Shakespeare alludes in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some say that ravens foster forlorn children,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The whilst their own birds famish in their nests.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“It was supposed that when the raven,” says Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_316_316" id="FNanchor_316_316"></a><a href="#Footnote_316_316" class="fnanchor">[316]</a>
“saw its young ones newly hatched and covered with down,
it conceived such an aversion that it forsook them, and did
not return to the nest until a darker plumage had shown itself.”
To this belief the commentators consider the Psalmist
refers, when he says, “He giveth to the beast his food,
and to the young ravens which cry” (Psalm cxlvii. 9). We
are told, too, in Job, “Who provideth for the raven his food?
when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of
meat” (xxxviii. 41). Shakespeare, in “As You Like It” (ii. 3),
probably had the words of the Psalmist in his mind:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“He that doth the ravens feed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, providently caters for the sparrow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The raven has from earliest times been symbolical of blackness,
both in connection with color and character. In “Romeo
and Juliet” (iii. 2), Juliet exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dove-feather’d raven!”<a name="FNanchor_317_317" id="FNanchor_317_317"></a><a href="#Footnote_317_317" class="fnanchor">[317]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, ravens’ feathers were formerly used by witches,
from an old superstition that the wings of this bird carried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
with them contagion wherever they went. Hence, in “The
Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Drop on you both!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Robin Redbreast.</i> According to a pretty notion,<a name="FNanchor_318_318" id="FNanchor_318_318"></a><a href="#Footnote_318_318" class="fnanchor">[318]</a> this little
bird is said to cover with leaves any dead body it may
chance to find unburied; a belief which probably, in a great
measure, originated in the well-known ballad of the “Children
in the Wood,” although it seems to have been known
previously. Thus Singer quotes as follows from “Cornucopia,
or Divers Secrets,” etc. (by Thomas Johnson, 1596):
“The robin redbreast, if he finds a man or woman dead, will
cover all his face with moss; and some think that if the
body should remain unburied that he would cover the whole
body also.” In Dekker’s “Villaines Discovered by Lanthorn
and Candlelight” (1616), quoted by Douce, it is said, “They
that cheere up a prisoner but with their sight, are robin redbreasts
that bring strawes in their bills to cover a dead man
in extremitie.” Shakespeare, in a beautiful passage in “Cymbeline”
(iv. 2), thus touchingly alludes to it, making Arviragus,
when addressing the supposed dead body of Imogen,
say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“With fairest flowers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out-sweeten’d not thy breath: the ruddock would,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With charitable bill,—O bill, sore-shaming<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Those rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Without a monument!—bring thee all this;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To winter-ground thy corse”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the “ruddock”<a name="FNanchor_319_319" id="FNanchor_319_319"></a><a href="#Footnote_319_319" class="fnanchor">[319]</a> being one of the old names for the redbreast,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
which is nowadays found in some localities. John Webster,
also, refers to the same idea in “The White Devil” (1857,
ed. Dyce, p. 45):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Call for the robin redbreast and the wren<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Since o’er shady groves they hover,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And with leaves and flowers do cover<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The friendless bodies of unburied men.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Drayton, too, in “The Owl,” has the following lines:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cov’ring with moss the dead’s unclosed eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The little redbreast teaching charitie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Rook.</i> As an ominous bird this is mentioned in “Macbeth”
(iii. 4). Formerly the nobles of England prided themselves
in having a rookery<a name="FNanchor_320_320" id="FNanchor_320_320"></a><a href="#Footnote_320_320" class="fnanchor">[320]</a> in the neighborhood of their castles,
because rooks were regarded as “fowls of good omen.”
On this account no one was permitted to kill them, under
severe penalties. When rooks desert a rookery<a name="FNanchor_321_321" id="FNanchor_321_321"></a><a href="#Footnote_321_321" class="fnanchor">[321]</a> it is said
to foretell the downfall of the family on whose property it
is. A Northumbrian saying informs us that the rooks left
the rookery of Chipchase before the family of Reed left that
place. There is also a notion that when rooks haunt a town
or village “mortality is supposed to await its inhabitants,
and if they feed in the street it shows that a storm is at
hand.”<a name="FNanchor_322_322" id="FNanchor_322_322"></a><a href="#Footnote_322_322" class="fnanchor">[322]</a></p>

<p>The expression “bully-rook,” in “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(i. 3), in Shakespeare’s time, says Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_323_323" id="FNanchor_323_323"></a><a href="#Footnote_323_323" class="fnanchor">[323]</a> had the
same meaning as “jolly dog” nowadays; but subsequently
it became a term of reproach, meaning a cheating sharper.
It has been suggested that the term derives its origin from
the <i>rook</i> in the game of chess; but Douce<a name="FNanchor_324_324" id="FNanchor_324_324"></a><a href="#Footnote_324_324" class="fnanchor">[324]</a> considers it very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
improbable that this noble game, “never the amusement
of gamblers, should have been ransacked on this occasion.”</p>

<p><i>Snipe.</i> This bird was in Shakespeare’s time proverbial for
a foolish man.<a name="FNanchor_325_325" id="FNanchor_325_325"></a><a href="#Footnote_325_325" class="fnanchor">[325]</a> In “Othello” (i. 3), Iago, speaking of Roderigo,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For I mine own gain’d knowledge should profane,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If I would time expend with such a snipe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But for my sport and profit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sparrow.</i> A popular name for the common sparrow was,
and still is, Philip, perhaps from its note, “Phip, phip.”
Hence the allusion to a person named Philip, in “King
John” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Gurney.</i> Good leave, good Philip.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Bastard.</i><span style="padding-left: 10em">Philip?—sparrow!</span><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Staunton says perhaps Catullus alludes to this expression in
the following lines:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sed circumsiliens, modo huc, modo illuc,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ad solam dominam usque pipilabat.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Skelton, in an elegy upon a sparrow, calls it “Phyllyp
Sparowe;” and Gascoigne also writes “The praise of Philip
Sparrow.”</p>

<p>In “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2), Lucio, speaking of Angelo,
the deputy-duke of Vienna, says: “Sparrows must not
build in his house-eaves, because they are lecherous.”<a name="FNanchor_326_326" id="FNanchor_326_326"></a><a href="#Footnote_326_326" class="fnanchor">[326]</a></p>

<p><a name="Sparrow-hawk" id="Sparrow-hawk"></a><i>Sparrow-hawk.</i> A name formerly given to a young sparrow-hawk
was eyas-musket,<a name="FNanchor_327_327" id="FNanchor_327_327"></a><a href="#Footnote_327_327" class="fnanchor">[327]</a> a term we find in “Merry Wives
of Windsor” (iii. 3): “How now, my eyas-musket! what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
news with you?” It was thus metaphorically used as a
jocular phrase for a small child. As the invention, too, of
fire-arms took place<a name="FNanchor_328_328" id="FNanchor_328_328"></a><a href="#Footnote_328_328" class="fnanchor">[328]</a> at a time when hawking was in high
fashion, some of the new weapons were named after those
birds, probably from the idea of their fetching their prey
from on high. <i>Musket</i> has thus become the established name
for one sort of gun. Some, however, assert that the musket
was invented in the fifteenth century, and owes its name to
its inventors.</p>

<p><i>Starling.</i> This was one of the birds that was in days
gone by trained to speak. In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3), Hotspur
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To keep his anger still in motion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Pliny tells us how starlings were taught to utter both
Latin and Greek words for the amusement of the young
Cæsars; and there are numerous instances on record of the
clever sentences uttered by this amusing bird.</p>

<p><i>Swallow.</i> This bird has generally been honored as the
harbinger of spring, and Athenæus relates that the Rhodians
had a solemn song to welcome it. Anacreon has a well-known
ode. Shakespeare, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3),
alludes to the time of the swallow’s appearance in the following
passage:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“daffodils,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That come before the swallow dares, and take<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The winds of March with beauty.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And its departure is mentioned in “Timon of Athens” (iii. 6):
“The swallow follows not summer more willing than we
your lordship.”</p>

<p>We may compare Tennyson’s notice of the bird’s approach
and migration in “The May Queen:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And the swallow ’ll come back again with summer o’er the wave.”<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been long considered lucky for the swallow to build
its nest on the roof of a house, but just as unlucky for it to
forsake a place which it has once tenanted. Shakespeare
probably had this superstition in his mind when he represents
Scarus as saying, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 12):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Swallows have built<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In Cleopatra’s sails their nests: the augurers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Say, they know not,—they cannot tell;—look grimly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And dare not speak their knowledge.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Swan.</i> According to a romantic notion, dating from antiquity,
the swan is said to sing sweetly just before its death,
many pretty allusions to which we find scattered here and
there throughout Shakespeare’s plays. In “Merchant of
Venice” (iii. 2), Portia says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“he makes a swan-like end,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fading in music.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Emilia, too, in “Othello” (v. 2), just before she dies, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I will play the swan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And die in music.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “King John” (v. 7), Prince Henry, at his father’s death-bed,
thus pathetically speaks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“’Tis strange that death should sing.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His soul and body to their lasting rest.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Lucrece” (1611), we have these touching lines:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And now this pale swan in her watery nest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, in “The Phœnix and Turtle:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let the priest in surplice white,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That defunctive music can,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be the death-divining swan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lest the requiem lack his right.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This superstition, says Douce,<a name="FNanchor_329_329" id="FNanchor_329_329"></a><a href="#Footnote_329_329" class="fnanchor">[329]</a> “was credited by Plato,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
Chrysippus, Aristotle, Euripides, Philostratus, Cicero, Seneca,
and Martial. Pliny, Ælian, and Athenæus, among the ancients,
and Sir Thomas More, among the moderns, treat this
opinion as a vulgar error. Luther believed in it.” This
notion probably originated in the swan being identified with
Orpheus. Sir Thomas Browne<a name="FNanchor_330_330" id="FNanchor_330_330"></a><a href="#Footnote_330_330" class="fnanchor">[330]</a> says, we read that, “after his
death, Orpheus, the musician, became a swan. Thus was it
the bird of Apollo, the bird of music by the Greeks.” Alluding
to this piece of folk-lore, Carl Engel<a name="FNanchor_331_331" id="FNanchor_331_331"></a><a href="#Footnote_331_331" class="fnanchor">[331]</a> remarks: “Although
our common swan does not produce sounds which
might account for this tradition, it is a well-known fact that
the wild swan (<i>Cygnus ferus</i>), also called the ‘whistling swan,’
when on the wing emits a shrill tone, which, however harsh
it may sound if heard near, produces a pleasant effect when,
emanating from a large flock high in the air, it is heard in a
variety of pitches of sound, increasing or diminishing in
loudness according to the movement of the birds and to the
current of the air.” Colonel Hawker<a name="FNanchor_332_332" id="FNanchor_332_332"></a><a href="#Footnote_332_332" class="fnanchor">[332]</a> says, “The only note
which I ever heard the wild swan make, in winter, is his well-known
‘whoop.’”<a name="FNanchor_333_333" id="FNanchor_333_333"></a><a href="#Footnote_333_333" class="fnanchor">[333]</a></p>

<p><i>Tassel-Gentle.</i><a name="FNanchor_334_334" id="FNanchor_334_334"></a><a href="#Footnote_334_334" class="fnanchor">[334]</a> The male of the goshawk was so called
on account of its tractable disposition, and the facility with
which it was tamed. The word occurs in “Romeo and Juliet”
(ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“O, for a falconer’s voice<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To lure this tassel-gentle back again!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Spenser, in his “Fairy Queen” (bk. iii. c. iv. l. 49), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Having far off espied a tassel-gent<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which after her his nimble wings doth straine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This species of hawk was also commonly called a “falcon-gentle,”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
on account of “her familiar, courteous disposition.”<a name="FNanchor_335_335" id="FNanchor_335_335"></a><a href="#Footnote_335_335" class="fnanchor">[335]</a></p>

<p><i>Turkey.</i> This bird, so popular with us at Christmas-tide,
is mentioned in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1), where the First Carrier
says: “God’s body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite
starved.” This, however, is an anachronism on the part of
Shakespeare, as the turkey was unknown in this country
until the reign of Henry VIII. According to a rhyme written
in 1525, commemorating the introduction of this bird,
we are told how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Turkies, carps, hoppes, piccarell, and beere,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Came into England all in one yeare.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The turkey is again mentioned by Shakespeare in “Twelfth
Night” (ii. 5), where Fabian says of Malvolio: “Contemplation
makes a rare turkey-cock of him: how he jets under his
advanced plumes!”</p>

<p><i>Vulture.</i> In several passages Shakespeare has most forcibly
introduced this bird to deepen the beauty of some of his
exquisite passages. Thus, in “King Lear” (ii. 4), when he is
complaining of the unkindness of a daughter, he bitterly
exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“O Regan, she hath tied<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">What, too, can be more graphic than the expression of Tamora
in “Titus Andronicus” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am Revenge, sent from the infernal kingdom,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Equally forcible, too, are Pistol’s words in “The Merry Wives
of Windsor” (i. 3): “Let vultures gripe thy guts.”</p>

<p>Johnson considers that “the vulture of sedition” in “2
Henry VI.” (iv. 3) is in allusion to the tale of Prometheus,
but of this there is a decided uncertainty.</p>

<p><i>Wagtail.</i> In “King Lear” (ii. 2), Kent says, “Spare my
grey beard, you wagtail?” the word being used in an opprobrious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
sense, to signify an officious person.</p>

<p><i>Woodcock.</i> In several passages this bird is used to denote
a fool or silly person; as in “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 2):
“O this woodcock! what an ass it is!” And again, in “Much
Ado About Nothing” (v. 1), where Claudio, alluding to the
plot against Benedick, says: “Shall I not find a woodcock
too?” In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3) Biron says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“O heavens, I have my wish!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dumain transformed: four woodcocks in a dish.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The woodcock has generally been proverbial as a foolish
bird—perhaps because it is easily caught in springes or nets.<a name="FNanchor_336_336" id="FNanchor_336_336"></a><a href="#Footnote_336_336" class="fnanchor">[336]</a>
Thus the popular phrase “Springes to catch woodcocks”
meant arts to entrap simplicity,<a name="FNanchor_337_337" id="FNanchor_337_337"></a><a href="#Footnote_337_337" class="fnanchor">[337]</a> as in “Hamlet” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Aye, springes to catch woodcocks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A similar expression occurs in Beaumont and Fletcher’s
“Loyal Subject” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Go like a woodcock,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thrust your neck i’ th’ noose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“It seems,” says Nares, “that woodcocks are now grown
wiser by time, for we do not now hear of their being so easily
caught. If they were sometimes said to be without brains,
it was only founded on their character, certainly not on any
examination of the fact.”<a name="FNanchor_338_338" id="FNanchor_338_338"></a><a href="#Footnote_338_338" class="fnanchor">[338]</a> Formerly, one of the terms for
twilight<a name="FNanchor_339_339" id="FNanchor_339_339"></a><a href="#Footnote_339_339" class="fnanchor">[339]</a> was “cock-shut time,” because the net in which
cocks, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, woodcocks, were shut in during the twilight, was
called a “cock-shut.” It appears that a large net was
stretched across a glade, and so suspended upon poles as
to be easily drawn together. Thus, in “Richard III.” (v. 3),
Ratcliff says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thomas the Earl of Surrey, and himself,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Much about cock-shut time, from troop to troop,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Went through the army, cheering up the soldiers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Ben Jonson’s “Masque of Gypsies” we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mistress, this is only spite;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For you would not yesternight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kiss him in the cock-shut light.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Sometimes it was erroneously written “cock-shoot.” “Come,
come away then, a fine cock-shoot evening.” In the “Two
Noble Kinsmen” (iv. 1) we find the term “cock-light.”</p>

<p><i>Wren.</i> The diminutive character of this bird is noticed
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1, song):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The wren with little quill.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Macbeth” (iv. 2), Lady Macbeth says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“the poor wren,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The most diminutive of birds, will fight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Considering, too, that as many as sixteen young ones have
been found in this little bird’s nest, we can say with Grahame,
in his poem on the birds of Scotland:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But now behold the greatest of this train<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of miracles, stupendously minute;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The numerous progeny, claimant for food<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Supplied by two small bills, and feeble wings<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of narrow range, supplied—ay, duly fed—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fed in the dark, and yet not one forgot.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The epithet “poor,” applied to the wren by Lady Macbeth,
was certainly appropriate in days gone by, when we recollect
how it was cruelly hunted in Ireland on St. Stephen’s day—a
practice which prevailed also in the Isle of Man.<a name="FNanchor_340_340" id="FNanchor_340_340"></a><a href="#Footnote_340_340" class="fnanchor">[340]</a></p>


<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> See Harland and Wilkinson’s “Lancashire Folk-Lore,” 1867, pp. 116-121;
“Notes and Queries,” 1st series, vol. viii. p. 224; “Penny Cyclopædia,”
vol. vii. p. 206, article “Cirripeda.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” 1872, vol. i. p. 56.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> See Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” 1871, pp. 246-257.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” 1871, p. 252.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> See “Philosophical Transactions” for 1835; Darwin’s “Monograph
of the Cirrhipedia,” published by the Ray Society; a paper by Sir J.
Emerson Tennent in “Notes and Queries,” 1st series, vol. viii. p. 223;
Brand’s “Popular Antiquities,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 361, 362; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 14.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> See Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,” 2d edition, vol. i. p. 218;
“Dialect of Leeds,” 1862, p. 329. In “Hamlet” (iii. 2), some modern
editions read “ouzle;” the old editions all have <i>weasel</i>, which is now
adopted.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> Miss Baker’s “Northamptonshire Glossary,” 1854, vol. i. p. 94. See
Nares’s “Glossary,” 1872, vol. i. p. 124; and “Richard III.,” i. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 144; Halliwell-Phillipps’s
“Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 187. The term
finch, also, according to some, may mean either the bullfinch or goldfinch.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> See Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,” 2d edition, vol. ii. p. 58.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 156; Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol.
v. p. 115; Dyce’s “Glossary,” 1876, p. 77.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> Mr. Dyce says that if Dr. Latham had been acquainted with the
article “Chouette,” in Cotgrave, he would not probably have suggested
that Shakespeare meant here the lapwing or pewit. Some consider
the magpie is meant. See Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to
Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 83. Professor Newton would read “russet-patted,”
or “red-legged,” thinking that Shakespeare meant the chough.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 162; Singer’s “Notes to Shakespeare,” 1875,
vol. v. p. 42.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> Massinger’s Works, 1813, vol. i. p. 281.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 86.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> Miss Baker’s “Northamptonshire Glossary,” 1854, vol. i. p. 116.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> “Coriolanus,” iv. 5; “Troilus and Cressida,” i. 2; “Much Ado
About Nothing,” ii. 3; “Twelfth Night,” iii. 4; “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”
v. 2, song; “1 Henry VI.” ii. 4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, p. 240.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, p. 48.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 438.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> See Ibid.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 51-57; Hampson’s
“Medii Œvi Kalendarium,” vol. i. p. 84.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> 1st series, vol. iii. p. 404.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> “Medii Œvi Kalendarium,” vol. i. p. 85.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> Roberts’s “Social History of Southern Counties of England,” 1856,
p. 421; see “British Popular Customs,” 1876, p. 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” 1872, vol. i. p. 203.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. ix. p. 256; Halliwell-Phillipps’s
“Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 112.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 85.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 290.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 171.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> It is also an ale-house sign.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 85.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” 1863, vol. i. p. 157.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> In “King Lear” (iv. 6), where Edgar says:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Yond tall anchoring bark,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Almost too small for sight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>the word “cock” is an abbreviation for cock-boat.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> For superstitions associated with this bird, see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. iii. p. 218.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 260.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> See “Folk-Lore Record,” 1879, vol. i. p. 52; Henderson’s “Folk-Lore
of Northern Counties,” 1879, pp. 25, 126, 277.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 208.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> Cf. “Henry IV.,” iv. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> Miss Baker’s “Northamptonshire Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 161; Brand’s
“Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 393.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Cf. “Romeo and Juliet,” i. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> “A cuckold being called from the cuckoo, the note of that bird was
supposed to prognosticate that destiny.”—Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i.
p. 212.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> Engel’s “Musical Myths and Facts,” 1876, vol. i. p. 9.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Indo-European Folk-Lore,” 1863, p. 99; “English
Folk-Lore,” 1879, pp. 55-62.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> See Mary Howitt’s “Pictorial Calendar of the Seasons,” p. 155;
Knight’s “Pictorial Shakespeare,” vol. i. pp. 225, 226.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> Chambers’s “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 531.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 201.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> “Asinaria,” v. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> Nares, in his “Glossary” (vol. i. p. 212), says: “Cuckold, perhaps,
<i>quasi</i> cuckoo’d, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, one served; <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, forced to bring up a brood that
is not his own.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. ix. p. 294.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” pp. 190, 191.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> Sir W. Raleigh’s “History of the World,” bk. i. pt. i. ch. 6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 329.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> There is an allusion to the proverbial saying, “Brag is a good dog,
but Hold-fast is a better.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> In the same scene we are told,
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Cf. “Romeo and Juliet,” iii. 5; “Richard II.,” iii. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> Quoted by Harting, in “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 24.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> Kelly’s “Indo-European Folk-Lore,” pp. 75, 79.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> Cf. “Antony and Cleopatra,” ii. 2: “This was but as a fly by an
eagle.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> Josephus, “De Bello Judico,” iii. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 33.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 378.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> “Execration against Vulcan,” 1640, p. 37.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> Singer’s “Notes,” 1875, vol. i. p. 283.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_214_214" id="Footnote_214_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_214_214"><span class="label">[214]</span></a> See “Archæologia,” vol. iii. p. 33.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_215_215" id="Footnote_215_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_215_215"><span class="label">[215]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 693. Some think that the bullfinch
is meant.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_216_216" id="Footnote_216_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_216_216"><span class="label">[216]</span></a> Singer’s “Notes,” 1875, vol. v. p. 82; see Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 433.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_217_217" id="Footnote_217_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_217_217"><span class="label">[217]</span></a> Some doubt exists as to the derivation of <i>gull</i>. Nares says it is
from the old French <i>guiller</i>. Tooke holds that gull, guile, wile, and
guilt are all from the Anglo-Saxon “wiglian, gewiglian,” that by which
any one is deceived. Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 267.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_218_218" id="Footnote_218_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_218_218"><span class="label">[218]</span></a> See D’Israeli’s “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. p. 84.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_219_219" id="Footnote_219_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_219_219"><span class="label">[219]</span></a> See Thornbury’s “Shakespeare’s England,” vol. i. pp. 311-322.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_220_220" id="Footnote_220_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_220_220"><span class="label">[220]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 394.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_221_221" id="Footnote_221_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_221_221"><span class="label">[221]</span></a> Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 269.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_222_222" id="Footnote_222_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_222_222"><span class="label">[222]</span></a> Aldis Wright’s “Notes to ‘The Tempest’,” 1875, pp. 120, 121.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_223_223" id="Footnote_223_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_223_223"><span class="label">[223]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 245.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224_224" id="Footnote_224_224"></a><a href="#FNanchor_224_224"><span class="label">[224]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 60-97, and “Book of
Days,” 1863, vol. ii. pp. 211-213; Smith’s “Festivals, Games, and Amusements,”
1831, p. 174.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_225_225" id="Footnote_225_225"></a><a href="#FNanchor_225_225"><span class="label">[225]</span></a> “A hawk full-fed was untractable, and refused the lure—the lure
being a thing stuffed to look like the game the hawk was to pursue;
its lure was to tempt him back after he had flown.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_226_226" id="Footnote_226_226"></a><a href="#FNanchor_226_226"><span class="label">[226]</span></a> In the same play (iv. 2) Hortensio describes Bianca as “this proud
disdainful haggard.” See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 197; Cotgrave’s
“French and English Dictionary,” sub. “Hagard;” and Latham’s
“Falconry,” etc., 1658.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_227_227" id="Footnote_227_227"></a><a href="#FNanchor_227_227"><span class="label">[227]</span></a> “To whistle off,” or dismiss by a whistle; a hawk seems to have
been usually sent off in this way against the wind when sent in pursuit
of prey.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_228_228" id="Footnote_228_228"></a><a href="#FNanchor_228_228"><span class="label">[228]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 77; see “Twelfth Night,” ii. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_229_229" id="Footnote_229_229"></a><a href="#FNanchor_229_229"><span class="label">[229]</span></a> The use of the word is not quite the same here, because the voyage
was Hamlet’s “proper game,” which he abandons. “Notes to Hamlet,”
Clark and Wright, 1876, p. 205.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_230_230" id="Footnote_230_230"></a><a href="#FNanchor_230_230"><span class="label">[230]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 456; Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,”
p. 39; Tuberville’s “Booke of Falconrie,” 1611, p. 53.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_231_231" id="Footnote_231_231"></a><a href="#FNanchor_231_231"><span class="label">[231]</span></a> Also in i. 2 we read:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Show’d like a rebel’s whore.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Some read “quarry;” see “Notes to Macbeth.” Clark and Wright,
p. 77. It denotes the square-headed bolt of a cross-bow; see Douce’s
“Illustrations,” 1839, p. 227; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 206.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_232_232" id="Footnote_232_232"></a><a href="#FNanchor_232_232"><span class="label">[232]</span></a> See Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” book i. canto xi. l. 18:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Low stooping with unwieldy sway.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_233_233" id="Footnote_233_233"></a><a href="#FNanchor_233_233"><span class="label">[233]</span></a> Ed. Dyce, 1857, p. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_234_234" id="Footnote_234_234"></a><a href="#FNanchor_234_234"><span class="label">[234]</span></a> See “3 Henry VI.” i. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_235_235" id="Footnote_235_235"></a><a href="#FNanchor_235_235"><span class="label">[235]</span></a> A quibble is perhaps intended between bate, the term of falconry,
and abate, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, fall off, dwindle. “Bate is a term in falconry, to flutter
the wings as preparing for flight, particularly at the sight of prey.” In
‘1 Henry IV.’ (iv. 1):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘All plumed like estridges, that with the wind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bated, like eagles having lately bathed.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>
—Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 60.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236_236" id="Footnote_236_236"></a><a href="#FNanchor_236_236"><span class="label">[236]</span></a> “Unmann’d” was applied to a hawk not tamed.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_237_237" id="Footnote_237_237"></a><a href="#FNanchor_237_237"><span class="label">[237]</span></a> See Singer’s “Notes to Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. x. p. 86; Nares’s
“Glossary,” vol. i. p. 448.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238_238" id="Footnote_238_238"></a><a href="#FNanchor_238_238"><span class="label">[238]</span></a> See passage in “Taming of the Shrew,” iv. 1, already referred to,
p. 122.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239_239" id="Footnote_239_239"></a><a href="#FNanchor_239_239"><span class="label">[239]</span></a> Also in same play, i. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_240_240" id="Footnote_240_240"></a><a href="#FNanchor_240_240"><span class="label">[240]</span></a> Turbervile, in his “Booke of Falconrie,” 1575, gives some curious
directions as “how to seele a hawke;” we may compare similar expressions
in “Antony and Cleopatra,” iii. 13; v. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_241_241" id="Footnote_241_241"></a><a href="#FNanchor_241_241"><span class="label">[241]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. pp. 777, 778; cf. Beaumont and Fletcher,
“Philaster,” v. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_242_242" id="Footnote_242_242"></a><a href="#FNanchor_242_242"><span class="label">[242]</span></a> Imp, from Anglo-Saxon, <i>impan</i>, to graft. Turbervile has a whole
chapter on “The way and manner how to ympe a hawke’s feather,
howsoever it be broken or bruised.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_243_243" id="Footnote_243_243"></a><a href="#FNanchor_243_243"><span class="label">[243]</span></a> Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakspeare,” p. 72.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_244_244" id="Footnote_244_244"></a><a href="#FNanchor_244_244"><span class="label">[244]</span></a> The reading of the folios here is stallion; but the word wing, and
the falconer’s term <i>checks</i>, prove that the bird must be meant. See
Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 832.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_245_245" id="Footnote_245_245"></a><a href="#FNanchor_245_245"><span class="label">[245]</span></a> See <a href="#Kestrel">kestrel</a> and <a href="#Sparrow-hawk">sparrow-hawk</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_246_246" id="Footnote_246_246"></a><a href="#FNanchor_246_246"><span class="label">[246]</span></a> “Notes to Hamlet,” Clark and Wright, 1876, p. 159.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_247_247" id="Footnote_247_247"></a><a href="#FNanchor_247_247"><span class="label">[247]</span></a> Ray’s “Proverbs,” 1768, p. 196.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_248_248" id="Footnote_248_248"></a><a href="#FNanchor_248_248"><span class="label">[248]</span></a> Quoted in “Notes to Hamlet,” by Clark and Wright, p. 159; see
Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 416.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_249_249" id="Footnote_249_249"></a><a href="#FNanchor_249_249"><span class="label">[249]</span></a> That is, made by art: the creature not of nature, but of painting;
cf. “Taming of the Shrew,” iv. 3; “The Tempest,” ii. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_250_250" id="Footnote_250_250"></a><a href="#FNanchor_250_250"><span class="label">[250]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 482.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251_251" id="Footnote_251_251"></a><a href="#FNanchor_251_251"><span class="label">[251]</span></a> Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 74.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_252_252" id="Footnote_252_252"></a><a href="#FNanchor_252_252"><span class="label">[252]</span></a> “Notes,” vol. iii. pp. 357, 358.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_253_253" id="Footnote_253_253"></a><a href="#FNanchor_253_253"><span class="label">[253]</span></a> “Description of England,” vol. i. p. 162.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254_254" id="Footnote_254_254"></a><a href="#FNanchor_254_254"><span class="label">[254]</span></a> “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 88.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_255_255" id="Footnote_255_255"></a><a href="#FNanchor_255_255"><span class="label">[255]</span></a> Sir Thomas Browne’s “Vulgar Errors,” bk. iii. chap. 10.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_256_256" id="Footnote_256_256"></a><a href="#FNanchor_256_256"><span class="label">[256]</span></a> Also to the buzzard, which see, p. 100.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257_257" id="Footnote_257_257"></a><a href="#FNanchor_257_257"><span class="label">[257]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iv. p. 67.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258_258" id="Footnote_258_258"></a><a href="#FNanchor_258_258"><span class="label">[258]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 243.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_259_259" id="Footnote_259_259"></a><a href="#FNanchor_259_259"><span class="label">[259]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 495; see Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,”
2d edition, vol. ii. p. 482.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_260_260" id="Footnote_260_260"></a><a href="#FNanchor_260_260"><span class="label">[260]</span></a> Ray’s “Proverbs,” 1768, p. 199.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_261_261" id="Footnote_261_261"></a><a href="#FNanchor_261_261"><span class="label">[261]</span></a> Cf. “Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iv. 1). “the morning lark;”
“Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), “the lark, the herald of the morn.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262_262" id="Footnote_262_262"></a><a href="#FNanchor_262_262"><span class="label">[262]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 886; Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,”
1839, p. 217.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263_263" id="Footnote_263_263"></a><a href="#FNanchor_263_263"><span class="label">[263]</span></a> Chambers’s “Popular Rhymes of Scotland,” 1870, p. 192.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_264_264" id="Footnote_264_264"></a><a href="#FNanchor_264_264"><span class="label">[264]</span></a> See “English Folk-Lore,” p. 81.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_265_265" id="Footnote_265_265"></a><a href="#FNanchor_265_265"><span class="label">[265]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” p. 127.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_266_266" id="Footnote_266_266"></a><a href="#FNanchor_266_266"><span class="label">[266]</span></a> Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” vol. ii. p. 34; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, pp. 215, 216; see also Harland and Wilkinson’s “Lancashire
Folk-Lore,” 1867, pp. 143, 145.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_267_267" id="Footnote_267_267"></a><a href="#FNanchor_267_267"><span class="label">[267]</span></a> “Atmospherical Researches,” 1823, p. 262.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_268_268" id="Footnote_268_268"></a><a href="#FNanchor_268_268"><span class="label">[268]</span></a> Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 1852, vol. i. p. 378.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_269_269" id="Footnote_269_269"></a><a href="#FNanchor_269_269"><span class="label">[269]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 515.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_270_270" id="Footnote_270_270"></a><a href="#FNanchor_270_270"><span class="label">[270]</span></a> Southey’s “Commonplace Book.” 5th series. 1851, p. 305.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_271_271" id="Footnote_271_271"></a><a href="#FNanchor_271_271"><span class="label">[271]</span></a> Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” bk. vi. ll. 455-676; “Titus Andronicus,”
iv. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_272_272" id="Footnote_272_272"></a><a href="#FNanchor_272_272"><span class="label">[272]</span></a> Cf. “Lucrece,” ll. 1079, 1127.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_273_273" id="Footnote_273_273"></a><a href="#FNanchor_273_273"><span class="label">[273]</span></a> See Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,” 1856, vol. i. p. 30; Nares’s
“Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 620; also Pennant’s “British Zoology;” see
Peele’s Play of the “Battle of Alcazar” (ii. 3), 1861, p. 28.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_274_274" id="Footnote_274_274"></a><a href="#FNanchor_274_274"><span class="label">[274]</span></a> Called <i>estridge</i> in “1 Henry IV.” iv. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_275_275" id="Footnote_275_275"></a><a href="#FNanchor_275_275"><span class="label">[275]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 365.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_276_276" id="Footnote_276_276"></a><a href="#FNanchor_276_276"><span class="label">[276]</span></a> “Animal Kingdom,” 1829, vol. viii. p. 427.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277_277" id="Footnote_277_277"></a><a href="#FNanchor_277_277"><span class="label">[277]</span></a> See Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 1852, vol. i. pp. 334-337.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_278_278" id="Footnote_278_278"></a><a href="#FNanchor_278_278"><span class="label">[278]</span></a> “Æneid,” bk. iv. l. 462.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_279_279" id="Footnote_279_279"></a><a href="#FNanchor_279_279"><span class="label">[279]</span></a> “Metamorphoses,” bk. v. l. 550; bk. vi. l. 432; bk. x. l. 453; bk. xv.
l. 791.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_280_280" id="Footnote_280_280"></a><a href="#FNanchor_280_280"><span class="label">[280]</span></a> “2 Henry VI.” iii. 2; iv. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_281_281" id="Footnote_281_281"></a><a href="#FNanchor_281_281"><span class="label">[281]</span></a> “Titus Andronicus,” ii. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_282_282" id="Footnote_282_282"></a><a href="#FNanchor_282_282"><span class="label">[282]</span></a> Cf. “Lucrece,” l. 165; see Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,” vol.
i. p. 122.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_283_283" id="Footnote_283_283"></a><a href="#FNanchor_283_283"><span class="label">[283]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 209.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_284_284" id="Footnote_284_284"></a><a href="#FNanchor_284_284"><span class="label">[284]</span></a> The spelling of the folios is “howlets.” In Holland’s translation
of Pliny (chap. xvii. book x.), we read “of owlls or howlets.” Cotgrave
gives “Hulotte.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285_285" id="Footnote_285_285"></a><a href="#FNanchor_285_285"><span class="label">[285]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s, “Handbook Index,” 1866, p. 354.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_286_286" id="Footnote_286_286"></a><a href="#FNanchor_286_286"><span class="label">[286]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 302.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_287_287" id="Footnote_287_287"></a><a href="#FNanchor_287_287"><span class="label">[287]</span></a> See Singer’s “Notes to The Tempest,” 1875, vol. i. p. 82.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_288_288" id="Footnote_288_288"></a><a href="#FNanchor_288_288"><span class="label">[288]</span></a> See <i>Gentleman’s Magazine</i>, November, 1804, pp. 1083, 1084.
Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_289_289" id="Footnote_289_289"></a><a href="#FNanchor_289_289"><span class="label">[289]</span></a> See Dasent’s “Tales of the Norse,” 1859, p. 230.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_290_290" id="Footnote_290_290"></a><a href="#FNanchor_290_290"><span class="label">[290]</span></a> “Hudibras,” pt. i. ch. i.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_291_291" id="Footnote_291_291"></a><a href="#FNanchor_291_291"><span class="label">[291]</span></a> In “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1), Benedick likens Beatrice to
a “parrot-teacher,” from her talkative powers.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_292_292" id="Footnote_292_292"></a><a href="#FNanchor_292_292"><span class="label">[292]</span></a> This is the reading adopted by Singer.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_293_293" id="Footnote_293_293"></a><a href="#FNanchor_293_293"><span class="label">[293]</span></a> “Notes to Hamlet,” Clark and Wright, 1876, pp. 179, 180.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_294_294" id="Footnote_294_294"></a><a href="#FNanchor_294_294"><span class="label">[294]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 645; Singer’s “Notes,” vol. ix.
p. 228.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_295_295" id="Footnote_295_295"></a><a href="#FNanchor_295_295"><span class="label">[295]</span></a> Cf. “Troilus and Cressida,” iii. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_296_296" id="Footnote_296_296"></a><a href="#FNanchor_296_296"><span class="label">[296]</span></a> Cf. “Richard II.” i. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_297_297" id="Footnote_297_297"></a><a href="#FNanchor_297_297"><span class="label">[297]</span></a> Mr. Harting, in his “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” quotes an interesting
correspondence from “Land and Water” (1869), on the subject.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_298_298" id="Footnote_298_298"></a><a href="#FNanchor_298_298"><span class="label">[298]</span></a> See Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 1852, vol. ii. pp. 1-4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_299_299" id="Footnote_299_299"></a><a href="#FNanchor_299_299"><span class="label">[299]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 366, 367.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_300_300" id="Footnote_300_300"></a><a href="#FNanchor_300_300"><span class="label">[300]</span></a> Cf. “The Tempest,” iii. 3; “All’s Well that Ends Well,” i. 1; “Antony
and Cleopatra,” iii. 2; “Cymbeline,” i. 6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_301_301" id="Footnote_301_301"></a><a href="#FNanchor_301_301"><span class="label">[301]</span></a> Works, 1852, vol. i. pp. 277-284.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_302_302" id="Footnote_302_302"></a><a href="#FNanchor_302_302"><span class="label">[302]</span></a> See Aldis Wright’s “Notes to The Tempest,” 1875, p. 129.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_303_303" id="Footnote_303_303"></a><a href="#FNanchor_303_303"><span class="label">[303]</span></a> <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, January 31, 1880; see Southey’s “Commonplace
Book,” 1849, 2d series, p. 447.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_304_304" id="Footnote_304_304"></a><a href="#FNanchor_304_304"><span class="label">[304]</span></a> See <i>Dove</i>, pp. 114, 115.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_305_305" id="Footnote_305_305"></a><a href="#FNanchor_305_305"><span class="label">[305]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 704; Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook
Index to Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 398; Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 345; Singer’s
“Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 264.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_306_306" id="Footnote_306_306"></a><a href="#FNanchor_306_306"><span class="label">[306]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 218.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_307_307" id="Footnote_307_307"></a><a href="#FNanchor_307_307"><span class="label">[307]</span></a> Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 19, 97, 677; Brand’s “Pop.
Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 59, 60.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_308_308" id="Footnote_308_308"></a><a href="#FNanchor_308_308"><span class="label">[308]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 367.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_309_309" id="Footnote_309_309"></a><a href="#FNanchor_309_309"><span class="label">[309]</span></a> Marsden’s “History of Sumatra,” 1811, p. 276.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_310_310" id="Footnote_310_310"></a><a href="#FNanchor_310_310"><span class="label">[310]</span></a> Cf. “2 Henry VI.” iii. 2; “Troilus and Cressida,” v. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_311_311" id="Footnote_311_311"></a><a href="#FNanchor_311_311"><span class="label">[311]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 211, 212.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_312_312" id="Footnote_312_312"></a><a href="#FNanchor_312_312"><span class="label">[312]</span></a> “English Folk-lore,” 1878, p. 78.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_313_313" id="Footnote_313_313"></a><a href="#FNanchor_313_313"><span class="label">[313]</span></a> See Hunt’s “Popular Romances of West of England,” 1881, p. 380.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_314_314" id="Footnote_314_314"></a><a href="#FNanchor_314_314"><span class="label">[314]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” 1876, p. 288.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_315_315" id="Footnote_315_315"></a><a href="#FNanchor_315_315"><span class="label">[315]</span></a> See Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” pp. 101, 102; Yarrell’s
“History of British Birds,” vol. ii. p. 581.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_316_316" id="Footnote_316_316"></a><a href="#FNanchor_316_316"><span class="label">[316]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 107.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_317_317" id="Footnote_317_317"></a><a href="#FNanchor_317_317"><span class="label">[317]</span></a> Cf. “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” ii. 2; “Twelfth Night,” v. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_318_318" id="Footnote_318_318"></a><a href="#FNanchor_318_318"><span class="label">[318]</span></a> “English Folk-Lore,” pp. 62-64; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol.
iii. p. 191; Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. x. p. 424; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 380.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_319_319" id="Footnote_319_319"></a><a href="#FNanchor_319_319"><span class="label">[319]</span></a> Cf. Spenser’s “Epithalamium,” v. 8:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The thrush replies, the mavis descant plays,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The ouzell shrills, the ruddock warbles soft.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_320_320" id="Footnote_320_320"></a><a href="#FNanchor_320_320"><span class="label">[320]</span></a> <i>Standard</i>, January 26, 1877.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_321_321" id="Footnote_321_321"></a><a href="#FNanchor_321_321"><span class="label">[321]</span></a> “English Folk-Lore,” p. 76.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_322_322" id="Footnote_322_322"></a><a href="#FNanchor_322_322"><span class="label">[322]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, p. 122.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_323_323" id="Footnote_323_323"></a><a href="#FNanchor_323_323"><span class="label">[323]</span></a> “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 121.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_324_324" id="Footnote_324_324"></a><a href="#FNanchor_324_324"><span class="label">[324]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 36; the term “bully-rook”
occurs several times in Shadwell’s “Sullen Lovers;” see Dyce’s “Glossary,”
p. 58.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_325_325" id="Footnote_325_325"></a><a href="#FNanchor_325_325"><span class="label">[325]</span></a> In Northamptonshire the word denotes an icicle, from its resemblance
to the long bill of the bird so-called.—Baker’s “Northamptonshire
Glossary,” 1854, vol. ii. p. 260.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_326_326" id="Footnote_326_326"></a><a href="#FNanchor_326_326"><span class="label">[326]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 653; Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 320.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_327_327" id="Footnote_327_327"></a><a href="#FNanchor_327_327"><span class="label">[327]</span></a> Derived from the French <i>mouschet</i>, of the same meaning.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_328_328" id="Footnote_328_328"></a><a href="#FNanchor_328_328"><span class="label">[328]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 593: Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,”
1839, p. 46. Turbervile tells us “the first name and terme that
they bestowe on a falcon is an eyesse, and this name doth laste as long
as she is an eyrie and for that she is taken from the eyrie.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_329_329" id="Footnote_329_329"></a><a href="#FNanchor_329_329"><span class="label">[329]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 161.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_330_330" id="Footnote_330_330"></a><a href="#FNanchor_330_330"><span class="label">[330]</span></a> Works, 1852, vol. i. p. 357.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_331_331" id="Footnote_331_331"></a><a href="#FNanchor_331_331"><span class="label">[331]</span></a> “Musical Myths and Facts,” 1876, vol. i. p. 89.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_332_332" id="Footnote_332_332"></a><a href="#FNanchor_332_332"><span class="label">[332]</span></a> “Instructions to Young Sportsmen,” 11th ed., p. 269.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_333_333" id="Footnote_333_333"></a><a href="#FNanchor_333_333"><span class="label">[333]</span></a> See Baring-Gould’s “Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,” 1877,
p. 561; Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” 1852, vol. iii. pp. 302-328.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_334_334" id="Footnote_334_334"></a><a href="#FNanchor_334_334"><span class="label">[334]</span></a> Properly “tiercel gentle,” French, <i>tiercelet</i>; cf. “Troilus and Cressida,”
iii. 2, “the falcon as the tercel.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_335_335" id="Footnote_335_335"></a><a href="#FNanchor_335_335"><span class="label">[335]</span></a> “Gentleman’s Recreation,” p. 19, quoted in Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. ii. p. 867.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_336_336" id="Footnote_336_336"></a><a href="#FNanchor_336_336"><span class="label">[336]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 508.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_337_337" id="Footnote_337_337"></a><a href="#FNanchor_337_337"><span class="label">[337]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 971.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_338_338" id="Footnote_338_338"></a><a href="#FNanchor_338_338"><span class="label">[338]</span></a> See Willughby’s “Ornithology,” iii. section 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_339_339" id="Footnote_339_339"></a><a href="#FNanchor_339_339"><span class="label">[339]</span></a> Minsheu’s “Guide into Tongues,” ed. 1617.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_340_340" id="Footnote_340_340"></a><a href="#FNanchor_340_340"><span class="label">[340]</span></a> See Yarrell’s “History of British Birds,” vol. ii. p. 178.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span></h2>

<h3>ANIMALS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">As</span> in the case of the birds considered in the previous
chapter, Shakespeare has also interwoven throughout his
plays an immense deal of curious folk-lore connected with
animals. Not only does he allude with the accuracy of a
naturalist to the peculiarities and habits of certain animals,
but so true to nature is he in his graphic descriptions of
them that it is evident his knowledge was in a great measure
acquired from his own observation. It is interesting,
also, to note how carefully he has, here and there, worked
into his narrative some old proverb or superstition, thereby
adding a freshness to the picture which has, if possible, imbued
it with an additional lustre. In speaking of the dog,
he has introduced many an old hunting custom, and his
references to the tears of the deer are full of sweet pathos,
as, for instance, where Hamlet says (iii. 2), “Let the stricken
deer go weep.” It is not necessary, however, to add further
illustrations, as these will be found in the following pages.</p>

<p><i>Ape.</i> In addition to Shakespeare’s mention of this animal
as a common term of contempt, there are several other allusions
to it. There is the well-known phrase, “to lead apes
in hell,” applied to old maids, mentioned in the “Taming of
the Shrew” (ii. 1)—the meaning of this term not having
been yet satisfactorily explained.<a name="FNanchor_341_341" id="FNanchor_341_341"></a><a href="#Footnote_341_341" class="fnanchor">[341]</a> (It is further discussed
in the <a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">chapter on Marriage</a>.)</p>

<p>In “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), the word is used as a term of
endearment, “Alas, poor ape, how thou sweat’st.”</p>

<p><i>Ass.</i> Beyond the proverbial use of this much ill-treated
animal to denote a silly, foolish person, Shakespeare has said
little about it. In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1), Thersites<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
uses the word <i>assinego</i>, a Portuguese expression for a young
ass, “Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows;
an assinego may tutor thee.” It is used by Beaumont and
Fletcher in the “Scornful Lady” (v. 4): “All this would be
forsworn, and I again an assinego, as your sister left me.”<a name="FNanchor_342_342" id="FNanchor_342_342"></a><a href="#Footnote_342_342" class="fnanchor">[342]</a>
Dyce<a name="FNanchor_343_343" id="FNanchor_343_343"></a><a href="#Footnote_343_343" class="fnanchor">[343]</a> would spell the word “asinico,” because it is so spelled
in the old editions of Shakespeare, and is more in accordance
with the Spanish word.<a name="FNanchor_344_344" id="FNanchor_344_344"></a><a href="#Footnote_344_344" class="fnanchor">[344]</a> In “King Lear” (i. 4), the Fool
alludes to Æsop’s celebrated fable of the old man and his
ass: “thou borest thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt.”</p>

<p><i>Bat.</i> The bat, immortalized by Shakespeare (“The Tempest,”
v. 1) as the “delicate Ariel’s” steed—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“On the bat’s back I do fly,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—has generally been an object of superstitious dread, and
proved to the poet and painter a fertile source of images of
gloom and terror.<a name="FNanchor_345_345" id="FNanchor_345_345"></a><a href="#Footnote_345_345" class="fnanchor">[345]</a> In Scotland<a name="FNanchor_346_346" id="FNanchor_346_346"></a><a href="#Footnote_346_346" class="fnanchor">[346]</a> it is still connected with
witchcraft, and if, while flying, it rise and then descend again
earthwards, it is a sign that the witches’ hour is come—the
hour in which they are supposed to have power over every
human being who is not specially shielded from their influence.
Thus, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1) the “wool of bat” forms
an ingredient in the witches’ caldron. One of its popular
names is “rere-mouse,” which occurs in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 2), where Titania says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some, war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make my small elves coats.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This term is equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon, <i>hrére-mús</i>, from
<i>hreran</i>, to stir, agitate, and so the same as the old name
“flitter-mouse.”<a name="FNanchor_347_347" id="FNanchor_347_347"></a><a href="#Footnote_347_347" class="fnanchor">[347]</a> The early copies spell the word <i>reremise</i>.<a name="FNanchor_348_348" id="FNanchor_348_348"></a><a href="#Footnote_348_348" class="fnanchor">[348]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
It occurs in the Wicliffite version of Leviticus xi. 19, and
the plural in the form “reremees” or “rere-myis” is found in
Isaiah ii. 20. At Polperro, Cornwall,<a name="FNanchor_349_349" id="FNanchor_349_349"></a><a href="#Footnote_349_349" class="fnanchor">[349]</a> the village boys call it
“airy-mouse,” and address it in the following rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Airy mouse, airy mouse! fly over my head,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And you shall have a crust of bread;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when I brew, and when I bake,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You shall have a piece of my wedding-cake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Scotland<a name="FNanchor_350_350" id="FNanchor_350_350"></a><a href="#Footnote_350_350" class="fnanchor">[350]</a> it is known as the Backe or Bakie bird. An
immense deal of folk-lore has clustered round this curious
little animal.<a name="FNanchor_351_351" id="FNanchor_351_351"></a><a href="#Footnote_351_351" class="fnanchor">[351]</a></p>

<p><i>Bear.</i> According to an old idea, the bear brings forth unformed
lumps of animated flesh, and then licks them into
shape—a vulgar error, referred to in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 2),
where Gloster, bemoaning his deformity, says of his mother:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">To disproportion me in every part,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That carries no impression like the dam.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This erroneous notion, however, was long ago confuted by
Sir Thomas Browne.<a name="FNanchor_352_352" id="FNanchor_352_352"></a><a href="#Footnote_352_352" class="fnanchor">[352]</a> Alexander Ross, in his “Arcana
Microcosmi,” nevertheless affirms that bears bring forth their
young deformed and misshapen, by reason of the thick
membrane in which they are wrapped, that is covered over
with a mucous matter. This, he says, the dam contracts in
the winter-time, by lying in hollow caves without motion, so
that to the eye the cub appears like an unformed lump. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
above mucilage is afterwards licked away by the dam, and
the membrane broken, whereby that which before seemed to
be unformed appears now in its right shape. This, he contends,
is all that the ancients meant.<a name="FNanchor_353_353" id="FNanchor_353_353"></a><a href="#Footnote_353_353" class="fnanchor">[353]</a> Ovid (Metamorphoses,
bk. xv. l. 379) thus describes this once popular fancy:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nec catulus, partu quem reddidit ursa recenti,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sed male viva caro est: lambendo mater in artus<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fingit, et in formam, quantam capit ipsa, reducit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Bears, in days gone by, are reported to have been surprised
by means of a mirror, which they would gaze on, affording
their pursuers an opportunity of taking the surer aim. In
“Julius Cæsar” (ii. I), this practice is mentioned by Decius:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“unicorns may be betray’d with trees,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bears with glasses.”<a name="FNanchor_354_354" id="FNanchor_354_354"></a><a href="#Footnote_354_354" class="fnanchor">[354]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Batman, “On Bartholomæus” (1582), speaking of the bear,
says, “And when he is taken he is made blinde with a
bright basin, and bound with chaynes, and compelled to
playe.” This, however, says Mr. Aldis Wright,<a name="FNanchor_355_355" id="FNanchor_355_355"></a><a href="#Footnote_355_355" class="fnanchor">[355]</a> probably
refers to the actual blinding of the bear.</p>

<p>A favorite amusement with our ancestors was bear-baiting.
As early as the reign of Henry II. the baiting of bears by
dogs was a popular game in London,<a name="FNanchor_356_356" id="FNanchor_356_356"></a><a href="#Footnote_356_356" class="fnanchor">[356]</a> while at a later period
“a royal bear-ward” was an officer regularly attached to the
royal household. In “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), this personage is
alluded to by Clifford, who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Are these thy bears? We’ll bait thy bears to death,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And manacle the bear-ward in their chains,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If thou dar’st bring them to the baiting place.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Beatrice
says, “I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-ward,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
and lead his apes into hell.” The synonymous term, “bear-herd,”
occurs in “Taming of the Shrew” (Ind. scene 2),
where Sly speaks of himself as “by transmutation a bear-herd;”
and in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Sir John Falstaff remarks
how “true valor is turned bear-herd.” Among the Harleian
MSS.<a name="FNanchor_357_357" id="FNanchor_357_357"></a><a href="#Footnote_357_357" class="fnanchor">[357]</a> is preserved the original warrant of Richard III. appointing
John Brown to this office, and which recites “the
diligent service he had done the king” as the ground for
granting him the privilege of wandering about the country
with his bears and apes, and receiving the “loving benevolence
and favors of the people.”<a name="FNanchor_358_358" id="FNanchor_358_358"></a><a href="#Footnote_358_358" class="fnanchor">[358]</a> In the time of Queen
Elizabeth bear-baiting was still a favorite pastime, being
considered a fashionable entertainment for ladies of the
highest rank.<a name="FNanchor_359_359" id="FNanchor_359_359"></a><a href="#Footnote_359_359" class="fnanchor">[359]</a> James I. encouraged this sport. Nichols<a name="FNanchor_360_360" id="FNanchor_360_360"></a><a href="#Footnote_360_360" class="fnanchor">[360]</a>
informs us that on one occasion the king, accompanied by
his court, took the queen, the Princess Elizabeth, and the
two young princes to the Tower to witness a fight between a
lion and a bear, and by the king’s command the bear (which
had killed a child that had been negligently left in the bear-house)
was afterwards “baited to death upon a stage in the
presence of many spectators.” Popular, says Mr. Kelly, as
bear-baiting was in the metropolis and at court, it was equally
so among all classes of the people.<a name="FNanchor_361_361" id="FNanchor_361_361"></a><a href="#Footnote_361_361" class="fnanchor">[361]</a> It is on record that at
Congleton, in Cheshire, “the town-bear having died, the
corporation in 1601 gave orders to sell their Bible, in order
to purchase another, which was done, and the town no
longer without a bear.” This event is kept up in a popular
rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Congleton rare, Congleton rare,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sold the Bible to pay for a bear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The same legend attaches to Clifton, a village near Rugby:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Clifton-upon-Dunsmore, in Warwickshire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sold the Church Bible to buy a bear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Pulleyn’s “Etymological Compendium,”<a name="FNanchor_362_362" id="FNanchor_362_362"></a><a href="#Footnote_362_362" class="fnanchor">[362]</a> we are told
that “this cruel amusement is of African origin, and was introduced
into Europe by the Romans.” It is further alluded
to by Shakespeare in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), “dancing and
bear-baiting;” and further on in the same play (ii. 5) Fabian
says, “he brought me out o’ favor with my lady about a
bear-baiting here;” and Macbeth (v. 7) relates:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, bear-like, I must fight the course.”<a name="FNanchor_363_363" id="FNanchor_363_363"></a><a href="#Footnote_363_363" class="fnanchor">[363]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 1), Octavius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“we are at the stake,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bay’d about with many enemies.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Boar.</i> It appears that in former times boar-hunting was
a favorite recreation; many allusions to which we find in old
writers. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the destruction of a
wild boar ranked among the deeds of chivalry,<a name="FNanchor_364_364" id="FNanchor_364_364"></a><a href="#Footnote_364_364" class="fnanchor">[364]</a> and “won
for a warrior almost as much renown as the slaying an enemy
in the open field.” So dangerous, too, was boar-hunting
considered, that Shakespeare represents Venus as dissuading
Adonis from the perilous practice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘O be advised! thou know’st not what it is,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With javelin’s point a churlish swine to gore,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Whose tushes never sheathed he whetteth still,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Like to a mortal butcher, bent to kill.<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">His brawny sides, with hairy bristles arm’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are better proof than thy spear’s point can enter;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His short thick neck cannot be easily harm’d;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Being ireful, on the lion he will venture.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Such hunting expeditions were generally fatal to some of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
the dogs, and occasionally to one or more of the hunters.
An old tradition of Grimsby, in Lincolnshire,<a name="FNanchor_365_365" id="FNanchor_365_365"></a><a href="#Footnote_365_365" class="fnanchor">[365]</a> asserts that
every burgess, at his admission to the freedom of the borough,
anciently presented to the mayor a boar’s head, or an equivalent
in money, when the animal could not be procured.
The old seal of the mayor of Grimsby represents a boar
hunt. The lord, too, of the adjacent manor of Bradley, was
obliged by his tenure to keep a supply of these animals in
his wood, for the entertainment of the mayor and burgesses.<a name="FNanchor_366_366" id="FNanchor_366_366"></a><a href="#Footnote_366_366" class="fnanchor">[366]</a>
A curious triennial custom called the “Rhyne Toll,” is observed
at Chetwode, a small village about five miles from
Buckingham.<a name="FNanchor_367_367" id="FNanchor_367_367"></a><a href="#Footnote_367_367" class="fnanchor">[367]</a> According to tradition, it originated in the
destruction of an enormous wild boar—the terror of the surrounding
county—by one of the lords of Chetwode; who,
after fighting with it for four hours on a hot summer’s day,
eventually killed it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Then Sir Ryalas he drawed his broad sword with might,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Wind well thy horn, good hunter;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And he fairly cut the boar’s head off quite,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">For he was a jovial hunter.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">As a reward, it is said, the king “granted to him and to his
heirs forever, among other immunities and privileges, the
full right to levy every year the Rhyne Toll.” This is still
kept up, and consists of a yearly tax on all cattle found
within the manor of Chetwode between the 30th of October
and the 7th of November, inclusive. In “Antony and
Cleopatra” (iv. 13) Cleopatra alludes to the famous boar
killed by Meleager,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“the boar of Thessaly<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was never so emboss’d.”<a name="FNanchor_368_368" id="FNanchor_368_368"></a><a href="#Footnote_368_368" class="fnanchor">[368]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bull.</i> Once upon a time there was scarcely a town or village<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
of any magnitude which had not its bull-ring.<a name="FNanchor_369_369" id="FNanchor_369_369"></a><a href="#Footnote_369_369" class="fnanchor">[369]</a> Indeed,
it was not until the year 1835 that baiting was finally put
down by an act of Parliament, “forbidding the keeping of
any house, pit, or other place for baiting or fighting any
bull, bear, dog, or other animal;” and, after an existence of
at least seven centuries, this ceased to rank among the
amusements of the English people.<a name="FNanchor_370_370" id="FNanchor_370_370"></a><a href="#Footnote_370_370" class="fnanchor">[370]</a> This sport is alluded
to in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), “Remember, Jove,
thou wast a bull for thy Europa.” We may, too, compare
the expressions in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 7), “Now, bull,
now, dog!... The bull has the game.”<a name="FNanchor_371_371" id="FNanchor_371_371"></a><a href="#Footnote_371_371" class="fnanchor">[371]</a></p>

<p><i>Cat.</i> Few animals, in times past, have been more esteemed
than the cat, or been honored with a wider folk-lore. Indeed,
among the Egyptians this favored animal was held
sacred to Isis, or the moon, and worshipped with great ceremony.
In the mythology of all the Indo-European nations
the cat holds a prominent place; and its connection with
witches is well known. “The picture of a witch,” says Mr.
Henderson,<a name="FNanchor_372_372" id="FNanchor_372_372"></a><a href="#Footnote_372_372" class="fnanchor">[372]</a> “is incomplete without her cat, by rights a black
one.” In “Macbeth” (iv. 1) the first witch says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">it being a common superstition that the form most generally
assumed by the familiar spirits of witches was the cat.
Thus, in another passage of the same play (i. 1), the first
witch says: “I come, Graymalkin”—the word otherwise
spelled Grimalkin,<a name="FNanchor_373_373" id="FNanchor_373_373"></a><a href="#Footnote_373_373" class="fnanchor">[373]</a> meaning a gray cat. Numerous stories
are on record of witches having disguised themselves as
cats, in order to carry out their fiendish designs. A woodman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
out working in the forest has his dinner every day stolen
by a cat. Exasperated at the continued repetition of the
theft, he lies in wait for the aggressor, and succeeds in cutting
off her paw, when lo! on his return home he finds his wife
minus a hand.<a name="FNanchor_374_374" id="FNanchor_374_374"></a><a href="#Footnote_374_374" class="fnanchor">[374]</a> An honest Yorkshireman,<a name="FNanchor_375_375" id="FNanchor_375_375"></a><a href="#Footnote_375_375" class="fnanchor">[375]</a> who bred pigs,
often lost the young ones. On applying to a certain wise
man of Stokesley, he was informed that they were bewitched
by an old woman who lived near. The owner of the pigs,
calling to mind that he had often seen a cat prowling about
his yard, decided that this was the old woman in disguise. He
watched for her, and, as soon as she made her appearance,
flung at her a poker with all his might. The cat disappeared,
and, curiously enough, the poor old woman in question that
night fell and broke her leg. This was considered as conclusive
that she was the witch that had simulated the form of a cat.
This notion is very prevalent on the Continent. It is said
that witch-cats have a great hankering after beer.<a name="FNanchor_376_376" id="FNanchor_376_376"></a><a href="#Footnote_376_376" class="fnanchor">[376]</a> Witches
are adepts in the art of brewing, and therefore fond of tasting
what their neighbors brew. On these occasions they always
masquerade as cats, and what they steal they consume on the
spot. There was a countryman whose beer was all drunk up
by night whenever he brewed, so that at last he resolved for
once to sit up all night and watch. As he was standing by
his brewing pan, a number of cats made their appearance, and
calling to them, he said; “Come, puss, puss, come, warm you
a bit.” So in a ring they all sat round the fire as if to warm
themselves. After a time, he asked them “if the water was
hot.” “Just on the boil,” said they; and as he spoke he
dipped his long-handled pail in the wort, and soused the
whole company with it. They all vanished at once, but on
the following day his wife had a terribly scalded face, and
then he knew who it was that had always drunk his beer.
This story is widely prevalent, and is current among the
Flemish-speaking natives of Belgium. Again, a North German<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
tradition<a name="FNanchor_377_377" id="FNanchor_377_377"></a><a href="#Footnote_377_377" class="fnanchor">[377]</a> tells us of a peasant who had three beautiful
large cats. A neighbor begged to have one of them, and
obtained it. To accustom it to the place, he shut it up in
the loft. At night, the cat, popping its head through the
window, said, “What shall I bring to-night?” “Thou shalt
bring mice,” answered the man. The cat then set to work,
and cast all it caught on the floor. Next morning the place
was so full of dead mice that it was hardly possible to open
the door, and the man was employed the whole day in
throwing them away by bushels. At night the cat again
asked, “What shall I bring to-night?” “Thou shalt bring
rye,” answered the peasant. The cat was now busily employed
in shooting down rye, so that in the morning the
door could not be opened. The man then discovered that
the cat was a witch, and carried it back to his neighbor.
A similar tradition occurs in Scandinavian mythology.<a name="FNanchor_378_378" id="FNanchor_378_378"></a><a href="#Footnote_378_378" class="fnanchor">[378]</a>
Spranger<a name="FNanchor_379_379" id="FNanchor_379_379"></a><a href="#Footnote_379_379" class="fnanchor">[379]</a> relates that a laborer, on one occasion, was attacked
by three young ladies in the form of cats, and that
they were wounded by him. On the following day they
were found bleeding in their beds. In Vernon,<a name="FNanchor_380_380" id="FNanchor_380_380"></a><a href="#Footnote_380_380" class="fnanchor">[380]</a> about the
year 1566, “the witches and warlocks gathered in great multitudes
under the shape of cats. Four or five men were attacked
in a lone place by a number of these beasts. The
men stood their ground, and succeeded in slaying one cat
and wounding many others. Next day a number of wounded
women were found in the town, and they gave the judge an
accurate account of all the circumstances connected with
their wounding.” It is only natural, then, that Shakespeare,
in his description of the witches in “Macbeth,” should have
associated them with the popular superstition which represents
the cat as their agent—a notion that no doubt originated
in the classic story of Galanthis being turned into a
cat, and becoming, through the compassion of Hecate, her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
priestess. From their supposed connection with witchcraft,
cats were formerly often tormented by the ignorant vulgar.
Thus it appears<a name="FNanchor_381_381" id="FNanchor_381_381"></a><a href="#Footnote_381_381" class="fnanchor">[381]</a> that, in days gone by, they (occasionally
fictitious ones) were hung up in baskets and shot at with
arrows. In some counties, too, they were enclosed, with a
quantity of soot, in wooden bottles suspended on a line, and
he who could beat out the bottom of the bottle as he ran
under it, and yet escape its contents, was the hero of the
sport.<a name="FNanchor_382_382" id="FNanchor_382_382"></a><a href="#Footnote_382_382" class="fnanchor">[382]</a> Shakespeare alludes to this practice in “Much Ado
About Nothing” (i. 1), where Benedick says: “Hang me in
a bottle like a cat, and shoot at me.”</p>

<p>Percy, in his “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” (1794,
vol. i. p. 155), says: “It is still a diversion in Scotland to
hang up a cat in a small cask or firkin, half filled with soot;
and then a parcel of clowns on horseback try to beat out the
ends of it, in order to show their dexterity in escaping before
the contents fall upon them.”</p>

<p>This practice was once kept up at Kelso, in Scotland, according
to Ebenezer Lazarus, who, in his “Description of
Kelso” (1789, p. 144), has given a graphic description of the
whole ceremony. He says, “This is a sport which was common
in the last century at Kelso on the Tweed. A large
concourse of men, women, and children assembled in a field
about half a mile from the town, and a cat having been put
into a barrel stuffed full of soot, was suspended on a crossbeam
between two high poles. A certain number of the
whipmen, or husbandmen, who took part in this savage and
unmanly amusement, then kept striking, as they rode to and
fro on horseback, the barrel in which the unfortunate animal
was confined, until at last, under the heavy blows of their
clubs and mallets, it broke, and allowed the cat to drop.
The victim was then seized and tortured to death.” He
justly stigmatizes it, saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The cat in the barrel exhibits such a farce,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
<span class="i0">That he who can relish it is worse than an ass.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Cats, from their great powers of resistance, are said to have
nine lives;<a name="FNanchor_383_383" id="FNanchor_383_383"></a><a href="#Footnote_383_383" class="fnanchor">[383]</a> hence Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1),
says: “Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine
lives.” Ben Jonson, in “Every Man in His Humour” (iii. 2),
makes Edward Knowell say to Bobadil, “’Twas pity you
had not ten; a cat’s and your own.” And in Gay’s fable of
the “Old Woman and her Cats,” one of these animals is introduced,
upbraiding the witch:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis infamy to serve a hag,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cats are thought imps, her broom a nag;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And boys against our lives combine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Because ’tis said, your cats have nine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Marston’s “Dutch Courtezan” we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why then, thou hast nine lives like a cat.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in Dekker’s “Strange Horse-Race” (1613): “When
the grand Helcat had gotten these two furies with nine
lives.” This notion, it may be noted, is quite the reverse of
the well-known saying, “Care will kill a cat,” mentioned in
“Much Ado About Nothing” (v. 1), where Claudio says:
“What though care killed a cat.”</p>

<p>For some undiscovered reason a cat was formerly called
Tybert or Tybalt;<a name="FNanchor_384_384" id="FNanchor_384_384"></a><a href="#Footnote_384_384" class="fnanchor">[384]</a> hence some of the insulting remarks of
Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1), who calls Tybalt
“rat-catcher” and “king of cats.” In the old romance of
“Hystorye of Reynard the Foxe” (chap. vi.), we are told
how “the king called for Sir Tibert, the cat, and said to him,
Sir Tibert, you shall go to Reynard, and summon him the
second time.”<a name="FNanchor_385_385" id="FNanchor_385_385"></a><a href="#Footnote_385_385" class="fnanchor">[385]</a> A popular term for a wild cat was “cat-o’-mountain,”
an expression<a name="FNanchor_386_386" id="FNanchor_386_386"></a><a href="#Footnote_386_386" class="fnanchor">[386]</a> borrowed from the Spaniards,
who call the wild cat “gato-montes.” In the “Merry Wives
of Windsor” (ii. 2), Falstaff says of Pistol, “Your cat-a-mountain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
looks.”</p>

<p>The word cat was used as a term of contempt, as in “The
Tempest” (ii. 1) and “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2),
where Lysander says, “Hang off, thou cat.” Once more,
too, in “Coriolanus” (iv. 2), we find it in the same sense:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“’Twas you incensed the rabble;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cats, that can judge as fitly of his worth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As I can of those mysteries which heaven<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will not have earth to know.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A gib, or a gib cat, is an old male cat<a name="FNanchor_387_387" id="FNanchor_387_387"></a><a href="#Footnote_387_387" class="fnanchor">[387]</a>—gib being the contraction
of Gilbert,<a name="FNanchor_388_388" id="FNanchor_388_388"></a><a href="#Footnote_388_388" class="fnanchor">[388]</a> and is, says Nares, an expression exactly
analogous to that of jackass.<a name="FNanchor_389_389" id="FNanchor_389_389"></a><a href="#Footnote_389_389" class="fnanchor">[389]</a> Tom-cat is now the usual
term. The word was certainly not bestowed upon a cat
early in life, as is evident from the melancholy character ascribed
to it in Shakespeare’s allusion in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2):
“I am as melancholy as a gib cat.” Ray gives “as melancholy
as a gib’d [a corruption of gib] cat.” The term occurs
again in “Hamlet” (iii. 4). It is improperly applied to a
female by Beaumont and Fletcher, in the “Scornful Lady”
(v. 1): “Bring out the cat-hounds! I’ll make you take a tree,
whore; then with my tiller bring down your gib-ship, and
then have you cased and hung up in the warren.”</p>

<p><i>Chameleon.</i> This animal was popularly believed to feed
on air, a notion which Sir Thomas Browne<a name="FNanchor_390_390" id="FNanchor_390_390"></a><a href="#Footnote_390_390" class="fnanchor">[390]</a> has carefully
discussed. He has assigned, among other grounds for this
vulgar opinion, its power of abstinence, and its faculty of
self-inflation. It lives on insects, which it catches by its
long, gluey tongue, and crushes between its jaws. It has
been ascertained by careful experiment that the chameleon
can live without eating for four months. It can inflate not
only its lungs, but its whole body, including even the feet
and tail. In allusion to this supposed characteristic, Shakespeare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
makes Hamlet say (iii. 2), “Of the chameleon’s dish:
I eat the air, promise-crammed; you cannot feed capons
so;” and in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 1) Speed
says: “Though the chameleon, Love, can feed on the air, I
am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain
have meat.” There is, too, a popular notion that this animal
undergoes frequent changes of color, according to that
of the bodies near it. This, however, depends on the volition
of the animal, or the state of its feelings, on its good or
bad health, and is subordinate to climate, age, and sex.<a name="FNanchor_391_391" id="FNanchor_391_391"></a><a href="#Footnote_391_391" class="fnanchor">[391]</a> In
“3 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) Gloster boasts:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I can add colours to the chameleon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Change shapes, with Proteus, for advantages.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cockatrice.</i> This imaginary creature, also called a basilisk,
has been the subject of extraordinary prejudice. It was
absurdly said to proceed from the eggs of old cocks. It has
been represented as having eight feet, a crown on the head,
and a hooked and recurved beak.<a name="FNanchor_392_392" id="FNanchor_392_392"></a><a href="#Footnote_392_392" class="fnanchor">[392]</a> Pliny asserts that the
basilisk had a voice so terrible that it struck terror into all
other species. Sir Thomas Browne,<a name="FNanchor_393_393" id="FNanchor_393_393"></a><a href="#Footnote_393_393" class="fnanchor">[393]</a> however, distinguishes
the cockatrice from the ancient basilisk. He says, “This
of ours is generally described with legs, wings, a serpentine
and winding tail, and a crest or comb somewhat like a cock.
But the basilisk of elder times was a proper kind of serpent,
not above three palms long, as some account; and different
from other serpents by advancing his head and some white
marks, or coronary spots upon the crown, as all authentic
writers have delivered.” No other animal, perhaps, has
given rise to so many fabulous notions. Thus, it was supposed
to have so deadly an eye as to kill by its very look,
to which Shakespeare often alludes. In “Romeo and Juliet”
(iii. 2), Juliet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“say thou but ‘I,’<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And that bare vowel, ‘I,’ shall poison more<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Richard III.” (iv. 1) the Duchess exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O my accursed womb, the bed of death!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A cockatrice hast thou hatch’d to the world,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose unavoided eye is murderous!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Lucrece” (l. 540) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Here with a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more,<a name="FNanchor_394_394" id="FNanchor_394_394"></a><a href="#Footnote_394_394" class="fnanchor">[394]</a> in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), Sir Toby Belch affirms:
“This will so fright them both that they will kill one
another by the look, like cockatrices.” It has also been
affirmed that this animal could not exercise this faculty unless
it first perceived the object of its vengeance; if first
seen, it died. Dryden has alluded to this superstition:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mischiefs are like the cockatrice’s eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If they see first they kill, if seen, they die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Cockatrice was a popular phrase for a loose woman, probably
from the fascination of the eye.<a name="FNanchor_395_395" id="FNanchor_395_395"></a><a href="#Footnote_395_395" class="fnanchor">[395]</a> It appears, too, that
basilisk<a name="FNanchor_396_396" id="FNanchor_396_396"></a><a href="#Footnote_396_396" class="fnanchor">[396]</a> was the name of a huge piece of ordnance carrying
a ball of very great weight. In the following passage in
“Henry V.” (v. 2), there is no doubt a double allusion—to
pieces of ordnance, and to the fabulous creature already described:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The fatal balls of murdering basilisks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Colt.</i> From its wild tricks the colt was formerly used to
designate, according to Johnson, “a witless, heady, gay
youngster.” Portia mentions it with a quibble in “The
Merchant of Venice” (i. 2), referring to the Neapolitan
prince. “Ay, that’s a colt, indeed.” The term “to colt”
meant to trick, or befool; as in the phrase in “1 Henry IV.”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
(ii. 2): “What a plague mean ye to colt me thus?” Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps<a name="FNanchor_397_397" id="FNanchor_397_397"></a><a href="#Footnote_397_397" class="fnanchor">[397]</a> explains the expression in “Henry
VIII.” (i. 3), “Your colt’s tooth is not cast yet,” to denote
a love of youthful pleasure. In “Cymbeline” (ii. 4) it is
used in a coarser sense: “She hath been colted by him.”</p>

<p><i>Crocodile.</i> According to fabulous accounts the crocodile
was the most deceitful of animals; its tears being proverbially
fallacious. Thus Othello (iv. 1) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“O devil, devil!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out of my sight!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare the words of the queen in “2 Henry
VI.” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Henry my lord is cold in great affairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Too full of foolish pity; and Gloster’s show<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With sorrow snares relenting passengers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is said that this treacherous animal weeps over a man’s
head when it has devoured the body, and will then eat up
the head too. In Bullokar’s “Expositor,” 1616, we read:
“Crocodile lachrymæ, crocodiles teares, do signify such
teares as are feigned, and spent only with intent to deceive
or do harm.” In Quarles’s “Emblems” there is the following
allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O what a crocodilian world is this,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Compos’d of treachries and ensnaring wiles!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She cloaths destruction in a formal kiss,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And lodges death in her deceitful smiles.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the above passage from “Othello,” Singer says there is,
no doubt, a reference to the doctrine of equivocal generation,
by which new animals were supposed to be producible by
new combinations of matter.<a name="FNanchor_398_398" id="FNanchor_398_398"></a><a href="#Footnote_398_398" class="fnanchor">[398]</a></p>

<p><i>Deer.</i> In “King Lear” (iii. 4) Edgar uses deer for wild<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
animals in general:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But mice, and rats, and such small deer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare frequently refers to the popular sport of hunting
the deer;<a name="FNanchor_399_399" id="FNanchor_399_399"></a><a href="#Footnote_399_399" class="fnanchor">[399]</a> and by his apt allusions shows how thoroughly
familiar he was with the various amusements of his day.<a name="FNanchor_400_400" id="FNanchor_400_400"></a><a href="#Footnote_400_400" class="fnanchor">[400]</a>
In “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2) Leontes speaks of “the mort o’
the deer:” certain notes played on the horn at the death of
the deer, and requiring a deep-drawn breath.<a name="FNanchor_401_401" id="FNanchor_401_401"></a><a href="#Footnote_401_401" class="fnanchor">[401]</a> It was anciently,
too, one of the customs of the chase for all to stain
their hands in the blood of the deer as a trophy. Thus, in
“King John” (ii. 1), the English herald declares to the men
of Angiers how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“like a jolly troop of huntsmen, come<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our lusty English, all with purpled hands,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The practice is again alluded to in “Julius Cæsar” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“here thy hunters stand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sign’d in thy spoil, and crimson’d in thy lethe.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Old Turbervile gives us the details of this custom: “Our
order is, that the prince, or chief, if so please them, do alight,
and take assay of the deer, with a sharp knife, the which is
done in this manner—the deer being laid upon his back, the
prince, chief, or such as they do appoint, comes to it, and the
chief huntsman, kneeling if it be a prince, doth hold the deer
by the forefoot, whilst the prince, or chief, do cut a slit drawn
along the brisket of the deer.”</p>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (v. 2), where Cæsar, speaking
of Cleopatra’s death, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“bravest at the last,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
<span class="i0">She levell’d at our purposes, and, being royal,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Took her own way”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">there is possibly an allusion to the <i>hart royal</i>, which had the
privilege of roaming unmolested, and of taking its own way
to its lair.</p>

<p>Shooting with the cross-bow at deer was an amusement
of great ladies. Buildings with flat roofs, called stands,
partly concealed by bushes, were erected in the parks for
the purpose. Hence the following dialogue in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Princess.</i> Then forester, my friend, where is the bush<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That we must stand and play the murderer in?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Forester.</i> Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A stand where you may make the fairest shoot.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among the hunting terms to which Shakespeare refers
may be mentioned the following:</p>

<p>“To draw” meant to trace the steps of the game, as in
“Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The term “to run counter” was to mistake the course of
the game, or to turn and pursue the backward trail.</p>

<p>The “recheat” denoted certain notes sounded on the
horn, properly and more usually employed to recall the
dogs from a wrong scent. It is used in “Much Ado About
Nothing” (i. 1): “I will have a recheat winded in my forehead.”
We may compare Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xiii.):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Recheating with his horn, which then the hunter cheers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The phrase “to recover the wind of me,” used by Hamlet
(iii. 2), is borrowed from hunting, and means to get the
animal pursued to run with the wind, that it may not scent
the toil or its pursuers. Again, when Falstaff, in “2 Henry
IV.” (ii. 4), speaks of “fat rascals,” he alludes to the phrase
of the forest—“rascall,” says Puttenham, “being properly
the hunting term given to a young deer leane and out of
season.”</p>

<p>The phrase “a hunts-up” implied any song intended to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
arouse in the morning—even a love song—the name having
been derived from a tune or song employed by early hunters.<a name="FNanchor_402_402" id="FNanchor_402_402"></a><a href="#Footnote_402_402" class="fnanchor">[402]</a>
The term occurs in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where
Juliet says to Romeo, speaking of the lark:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hunting thee hence with hunts-up to the day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xiii.) it is used:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No sooner doth the earth her flowery bosom brave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But hunts-up to the morn the feather’d sylvans sing.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Shakespeare’s day it was customary to hunt as well after
dinner as before, hence, in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2), Timon
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So soon as dinner’s done, we’ll forth again.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The word “embossed” was applied to a deer when foaming
at the mouth from fatigue. In “Taming of the Shrew”
(Ind. scene 1) we read: “the poor cur is embossed,” and in
“Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 13):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“the boar of Thessaly<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was never so emboss’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was usual to call a pack of hounds “a cry,” from the
French <i>meute de chiens</i>. The term is humorously applied
to any troop or company of players, as by Hamlet (iii. 2),
who speaks of “a fellowship in a cry of players.” In “Coriolanus”
(iv. 6) Menenius says,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“You have made<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Good work, you and your cry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Antony, in “Julius Cæsar” (iii. 1), alludes to the technical
phrase to “let slip a dog,” employed in hunting the hart.
This consisted in releasing the hounds from the leash or <i>slip</i>
of leather by which they were held in hand until it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
judged proper to let them pursue the animal chased.<a name="FNanchor_403_403" id="FNanchor_403_403"></a><a href="#Footnote_403_403" class="fnanchor">[403]</a> In
“1 Henry IV.” (i. 3) Northumberland tells Hotspur:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Before the game’s afoot, thou still let’st slip.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Taming of the Shrew” (v. 2) Tranio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, sir, Lucentio slipp’d me like his greyhound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which runs himself, and catches for his master.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A sportsman’s saying, applied to hounds, occurs in “2
Henry IV.” (v. 3): “a’ will not out; he is true bred,” serving
to expound Gadshill’s expression, “such as can hold in,”
“1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1).</p>

<p>The severity of the game laws under our early monarchs
was very stringent; and a clause in the “Forest Charter”<a name="FNanchor_404_404" id="FNanchor_404_404"></a><a href="#Footnote_404_404" class="fnanchor">[404]</a>
grants “to an archbishop, bishop, earl, or baron, when travelling
through the royal forests, at the king’s command, the
privilege to kill one deer or two in the sight of the forester,
if he was at hand; if not, they were commanded to cause a
horn to be sounded, that it might not appear as if they had
intended to steal the game.” In “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(v. 5), Falstaff, using the terms of the forest, alludes to
the perquisites of the keeper. Thus he speaks of the “shoulders
for the fellow of this walk,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, the keeper.</p>

<p>Shakespeare has several pretty allusions to the tears of the
deer, this animal being said to possess a very large secretion
of tears. Thus Hamlet (iii. 2) says: “let the strucken deer
go weep;” and in “As You Like It” (ii. 1) we read of the
“sobbing deer,” and in the same scene the first lord narrates
how, at a certain spot,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“a poor sequester’d stag<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did come to languish; ...<br /></span>
<span class="i6">... and the big round tears<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Coursed one another down his innocent nose<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In piteous chase.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Bartholomæus<a name="FNanchor_405_405" id="FNanchor_405_405"></a><a href="#Footnote_405_405" class="fnanchor">[405]</a> says, that “when the hart is arered, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
fleethe to a ryver or ponde, and roreth cryeth and wepeth
when he is take.”<a name="FNanchor_406_406" id="FNanchor_406_406"></a><a href="#Footnote_406_406" class="fnanchor">[406]</a> It appears that there were various superstitions
connected with the tears of the deer. Batman<a name="FNanchor_407_407" id="FNanchor_407_407"></a><a href="#Footnote_407_407" class="fnanchor">[407]</a>
tells us that “when the hart is sick, and hath eaten many
serpents for his recoverie, he is brought unto so great a heate
that he hasteth to the water, and there covereth his body
unto the very eares and eyes, at which time distilleth many
tears from which the [Bezoar] stone is gendered.”<a name="FNanchor_408_408" id="FNanchor_408_408"></a><a href="#Footnote_408_408" class="fnanchor">[408]</a> Douce<a name="FNanchor_409_409" id="FNanchor_409_409"></a><a href="#Footnote_409_409" class="fnanchor">[409]</a>
quotes the following passage from the “Noble Art of Venerie,”
in which the hart thus addresses the hunter:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O cruell, be content, to take in worth my tears,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which growe to gumme, and fall from me: content thee with my heares,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Content thee with my hornes, which every year I new,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since all these three make medicines, some sickness to eschew.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My tears congeal’d to gumme, by peeces from me fall,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thee preserve from pestilence, in pomander or ball.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Such wholesome tears shedde I, when thou pursewest me so.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Dog.</i> As the favorite of our domestic animals, the dog not
unnaturally possesses an extensive history, besides entering
largely into those superstitions which, more or less,
are associated with every stage of human life. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Shakespeare frequently speaks of the
dog, making it the subject of many of his illustrations. Thus
he has not omitted to mention the fatal significance of its
howl, which is supposed either to foretell death or misfortune.
In “2 Henry VI.” (i. 4) he makes Bolingbroke say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The time when screech-owls cry, and ban-dogs howl,<a name="FNanchor_410_410" id="FNanchor_410_410"></a><a href="#Footnote_410_410" class="fnanchor">[410]</a><br /></span>
<span class="i0">And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), King Henry, speaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
of Gloster, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The owl shriek’d at thy birth,—an evil sign;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dogs howl’d, and hideous tempests shook down trees.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The same superstition prevails in France and Germany,<a name="FNanchor_411_411" id="FNanchor_411_411"></a><a href="#Footnote_411_411" class="fnanchor">[411]</a> and
various charms are resorted to for averting the ill-consequences
supposed to attach to this sign of ill-omen. Several
of these, too, are practised in our own country. Thus, in
Staffordshire, when a dog howls, the following advice is
given: “Take off your shoe from the left foot, and spit
upon the sole, place it on the ground bottom upwards, and
your foot upon the place you sat upon, which will not only
preserve you from harm, but stop the howling of the dog.”<a name="FNanchor_412_412" id="FNanchor_412_412"></a><a href="#Footnote_412_412" class="fnanchor">[412]</a>
A similar remedy is recommended in Norfolk:<a name="FNanchor_413_413" id="FNanchor_413_413"></a><a href="#Footnote_413_413" class="fnanchor">[413]</a> “Pull off
your left shoe, and turn it, and it will quiet him. A dog
won’t howl three times after.” We are indebted to antiquity
for this superstition, some of the earliest writers referring
to it. Thus, Pausanias relates how, previous to the destruction
of the Messenians, the dogs pierced the air by raising
a louder barking than usual; and it is on record how,
before the sedition in Rome, about the dictatorship of Pompey,
there was an extraordinary howling of dogs. Vergil<a name="FNanchor_414_414" id="FNanchor_414_414"></a><a href="#Footnote_414_414" class="fnanchor">[414]</a>
(“Georgics,” lib. i. l. 470), speaking of the Roman misfortunes,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Obscenæque canes, importunæque volucres<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Signa dabant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Capitolinus narrates, too, how the dogs, by their howling,
presaged the death of Maximinus. The idea which associates
the dog’s howl with the approach of death is probably
derived from a conception in Aryan mythology, which represents<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
a dog as summoning the departing soul. Indeed, as
Mr. Fiske<a name="FNanchor_415_415" id="FNanchor_415_415"></a><a href="#Footnote_415_415" class="fnanchor">[415]</a> remarks, “Throughout all Aryan mythology, the
souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind,
with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the
souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses.”</p>

<p>Another popular superstition—in all probability derived
from the Egyptians—refers to the setting and rising of Sirius,
or the dog-star, as infusing madness into the canine race.
Hence the name of the “dog-days” was given by the Romans
to the period between the 3d of July and the 11th of
August, to which Shakespeare alludes in “Henry VIII.”
(v. 3): “the dog-days now reign.” We may, too, compare
the words of Benvolio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is obvious, however, that this superstition is utterly groundless,
for not only does the star vary in its rising, but is later
and later every year. The term “dog-day” is still a common
phrase, and it is difficult to say whether it is from superstitious
adherence to old custom, or from a belief in the injurious
effect of heat upon dogs, that the magistrates, often
unwisely, at this season of the year order them to be muzzled
or tied up. It was the practice to put them to death; and
Ben Jonson, in his “Bartholomew Fair,” speaks of “the dog-killer”
in this month of August. Lord Bacon, too, in his
“Sylva Sylvarum,” tells us that “it is a common experience
that dogs know the dog-killer, when, as in times of infection,
some petty fellow is sent out to kill them. Although they
have never seen him before, yet they will all come forth and
bark and fly at him.”</p>

<p>A “curtal dog,” to which allusion is made in “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), by Pistol—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hope is a curtal dog in some affairs,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">denoted “originally the dog of an unqualified person, which,
by the forest laws, must have its tail cut short, partly as a
mark, and partly from a notion that the tail of a dog is necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
to him in running.” In later usage, <i>curtail dog</i> means
either a common dog, not meant for sport, or a dog that
missed the game, which latter sense it has in the passage
above.<a name="FNanchor_416_416" id="FNanchor_416_416"></a><a href="#Footnote_416_416" class="fnanchor">[416]</a></p>

<p><i>Dragon.</i> As the type and embodiment of the spirit of
evil, the dragon has been made the subject of an extensive
legendary lore. The well-known myth of St. George and
the Dragon, which may be regarded as a grand allegory
representing the hideous and powerful monster against whom
the Christian soldier is called to fight, has exercised a remarkable
influence for good in times past, over half-instructed
people. It has been truly remarked that “the dullest
mind and hardest heart could not fail to learn from it something
of the hatefulness of evil, the beauty of self-sacrifice,
and the all-conquering might of truth.” This graceful conception
is alluded to by Shakespeare, in his “King John”
(ii. 1), where, according to a long-established custom, it is
made a subject for sign-painting:<a name="FNanchor_417_417" id="FNanchor_417_417"></a><a href="#Footnote_417_417" class="fnanchor">[417]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“St. George, that swinged the dragon, and e’er since,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sits on his horseback at mine hostess’ door,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Teach us some fence!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In ancient mythology the task of drawing the chariot of
night was assigned to dragons, on account of their supposed
watchfulness. In “Cymbeline” (ii. 2) Iachimo, addressing
them, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May bare the raven’s eye!”<a name="FNanchor_418_418" id="FNanchor_418_418"></a><a href="#Footnote_418_418" class="fnanchor">[418]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Milton, in his “Il Penseroso,” mentions the dragon yoke
of night, and in his “Comus” (l. 130):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“the dragon womb<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of Stygian darkness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It may be noticed that the whole tribe of serpents sleep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
with their eyes open, and so appear to exert a constant
watchfulness.<a name="FNanchor_419_419" id="FNanchor_419_419"></a><a href="#Footnote_419_419" class="fnanchor">[419]</a></p>

<p>In devising loathsome ingredients for the witches’ mess,
Shakespeare (“Macbeth,” iv. 1) speaks of “the scale of
dragon,” alluding to the horror in which this mythical being
was held. Referring, also, to the numerous legends associated
with its dread form, he mentions “the spleen of fiery
dragons” (“Richard III.,” v. 3), “dragon’s wings” (“1 Henry
VI.,” i. 1), and (“Pericles,” i. 1), “death-like dragons.”
Mr. Conway<a name="FNanchor_420_420" id="FNanchor_420_420"></a><a href="#Footnote_420_420" class="fnanchor">[420]</a> has admirably summed up the general views
respecting this imaginary source of terror: “Nearly all the
dragon forms, whatever their original types and their region,
are represented in the conventional monster of the European
stage, which meets the popular conception. The dragon
is a masterpiece of the popular imagination, and it required
many generations to give it artistic shape. Every
Christmas he appears in some London pantomime, with aspect
similar to that which he has worn for many ages. His
body is partly green, with the memories of the sea and of
slime, and partly brown or dark, with lingering shadow of
storm clouds. The lightning flames still in his red eyes,
and flashes from his fire-breathing mouth. The thunder-bolt
of Jove, the spear of Wodan, are in the barbed point
of his tail. His huge wings—bat-like, spiked—sum up all
the mythical life of extinct harpies and vampires. Spine of
crocodile is on his neck, tail of the serpent, and all the jagged
ridges of rocks and sharp thorns of jungles bristle around
him, while the ice of glaciers and brassy glitter of sunstrokes
are in his scales. He is ideal of all that is hard, obstructive,
perilous, loathsome, horrible in nature; every detail of him
has been seen through and vanquished by man, here or
there, but in selection and combination they rise again
as principles, and conspire to form one great generalization
of the forms of pain—the sum of every creature’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
worst.”<a name="FNanchor_421_421" id="FNanchor_421_421"></a><a href="#Footnote_421_421" class="fnanchor">[421]</a></p>

<p><i>Elephant.</i> According to a vulgar error, current in bygone
times, the elephant was supposed to have no joints—a notion
which is said to have been first recorded from tradition
by Ctesias the Cnidian.<a name="FNanchor_422_422" id="FNanchor_422_422"></a><a href="#Footnote_422_422" class="fnanchor">[422]</a> Sir Thomas Browne has entered
largely into this superstition, arguing, from reason, anatomy,
and general analogy with other animals, the absurdity of the
error. In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Ulysses says: “The
elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy: his legs are legs
for necessity, not for flexure.” Steevens quotes from “The
Dialogues of Creatures Moralized”—a curious specimen of
our early natural history—the following: “the olefawnte
that bowyth not the kneys.” In the play of “All Fools,”
1605, we read: “I hope you are no elephant—you have
joints.” In a note to Sir Thomas Browne’s Works,<a name="FNanchor_423_423" id="FNanchor_423_423"></a><a href="#Footnote_423_423" class="fnanchor">[423]</a> we
are told, “it has long been the custom for the exhibitors of
itinerant collections of wild animals, when showing the elephant,
to mention the story of its having no joints, and its
consequent inability to kneel; and they never fail to think
it necessary to demonstrate its untruth by causing the animal
to bend one of its fore-legs, and to kneel also.”</p>

<p>In “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1) the custom of seducing elephants
into pitfalls, lightly covered with hurdles and turf, on which
a proper bait to tempt them was exposed, is alluded to.<a name="FNanchor_424_424" id="FNanchor_424_424"></a><a href="#Footnote_424_424" class="fnanchor">[424]</a>
Decius speaks of elephants being betrayed “with holes.”</p>

<p><i>Fox.</i> It appears that the term fox was a common expression
for the old English weapon, the broadsword of Jonson’s
days, as distinguished from the small (foreign) sword.
The name was given from the circumstance that Andrea
Ferrara adopted a fox as the blade-mark of his weapons—a
practice, since his time, adopted by other foreign sword-cutlers.
Swords with a running fox rudely engraved on
the blades are still occasionally to be met with in the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
curiosity shops of London.<a name="FNanchor_425_425" id="FNanchor_425_425"></a><a href="#Footnote_425_425" class="fnanchor">[425]</a> Thus, in “Henry V.” (iv. 4),
Pistol says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O Signieur Dew, thou diest on point of fox,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Except, O signieur, thou do give to me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Egregious ransom.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” (ii. 6) the expression
occurs: “What would you have, sister, of a fellow that
knows nothing but a basket-hilt, and an old fox in it?”</p>

<p>The tricks and artifices of a hunted fox were supposed to
be very extraordinary; hence Falstaff makes use of this expression
in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3): “No more truth in thee
than in a drawn fox.”</p>

<p><i>Goat.</i> It is curious that the harmless goat should have
had an evil name, and been associated with devil-lore.
Thus, there is a common superstition in England and Scotland
that it is never seen for twenty-four hours together;
and that once in this space it pays a visit to the devil, in
order to have its beard combed. It was, formerly, too, a
popular notion that the devil appeared frequently in the
shape of a goat, which accounted for his horns and tail. Sir
Thomas Browne observes that the goat was the emblem of
the sin-offering, and is the emblem of sinful men at the day
of judgment. This may, perhaps, account for Shakespeare’s
enumerating the “gall of goat” (“Macbeth,” iv. 1) among
the ingredients of the witches’ caldron. His object seems
to have been to include the most distasteful and ill-omened
things imaginable—a practice shared, indeed, by other poets
contemporary with him.</p>

<p><i>Hare.</i> This was formerly esteemed a melancholy animal,
and its flesh was supposed to engender melancholy in those
who ate it. This idea was not confined to our own country,
but is mentioned by La Fontaine in one of his “Fables”
(liv. ii. fab. 14):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dans un profond ennui ce lievre se plongeoit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cet animal est triste, et la crainte le rounge;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and later on he says: “Le melancolique animal.” Hence,
in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff is told by Prince Henry
that he is as melancholy as a hare. This notion was not
quite forgotten in Swift’s time; for in his “Polite Conversation,”
Lady Answerall, being asked to eat hare, replies: “No,
madam; they say ’tis melancholy meat.” Mr. Staunton
quotes the following extract from Turbervile’s book on
Hunting and Falconry: “The hare first taught us the use
of the hearbe called wyld succory, which is very excellent
for those which are disposed to be melancholicke. She herself
is one of the most melancholicke beasts that is, and to
heale her own infirmitie, she goeth commonly to sit under
that hearbe.”</p>

<p>The old Greek epigram relating to the hare—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Strike ye my body, now that life is fled;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So hares insult the lion when he’s dead,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—is alluded to by the Bastard in “King John” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A familiar expression among sportsmen for a hare is “Wat,”
so called, perhaps, from its long ears or wattles. In “Venus
and Adonis” the term occurs:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stands on his hinder legs, with listening ear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xxiii.) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The man whose vacant mind prepares him to the sport,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The finder sendeth out, to seek out nimble Wat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which crosseth in the field, each furlong, every flat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till he this pretty beast upon the form hath found.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hedgehog.</i> The urchin or hedgehog, like the toad, for its
solitariness, the ugliness of its appearance, and from a popular
belief that it sucked or poisoned the udders of cows, was
adopted into the demonologic system; and its shape was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
sometimes supposed to be assumed by mischievous elves.<a name="FNanchor_426_426" id="FNanchor_426_426"></a><a href="#Footnote_426_426" class="fnanchor">[426]</a>
Hence, in “The Tempest” (i. 2), Prospero says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i14">“Urchins<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All exercise on thee;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and later on in the same play (ii. 2) Caliban speaks of being
frighted with “urchin shows.” In the witch scene in “Macbeth”
(iv. 1) the hedge-pig is represented as one of the
witches’ familiars; and in the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
(ii. 2), in the incantation of the fairies, “thorny hedgehogs”
are exorcised. For the use of urchins in similar associations
we may quote “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4), “like urchins,
ouphes, and fairies;” and “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3),
“ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins.”<a name="FNanchor_427_427" id="FNanchor_427_427"></a><a href="#Footnote_427_427" class="fnanchor">[427]</a> In the
phrase still current, of “little urchin” for a child, the idea
of the fairy also remains. In various legends we find this
animal holding a prominent place. Thus, for example, it
was in the form of a hedgehog<a name="FNanchor_428_428" id="FNanchor_428_428"></a><a href="#Footnote_428_428" class="fnanchor">[428]</a> that the devil is said to have
made his attempt to let the sea in through the Brighton
Downs, which was prevented by a light being brought,
though the seriousness of the scheme is still attested in the
Devil’s Dyke. There is an ancient tradition that when the
devil had smuggled himself into Noah’s Ark he tried to sink
it by boring a hole; but this scheme was defeated, and the
human race saved, by the hedgehog stuffing himself into the
hole. In the Brighton story, as Mr. Conway points out, the
devil would appear to have remembered his former failure in
drowning people, and to have appropriated the form which
defeated him. In “Richard III.” (i. 2), the hedgehog is used
as a term of reproach by Lady Anne, when addressing
Gloster.</p>

<p><i>Horse.</i> Although Shakespeare’s allusions to the horse are
most extensive, yet he has said little of the many widespread
superstitions, legends, and traditional tales that have been
associated from the earliest times with this brave and intellectual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
animal. Indeed, even nowadays, both in our own
country and abroad, many a fairy tale is told and credited
by the peasantry in which the horse occupies a prominent
place. It seems to have been a common notion that, at
night-time, fairies in their nocturnal revels played various
pranks with horses, often entangling in a thousand knots
their hair—a superstition to which we referred in our <a href="#CHAPTER_I">chapter
on Fairies</a>, where Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4),
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“This is that very Mab<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That plats the manes of horses in the night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “King Lear” (ii. 3), Edgar says: “I’ll ... elf all my hair
in knots.”</p>

<p>Mr. Hunt, in his “Popular Romances of the West of England”
(1871, p. 87), tells us that, when a boy, he was on a
visit at a farmhouse near Fowey River, and well remembers
the farmer, with much sorrow, telling the party one morning
at breakfast, how “the piskie people had been riding Tom
again.” The mane was said to be knotted into fairy stirrups,
and the farmer said he had no doubt that at least twenty
small people had sat upon the horse’s neck. Warburton<a name="FNanchor_429_429" id="FNanchor_429_429"></a><a href="#Footnote_429_429" class="fnanchor">[429]</a>
considers that this superstition may have originated from the
disease called “Plica Polonica.” Witches, too, have generally
been supposed to harass the horse, using it in various
ways for their fiendish purposes. Thus, there are numerous
local traditions in which the horse at night-time has been
ridden by the witches, and found in the morning in an almost
prostrate condition, bathed in sweat.</p>

<p>It was a current notion that a horse-hair dropped into
corrupted water would soon become an animal. The fact,
however, is that the hair moves like a living thing because
a number of animalculæ cling to it.<a name="FNanchor_430_430" id="FNanchor_430_430"></a><a href="#Footnote_430_430" class="fnanchor">[430]</a> This ancient vulgar
error is mentioned in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“much is breeding,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Which, like the courser’s hair, hath yet but life,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not a serpent’s poison.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Steevens quotes from Churchyard’s “Discourse of Rebellion,”
1570:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hit is of kinde much worse than horses heare,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That lyes in donge, where on vyle serpents brede.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Dr. Lister, in the “Philosophical Transactions,” says that
these animated horse-hairs are real thread-worms. It was
asserted that these worms moved like serpents, and were
poisonous to swallow. Coleridge tells us it was a common
experiment with boys in Cumberland and Westmoreland to
lay a horse-hair in water, which, when removed after a time,
would twirl round the finger and sensibly compress it—having
become the supporter of an immense number of small,
slimy water-lice.</p>

<p>A horse is said to have a “cloud in his face” when he
has a dark-colored spot in his forehead between his eyes.
This gives him a sour look, and, being supposed to indicate
an ill-temper, is generally considered a great blemish. This
notion is alluded to in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 2),
where Agrippa, speaking of Cæsar, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He has a cloud in’s face,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">whereupon Enobarbus adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He were the worse for that, were he a horse;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So is he, being a man.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” uses the phrase
for the look of a woman: “Every lover admires his mistress,
though she be very deformed of herselfe—thin, leane, chitty
face, have clouds in her face,” etc.</p>

<p>“To mose in the chine,” a phrase we find in “Taming of
the Shrew” (iii. 2)—“Possessed with the glanders, and like
to mose in the chine”—refers to a disorder in horses, also
known as “mourning in the chine.”</p>

<p>Alluding to the custom associated with horses, we may
note that a stalking-horse, or stale, was either a real or artificial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
one, under cover of which the fowler approached towards
and shot at his game. It is alluded to in “As You
Like It” (v. 4) by the Duke, who says of Touchstone: “He
uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation
of that he shoots his wit.” In “Much Ado About Nothing”
(ii. 3), Claudio says: “Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits.”<a name="FNanchor_431_431" id="FNanchor_431_431"></a><a href="#Footnote_431_431" class="fnanchor">[431]</a> In
“Comedy of Errors” (ii. 1), Adriana says: “I am but his
stale,” upon which Malone remarks: “Adriana undoubtedly
means to compare herself to a stalking-horse, behind whom
Antipholus shoots at such game as he selects.” In “Taming
of the Shrew,” Katharina says to her father (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“is it your will<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make a stale of me amongst these mates?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">which, says Singer, means “make an object of mockery.”
So in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 3), Warwick says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Had he none else to make a stale but me?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>That it was also a hunting term might be shown, adds
Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_432_432" id="FNanchor_432_432"></a><a href="#Footnote_432_432" class="fnanchor">[432]</a> by quotations from various old writers. In the inventories
of the wardrobe belonging to King Henry VIII.
we frequently find the allowance of certain quantities of
stuff for the purpose of making “stalking-coats and stalking-hose
for the use of his majesty.”<a name="FNanchor_433_433" id="FNanchor_433_433"></a><a href="#Footnote_433_433" class="fnanchor">[433]</a></p>

<p>Again, the forehorse of a team was generally gayly ornamented
with tufts and ribbons and bells. Hence, in “All’s
Well That Ends Well” (ii. 1), Bertram complains that, bedizened
like one of these animals, he will have to squire
ladies at the court, instead of achieving honor in the wars—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But one to dance with.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A familiar name for a common horse was “Cut”—either
from its being docked or gelded—a name occasionally applied
to a man as a term of contempt. In “Twelfth Night”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
(ii. 3), Sir Toby Belch says: “Send for money, knight; if
thou hast her not i’ the end, call me cut.” In “1 Henry IV.”
(ii. 1), the first carrier says: “I prithee, Tom, beat Cut’s
saddle.” We may compare, too, what Falstaff says further
on in the same play (ii. 4): “I tell thee what, Hal, if I tell
thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.” Hence, <i>call me
cut</i> is the same as <i>call me horse</i>—both expressions having
been used.</p>

<p>In Shakespeare’s day a <i>race</i> of horses was the term for
what is now called a stud. So in “Macbeth” (ii. 4), Rosse
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And Duncan’s horses—a thing most strange and certain—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turn’d wild in nature.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The words “minions of their race,” according to Steevens,
mean the favorite horses on the race-ground.</p>

<p><i>Lion.</i> The traditions and stories of the darker ages
abounded with examples of the lion’s generosity. “Upon
the supposition that these acts of clemency were true, Troilus,
in the passage below, reasons not improperly (‘Troilus and
Cressida,’ v. 3) that to spare against reason, by mere instinct
and pity, became rather a generous beast than a wise man:”<a name="FNanchor_434_434" id="FNanchor_434_434"></a><a href="#Footnote_434_434" class="fnanchor">[434]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Brother, you have a vice of mercy in you,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which better fits a lion than a man.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is recorded by Pliny<a name="FNanchor_435_435" id="FNanchor_435_435"></a><a href="#Footnote_435_435" class="fnanchor">[435]</a> that “the lion alone of all wild
animals is gentle to those that humble themselves before
him, and will not touch any such upon their submission, but
spareth what creature soever lieth prostrate before him.”
Hence Spenser’s Una, attended by a lion; and Perceval’s
lion, in “Morte d’Arthur” (bk. xiv. c. 6). Bartholomæus says
the lion’s “mercie is known by many and oft ensamples: for
they spare them that lie on the ground.” Shakespeare again
alludes to this notion in “As You Like It” (iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“for ’tis<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
<span class="i0">The royal disposition of that beast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was also supposed that the lion would not injure a royal
prince. Hence, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) the Prince says:
“You are lions too, you ran away upon instinct, you will not
touch the true prince; no, fie!” The same notion is alluded
to by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Mad Lover” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fetch the Numidian lion I brought over;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If she be sprung from royal blood, the lion<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He’ll do you reverence, else—<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">He’ll tear her all to pieces.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to some commentators there is an allusion in
“3 Henry VI.” (i. 3) to the practice of confining lions and
keeping them without food that they may devour criminals
exposed to them:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So looks the pent-up lion o’er the wretch<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That trembles under his devouring paws.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Mole.</i> The eyes of the mole are so extremely minute, and
so perfectly hid in its hair, that our ancestors considered it
blind—a vulgar error, to which reference is made by Caliban
in “The Tempest” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hear a foot fall.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again by Pericles (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“The blind mole casts<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Copp’d hills towards heaven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hence the expression “blind as a mole.” Alexander Ross<a name="FNanchor_436_436" id="FNanchor_436_436"></a><a href="#Footnote_436_436" class="fnanchor">[436]</a>
absurdly speaks of the mole’s eyes as only the “forms of
eyes,” given by nature “rather for ornament than for use;
as wings are given to the ostrich, which never flies, and a
long tail to the rat, which serves for no other purpose but
to be catched sometimes by it.” Sir Thomas Browne, however,
in his “Vulgar Errors” (bk. iii. c. xviii.),<a name="FNanchor_437_437" id="FNanchor_437_437"></a><a href="#Footnote_437_437" class="fnanchor">[437]</a> has, with his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
usual minuteness, disproved this idea, remarking “that they
have eyes in their head is manifested unto any that wants
them not in his own.” A popular term for the mole was the
“moldwarp” or “mouldiwarp,”<a name="FNanchor_438_438" id="FNanchor_438_438"></a><a href="#Footnote_438_438" class="fnanchor">[438]</a> so called from the Anglo-Saxon,
denoting turning the mould. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.”
(iii. 1) Hotspur says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“sometime he angers me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Mouse.</i> This word was formerly used as a term of endearment,
from either sex to the other. In this sense it is used
by Rosaline in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What’s your dark meaning, mouse, of this light word?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and again in “Hamlet” (iii. 4).</p>

<p>Some doubt exists as to the exact meaning of “Mouse-hunt,”
by Lady Capulet, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ay, you have been a mouse-hunt in your time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But I will watch you from such watching now.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to some, the expression implies “a hunter of gay
women,” mouse having been used in this signification.<a name="FNanchor_439_439" id="FNanchor_439_439"></a><a href="#Footnote_439_439" class="fnanchor">[439]</a>
Others are of opinion that the stoat<a name="FNanchor_440_440" id="FNanchor_440_440"></a><a href="#Footnote_440_440" class="fnanchor">[440]</a> is meant, the smallest
of the weasel tribe, and others again the polecat. Mr.
Staunton<a name="FNanchor_441_441" id="FNanchor_441_441"></a><a href="#Footnote_441_441" class="fnanchor">[441]</a> tells us that the mouse-hunt is the marten, an
animal of the weasel tribe which prowls about for its prey at
night, and is applied to any one of rakish propensities.</p>

<p>Holinshed, in his “History of Scotland” (1577, p. 181),
quotes from the laws of Kenneth II., King of Scotland: “If
a sowe eate her pigges, let hyr be stoned to death and buried,
that no man eate of hyr fleshe.” This offence is probably
alluded to by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), where the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
witch says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pour in sow’s blood, that hath eaten<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her nine farrow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Polecat</i>, or <i>Fitchew</i>. This animal is supposed to be very
amorous; and hence its name, Mr. Steevens says, was often
applied to ladies of easy or no virtue. In “Othello” (iv. 1)
Cassio calls Bianca a “fitchew,” and in “Troilus and Cressida”
(v. 1) Thersites alludes to it.<a name="FNanchor_442_442" id="FNanchor_442_442"></a><a href="#Footnote_442_442" class="fnanchor">[442]</a></p>

<p><i>Porcupine.</i> Another name for this animal was the porpentine,
which spelling occurs in “Hamlet” (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1) York speaks of “a
sharp-quill’d porpentine.” Ajax, too, in “Troilus and Cressida”
(ii. 1), applies the term to Thersites: “do not, porpentine.”
In the above passages, however, and elsewhere, the
word has been altered by editors to porcupine. According
to a popular error, the porcupine could dart his quills. They
are easily detached, very sharp, and slightly barbed, and may
easily stick to a person’s legs, when he is not aware that he
is near enough to touch them.<a name="FNanchor_443_443" id="FNanchor_443_443"></a><a href="#Footnote_443_443" class="fnanchor">[443]</a></p>

<p><i>Rabbit.</i> In “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 2) this animal is used as a
term of reproach, a sense in which it was known in Shakespeare’s
day. The phrase “cony-catch,” which occurs in
“Taming of the Shrew” (v. 1)—“Take heed, Signior Baptista,
lest you be cony-catched in this business”—implied the act
of deceiving or cheating a simple person—the cony or rabbit
being considered a foolish animal.<a name="FNanchor_444_444" id="FNanchor_444_444"></a><a href="#Footnote_444_444" class="fnanchor">[444]</a> It has been shown, from
Dekker’s “English Villanies,” that the system of cheating
was carried to a great length in the early part of the seventeenth
century, that a collective society of sharpers was called
“a warren,” and their dupes “rabbit-suckers,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, young
rabbit or conies.<a name="FNanchor_445_445" id="FNanchor_445_445"></a><a href="#Footnote_445_445" class="fnanchor">[445]</a> Shakespeare has once used the term to
express harmless roguery, in the “Taming of the Shrew”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
(iv. 1). When Grumio will not answer his fellow-servants,
except in a jesting way, Curtis says to him: “Come, you
are so full of cony-catching.”</p>

<p><a name="Rat" id="Rat"></a><i>Rat.</i> The fanciful idea that rats were commonly rhymed
to death, in Ireland, is said to have arisen from some metrical
charm or incantation, used there for that purpose, to which
there are constant allusions in old writers. In the “Merchant
of Venice” (iv. 1) Shylock says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What if my house be troubled with a rat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To have it baned?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind says: “I was
never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an
Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.” We find it mentioned
by Ben Jonson in the “Poetaster” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Rhime them to death, as they do Irish rats,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In drumming tunes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“The reference, however, is generally referred, in Ireland,”
says Mr. Mackay, “to the supposed potency of the verses
pronounced by the professional rhymers of Ireland, which,
according to popular superstition, could not only drive rats
to destruction, but could absolutely turn a man’s face to the
back of his head.”<a name="FNanchor_446_446" id="FNanchor_446_446"></a><a href="#Footnote_446_446" class="fnanchor">[446]</a></p>

<p>Sir W. Temple, in his “Essay on Poetry,” seems to derive
the idea from the Runic incantations, for, after speaking of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
them in various ways, he adds, “and the proverb of rhyming
rats to death, came, I suppose, from the same root.”</p>

<p>According to a superstitious notion of considerable antiquity,
rats leaving a ship are considered indicative of misfortune
to a vessel, probably from the same idea that crows
will not build upon trees that are likely to fall. This idea is
noticed by Shakespeare in “The Tempest” (i. 2), where Prospero,
describing the vessel in which himself and daughter
had been placed, with the view to their certain destruction
at sea, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“they hurried us aboard a bark,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Instinctively have quit it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The <i>Shipping Gazette</i> of April, 1869, contained a communication
entitled, “A Sailor’s Notion about Rats,” in which
the following passage occurs: “It is a well-authenticated
fact that rats have often been known to leave ships in the
harbor previous to their being lost at sea. Some of those
wiseacres who want to convince us against the evidence of
our senses will call this superstition. As neither I have time,
nor you space, to cavil with such at present, I shall leave
them alone in their glory.” The fact, however, as Mr. Hardwick
has pointed out in his “Traditions, Superstitions, and
Folk-lore” (1872, p. 251), that rats do sometimes migrate
from one ship to another, or from one barn or corn-stack to
another, from various causes, ought to be quite sufficient to
explain such a superstition. Indeed, a story is told of a cunning
Welsh captain who wanted to get rid of rats that infested
his ship, then lying in the Mersey, at Liverpool. Having
found out that there was a vessel laden with cheese in
the basin, and getting alongside of her about dusk, he left
all his hatches open, and waited till all the rats were in his
neighbor’s ship, and then moved off.</p>

<p><i>Snail.</i> A common amusement among children consists in
charming snails, in order to induce them to put out their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
horns—a couplet, such as the following, being repeated on
the occasion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Peer out, peer out, peer out of your hole,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else I’ll beat you as black as a coal.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Scotland, it is regarded as a token of fine weather if the
snail obey the command and put out its horn:<a name="FNanchor_447_447" id="FNanchor_447_447"></a><a href="#Footnote_447_447" class="fnanchor">[447]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Snailie, snailie, shoot out your horn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And tell us if it will be a bonnie day the morn.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare alludes to snail-charming in the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2), where Mrs. Page says of Mrs.
Ford’s husband, he “so buffets himself on the forehead, crying,
<i>Peer out! peer out!</i> that any madness I ever yet beheld
seemed but tameness, civility, and patience, to this his distemper
he is in now.” In “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 2), the
snail is used to denote a lazy person.</p>

<p><i>Tiger.</i> It was an ancient belief that this animal roared
and raged most furiously in stormy and high winds—a piece
of folk-lore alluded to in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 3), by
Nestor, who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The herd hath more annoyance by the breese<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than by the tiger; but when the splitting wind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And flies fled under shade, why then, the thing of courage,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Unicorn.</i> In “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1) Decius tells how “unicorns
may be betray’d with trees,” alluding to their traditionary
mode of capture. They are reported to have been
taken by one who, running behind a tree, eluded the violent
push the animal was making at him, so that his horn spent
its force on the trunk, and stuck fast, detaining the animal
till he was despatched by the hunter.<a name="FNanchor_448_448" id="FNanchor_448_448"></a><a href="#Footnote_448_448" class="fnanchor">[448]</a> In Topsell’s “History
of Beasts” (1658, p. 557), we read of the unicorn: “He is an
enemy to the lions, wherefore, as soon as ever a lion seeth a
unicorn, he runneth to a tree for succour, that so when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
unicorn maketh force at him, he may not only avoid his
horn, but also destroy him; for the unicorn, in the swiftness
of his course, runneth against the tree, wherein his sharp
horn sticketh fast, that when the lion seeth the unicorn fastened
by the horn, without all danger he falleth upon him
and killeth him.” With this passage we may compare the
following from Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” (bk. ii. canto 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like as a lyon, whose imperiall power<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A prowd rebellious unicorn defyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">T’ avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when him ronning in full course he spyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He slips aside: the whiles that furious beast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His precious horne, sought of his enimyes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Weasel.</i> To meet a weasel was formerly considered a bad
omen.<a name="FNanchor_449_449" id="FNanchor_449_449"></a><a href="#Footnote_449_449" class="fnanchor">[449]</a> That may be a tacit allusion to this superstition in
“Lucrece” (l. 307):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Night-wandering weasels shriek to see him there;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They fright him, yet he still pursues his fear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It appears that weasels were kept in houses, instead of cats,
for the purpose of killing vermin. Phædrus notices this
their feline office in the first and fourth fables of his fourth
book. The supposed quarrelsomeness of this animal is
spoken of by Pisanio in “Cymbeline” (iii. 4), who tells
Imogen that she must be “as quarrelous as the weasel;”
and in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 3), Lady Percy says to Hotspur:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As you are toss’d with.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This character of the weasel is not, however, generally
mentioned by naturalists.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_341_341" id="Footnote_341_341"></a><a href="#FNanchor_341_341"><span class="label">[341]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_342_342" id="Footnote_342_342"></a><a href="#FNanchor_342_342"><span class="label">[342]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 38.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_343_343" id="Footnote_343_343"></a><a href="#FNanchor_343_343"><span class="label">[343]</span></a> “Glossary to Shakespeare,” 1876, p. 20.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_344_344" id="Footnote_344_344"></a><a href="#FNanchor_344_344"><span class="label">[344]</span></a> “Asinico, a little ass,” Connelly’s “Spanish and English Dictionary,”
Madrid, 4to.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_345_345" id="Footnote_345_345"></a><a href="#FNanchor_345_345"><span class="label">[345]</span></a> “English Folk-Lore,” p. 115; cf. “Macbeth,” iii. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_346_346" id="Footnote_346_346"></a><a href="#FNanchor_346_346"><span class="label">[346]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, pp. 125,
126.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_347_347" id="Footnote_347_347"></a><a href="#FNanchor_347_347"><span class="label">[347]</span></a> It has been speciously derived from the English word <i>rear</i>, in the
sense of being able to raise itself in the air, but this is erroneous.
Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 726.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_348_348" id="Footnote_348_348"></a><a href="#FNanchor_348_348"><span class="label">[348]</span></a> Aldis Wright’s “Notes to A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” 1877, p.
101.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_349_349" id="Footnote_349_349"></a><a href="#FNanchor_349_349"><span class="label">[349]</span></a> “Folk-Lore Record,” 1879, p. 201.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_350_350" id="Footnote_350_350"></a><a href="#FNanchor_350_350"><span class="label">[350]</span></a> Jamieson’s “Scottish Dictionary,” 1879, vol. i p. 106.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_351_351" id="Footnote_351_351"></a><a href="#FNanchor_351_351"><span class="label">[351]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 189; Harting’s “Ornithology
of Shakespeare,” 1871, pp. 13, 14.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_352_352" id="Footnote_352_352"></a><a href="#FNanchor_352_352"><span class="label">[352]</span></a> “Vulgar Errors,” 1852, vol. i. p. 247.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_353_353" id="Footnote_353_353"></a><a href="#FNanchor_353_353"><span class="label">[353]</span></a> See Bartholomæus, “De Proprietate Rerum,” lib. xviii. c. 112;
Aristotle, “History of Animals,” lib. vi. c. 31; Pliny’s “Natural History,”
lib. viii. c. 54.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_354_354" id="Footnote_354_354"></a><a href="#FNanchor_354_354"><span class="label">[354]</span></a> Steevens on this passage.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_355_355" id="Footnote_355_355"></a><a href="#FNanchor_355_355"><span class="label">[355]</span></a> “Notes on Julius Cæsar,” 1878, p. 134.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_356_356" id="Footnote_356_356"></a><a href="#FNanchor_356_356"><span class="label">[356]</span></a> “Notices Illustrative of the Drama and other Popular Amusements,”
incidentally illustrating Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
extracted from the MSS. of Leicester, by W. Kelly, 1865, p. 152.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_357_357" id="Footnote_357_357"></a><a href="#FNanchor_357_357"><span class="label">[357]</span></a> No. 433. The document is given at length in Collier’s “Annals of
the Stage,” vol. i. p. 35, note.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_358_358" id="Footnote_358_358"></a><a href="#FNanchor_358_358"><span class="label">[358]</span></a> Kelly’s “Notices of Leicester,” p. 152.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_359_359" id="Footnote_359_359"></a><a href="#FNanchor_359_359"><span class="label">[359]</span></a> Wright’s “Domestic Manners,” p. 304.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_360_360" id="Footnote_360_360"></a><a href="#FNanchor_360_360"><span class="label">[360]</span></a> “Progresses and Processions,” vol. ii. p. 259.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_361_361" id="Footnote_361_361"></a><a href="#FNanchor_361_361"><span class="label">[361]</span></a> About 1760 it was customary to have a bear baited at the election
of the mayor. Corry, “History of Liverpool,” 1810, p. 93.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_362_362" id="Footnote_362_362"></a><a href="#FNanchor_362_362"><span class="label">[362]</span></a> Edited by M.&nbsp;A. Thorns, 1853, p. 170.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_363_363" id="Footnote_363_363"></a><a href="#FNanchor_363_363"><span class="label">[363]</span></a> For further information on this subject consult Strutt’s “Sports
and Pastimes,” 1876; Kelly’s “Notices of Leicester,” pp. 152-159.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_364_364" id="Footnote_364_364"></a><a href="#FNanchor_364_364"><span class="label">[364]</span></a> Chambers’s “Book of Days,” 1864, vol. ii. pp. 518, 519.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_365_365" id="Footnote_365_365"></a><a href="#FNanchor_365_365"><span class="label">[365]</span></a> Hampson’s “Œvi Medii Kalendarium,” vol. i. p. 96.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_366_366" id="Footnote_366_366"></a><a href="#FNanchor_366_366"><span class="label">[366]</span></a> See <i>Gentleman’s Magazine</i>, vol. xcviii. pp. 401, 402.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_367_367" id="Footnote_367_367"></a><a href="#FNanchor_367_367"><span class="label">[367]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” vol. ii. pp. 517-519.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_368_368" id="Footnote_368_368"></a><a href="#FNanchor_368_368"><span class="label">[368]</span></a> “Embossed” is a hunting term, properly applied to a deer when
foaming at the mouth from fatigue, see p. <a href="#Page_179">179</a>; also Dyce’s “Glossary
to Shakespeare,” p. 142; see Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 275.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_369_369" id="Footnote_369_369"></a><a href="#FNanchor_369_369"><span class="label">[369]</span></a> Wright’s “Domestic Manners,” p. 304; see Strutt’s “Sports and
Pastimes;” Smith’s “Festivals, Games, and Amusements,” 1831, pp.
192-229.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_370_370" id="Footnote_370_370"></a><a href="#FNanchor_370_370"><span class="label">[370]</span></a> “Book of Days,” vol. ii. p. 59.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_371_371" id="Footnote_371_371"></a><a href="#FNanchor_371_371"><span class="label">[371]</span></a> Cf. “2 Henry IV.” ii. 2, “the town-bull.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_372_372" id="Footnote_372_372"></a><a href="#FNanchor_372_372"><span class="label">[372]</span></a> “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” p. 267; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. iii. p. 7.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_373_373" id="Footnote_373_373"></a><a href="#FNanchor_373_373"><span class="label">[373]</span></a> Malkin is a diminutive of “Mary;” “Maukin,” the same word, is
still used in Scotland for a hare. “Notes to Macbeth,” by Clark and
Wright, 1877, p. 75.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_374_374" id="Footnote_374_374"></a><a href="#FNanchor_374_374"><span class="label">[374]</span></a> Sternberg’s “Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire,” 1851,
p. 148.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_375_375" id="Footnote_375_375"></a><a href="#FNanchor_375_375"><span class="label">[375]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties” 1879, p. 206.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_376_376" id="Footnote_376_376"></a><a href="#FNanchor_376_376"><span class="label">[376]</span></a> Kelly’s “Indo-European Folk-Lore,” 1863, p. 238.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_377_377" id="Footnote_377_377"></a><a href="#FNanchor_377_377"><span class="label">[377]</span></a> Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” 1851, vol. iii. p. 32.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_378_378" id="Footnote_378_378"></a><a href="#FNanchor_378_378"><span class="label">[378]</span></a> Ibid., vol. ii. p. 32; vol. iii. pp. 26-236.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_379_379" id="Footnote_379_379"></a><a href="#FNanchor_379_379"><span class="label">[379]</span></a> See Baring-Gould’s “Book of Werewolves,” 1869, p. 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_380_380" id="Footnote_380_380"></a><a href="#FNanchor_380_380"><span class="label">[380]</span></a> Ibid., p. 66.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_381_381" id="Footnote_381_381"></a><a href="#FNanchor_381_381"><span class="label">[381]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 70.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_382_382" id="Footnote_382_382"></a><a href="#FNanchor_382_382"><span class="label">[382]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 39; also Wright’s “Essays
on the Superstitions of the Middle Ages,” 1846.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_383_383" id="Footnote_383_383"></a><a href="#FNanchor_383_383"><span class="label">[383]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii. p. 42.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_384_384" id="Footnote_384_384"></a><a href="#FNanchor_384_384"><span class="label">[384]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 466.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_385_385" id="Footnote_385_385"></a><a href="#FNanchor_385_385"><span class="label">[385]</span></a> From Tibert, Tib was also a common name for a cat.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_386_386" id="Footnote_386_386"></a><a href="#FNanchor_386_386"><span class="label">[386]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 41.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_387_387" id="Footnote_387_387"></a><a href="#FNanchor_387_387"><span class="label">[387]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 183.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_388_388" id="Footnote_388_388"></a><a href="#FNanchor_388_388"><span class="label">[388]</span></a> A gibbe (an old male cat), Macou, Cotgrave’s “French and English
Dictionary.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_389_389" id="Footnote_389_389"></a><a href="#FNanchor_389_389"><span class="label">[389]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 360.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_390_390" id="Footnote_390_390"></a><a href="#FNanchor_390_390"><span class="label">[390]</span></a> “Vulgar Errors,” bk. iii. p. 21, 1852; bk. i. p. 321, <i>note</i>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_391_391" id="Footnote_391_391"></a><a href="#FNanchor_391_391"><span class="label">[391]</span></a> Ovid (“Metamorphoses,” bk. xv. l. 411) speaks of its changes of
color.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_392_392" id="Footnote_392_392"></a><a href="#FNanchor_392_392"><span class="label">[392]</span></a> Cuvier’s “Animal Kingdom,” 1831, vol. ix. p. 226.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_393_393" id="Footnote_393_393"></a><a href="#FNanchor_393_393"><span class="label">[393]</span></a> “Vulgar Errors,” bk. iii. p. 7.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_394_394" id="Footnote_394_394"></a><a href="#FNanchor_394_394"><span class="label">[394]</span></a> See “Cymbeline,” ii. 4; “Winter’s Tale,” i. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_395_395" id="Footnote_395_395"></a><a href="#FNanchor_395_395"><span class="label">[395]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p 173.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_396_396" id="Footnote_396_396"></a><a href="#FNanchor_396_396"><span class="label">[396]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 29; see “1 Henry IV.,” ii. 3, “of basilisks, of
cannon, culverin.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_397_397" id="Footnote_397_397"></a><a href="#FNanchor_397_397"><span class="label">[397]</span></a> “Handbook Index to Shakespeare.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_398_398" id="Footnote_398_398"></a><a href="#FNanchor_398_398"><span class="label">[398]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. x. p. 118.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_399_399" id="Footnote_399_399"></a><a href="#FNanchor_399_399"><span class="label">[399]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 66, 75, 79, 80, 113, 117.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_400_400" id="Footnote_400_400"></a><a href="#FNanchor_400_400"><span class="label">[400]</span></a> See “As You Like It,” iv. 2; “All’s Well That Ends Well,” v. 2;
“Macbeth,” iv. 3; “1 Henry IV.,” v. 4; “1 Henry VI.,” iv. 2; “2 Henry
VI.,” v. 2; “Titus Andronicus,” iii. 1, etc.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_401_401" id="Footnote_401_401"></a><a href="#FNanchor_401_401"><span class="label">[401]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. viii. p. 421</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_402_402" id="Footnote_402_402"></a><a href="#FNanchor_402_402"><span class="label">[402]</span></a> Chappell’s “Popular Music of the Olden Time,” 2d ed. vol. i. p. 61;
see Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 432; see, too, Nares’s
“Glossary,” vol. i. p. 440.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_403_403" id="Footnote_403_403"></a><a href="#FNanchor_403_403"><span class="label">[403]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 401.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_404_404" id="Footnote_404_404"></a><a href="#FNanchor_404_404"><span class="label">[404]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_405_405" id="Footnote_405_405"></a><a href="#FNanchor_405_405"><span class="label">[405]</span></a> “De Proprietate Rerum,” lib. xviii. c. 30.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_406_406" id="Footnote_406_406"></a><a href="#FNanchor_406_406"><span class="label">[406]</span></a> Cf. Vergil’s description of the wounded stag in “Æneid,” bk. vii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_407_407" id="Footnote_407_407"></a><a href="#FNanchor_407_407"><span class="label">[407]</span></a> Commentary on Bartholomæus’s “De Proprietate Rerum.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_408_408" id="Footnote_408_408"></a><a href="#FNanchor_408_408"><span class="label">[408]</span></a> The drops which fall from their eyes are not tears from the lachrymal
glands, but an oily secretion from the inner angle of the eye
close to the nose.—Brewer’s “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” p. 217.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_409_409" id="Footnote_409_409"></a><a href="#FNanchor_409_409"><span class="label">[409]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 183.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_410_410" id="Footnote_410_410"></a><a href="#FNanchor_410_410"><span class="label">[410]</span></a> These dogs were kept for baiting bears, when that amusement was
in vogue, and “from their terrific howling they are occasionally introduced
to heighten the horror of the picture.” Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. i. p. 50.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_411_411" id="Footnote_411_411"></a><a href="#FNanchor_411_411"><span class="label">[411]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Indo-European Folk-Lore,” p. 109.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_412_412" id="Footnote_412_412"></a><a href="#FNanchor_412_412"><span class="label">[412]</span></a> Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties,” p. 48.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_413_413" id="Footnote_413_413"></a><a href="#FNanchor_413_413"><span class="label">[413]</span></a> See “English Folk-Lore,” p. 101.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_414_414" id="Footnote_414_414"></a><a href="#FNanchor_414_414"><span class="label">[414]</span></a> See Hardwick’s “Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore,” p. 171.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_415_415" id="Footnote_415_415"></a><a href="#FNanchor_415_415"><span class="label">[415]</span></a> “Myths and Mythmakers,” 1873, p. 36.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_416_416" id="Footnote_416_416"></a><a href="#FNanchor_416_416"><span class="label">[416]</span></a> “Nares’s Glossary,” vol. i. p. 218.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_417_417" id="Footnote_417_417"></a><a href="#FNanchor_417_417"><span class="label">[417]</span></a> For the various versions of this myth consult Baring-Gould’s “Curious
Myths of the Middle Ages,” 1877, pp. 266-316.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_418_418" id="Footnote_418_418"></a><a href="#FNanchor_418_418"><span class="label">[418]</span></a> Cf. “Troilus and Cressida,” v. 8; “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,”
iii. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_419_419" id="Footnote_419_419"></a><a href="#FNanchor_419_419"><span class="label">[419]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. x. p. 363.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_420_420" id="Footnote_420_420"></a><a href="#FNanchor_420_420"><span class="label">[420]</span></a> “Demonology and Devil-Lore,” 1880, vol. i. p. 383.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_421_421" id="Footnote_421_421"></a><a href="#FNanchor_421_421"><span class="label">[421]</span></a> The dragon formerly constituted a part of the morris-dance.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_422_422" id="Footnote_422_422"></a><a href="#FNanchor_422_422"><span class="label">[422]</span></a> Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 1852, vol. i. pp. 220-232.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_423_423" id="Footnote_423_423"></a><a href="#FNanchor_423_423"><span class="label">[423]</span></a> Edited by Simon Wilkin, 1852, vol. i. p. 226.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_424_424" id="Footnote_424_424"></a><a href="#FNanchor_424_424"><span class="label">[424]</span></a> See Pliny’s “Natural History,” bk. viii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_425_425" id="Footnote_425_425"></a><a href="#FNanchor_425_425"><span class="label">[425]</span></a> Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol. ii. p. 367; Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. i. p. 331.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_426_426" id="Footnote_426_426"></a><a href="#FNanchor_426_426"><span class="label">[426]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ix. p. 75.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_427_427" id="Footnote_427_427"></a><a href="#FNanchor_427_427"><span class="label">[427]</span></a> See Wright’s Notes to “The Tempest,” 1875, p. 94.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_428_428" id="Footnote_428_428"></a><a href="#FNanchor_428_428"><span class="label">[428]</span></a> Conway’s “Demonology and Devil-Lore,” 1880, vol. i. p. 122.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_429_429" id="Footnote_429_429"></a><a href="#FNanchor_429_429"><span class="label">[429]</span></a> Warburton on “Romeo and Juliet,” i. 4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_430_430" id="Footnote_430_430"></a><a href="#FNanchor_430_430"><span class="label">[430]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 104.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_431_431" id="Footnote_431_431"></a><a href="#FNanchor_431_431"><span class="label">[431]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 106; Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. ii. p. 830.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_432_432" id="Footnote_432_432"></a><a href="#FNanchor_432_432"><span class="label">[432]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 412.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_433_433" id="Footnote_433_433"></a><a href="#FNanchor_433_433"><span class="label">[433]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” p. 48.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_434_434" id="Footnote_434_434"></a><a href="#FNanchor_434_434"><span class="label">[434]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. vii. p. 277.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_435_435" id="Footnote_435_435"></a><a href="#FNanchor_435_435"><span class="label">[435]</span></a> “Natural History,” bk. viii. c. 19.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_436_436" id="Footnote_436_436"></a><a href="#FNanchor_436_436"><span class="label">[436]</span></a> “Arcana Microcosmi,” p. 151.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_437_437" id="Footnote_437_437"></a><a href="#FNanchor_437_437"><span class="label">[437]</span></a> 1852, vol. i. pp. 312-315.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_438_438" id="Footnote_438_438"></a><a href="#FNanchor_438_438"><span class="label">[438]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 577; Singer’s “Shakespeare,”
vol. v. p. 77.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_439_439" id="Footnote_439_439"></a><a href="#FNanchor_439_439"><span class="label">[439]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” 1866,
p. 331.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_440_440" id="Footnote_440_440"></a><a href="#FNanchor_440_440"><span class="label">[440]</span></a> Forby’s “Vocabulary of East Anglia,” vol. ii. p. 222.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_441_441" id="Footnote_441_441"></a><a href="#FNanchor_441_441"><span class="label">[441]</span></a> See Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 278.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_442_442" id="Footnote_442_442"></a><a href="#FNanchor_442_442"><span class="label">[442]</span></a> Cf. “King Lear,” iv. 6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_443_443" id="Footnote_443_443"></a><a href="#FNanchor_443_443"><span class="label">[443]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 673.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_444_444" id="Footnote_444_444"></a><a href="#FNanchor_444_444"><span class="label">[444]</span></a> Ibid., vol. ii. p. 189.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_445_445" id="Footnote_445_445"></a><a href="#FNanchor_445_445"><span class="label">[445]</span></a> See D’Israeli’s “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. p. 78.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_446_446" id="Footnote_446_446"></a><a href="#FNanchor_446_446"><span class="label">[446]</span></a> “The strange phrase and the superstition that arose out of it seem
to have been produced by a mistranslation, by the English-speaking
population of a considerable portion of Ireland, of two Celtic or Gaelic
words, <i>ran</i>, to <i>roar</i>, to shriek, to bellow, to make a great noise on a
wind instrument; and <i>rann</i>, to versify, to rhyme. It is well known
that rats are scared by any great and persistent noise in the house
which they infest. The Saxon English, as well as Saxon Irish, of
Shakespeare’s time, confounding <i>rann</i>, a rhyme, with <i>ran</i>, a <i>roar</i>, fell
into the error which led to the English phrase as used by Shakespeare.”—<i>Antiquarian
Magazine and Bibliographer</i>, 1882, vol. ii. p. 9.
“On Some Obscure Words and Celtic Phrases in Shakespeare,” by
Charles Mackay.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_447_447" id="Footnote_447_447"></a><a href="#FNanchor_447_447"><span class="label">[447]</span></a> See “English Folk-Lore,” 1878, p. 120.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_448_448" id="Footnote_448_448"></a><a href="#FNanchor_448_448"><span class="label">[448]</span></a> See Brewer’s “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” p. 922.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_449_449" id="Footnote_449_449"></a><a href="#FNanchor_449_449"><span class="label">[449]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 283.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></h2>

<h3>PLANTS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">That</span> Shakespeare possessed an extensive knowledge of
the history and superstitions associated with flowers is evident,
from even only a slight perusal of his plays. Apart
from the extensive use which he has made of these lovely
objects of nature for the purpose of embellishing, or adding
pathos to, passages here and there, he has also, with a master
hand, interwoven many a little legend or superstition,
thereby infusing an additional force into his writings. Thus
we know with what effect he has made use of the willow in
“Othello,” in that touching passage where Desdemona
(iv. 3), anticipating her death, relates how her mother had a
maid called Barbara:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She was in love; and he she lov’d prov’d mad,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And did forsake her; she had a song of willow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An old thing ’twas, but it expressed her fortune,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And she died singing it: that song, to-night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will not go from my mind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In a similar manner Shakespeare has frequently introduced
flowers with a wonderful aptness, as in the case of poor
Ophelia. Those, however, desirous of gaining a good
insight into Shakespeare’s knowledge of flowers, as illustrated
by his plays, would do well to consult Mr. Ellacombe’s
exhaustive work on the “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,”
a book to which we are much indebted in the
following pages, as also to Mr. Beisly’s “Shakespeare’s
Garden.”</p>

<p><i>Aconite.</i><a name="FNanchor_450_450" id="FNanchor_450_450"></a><a href="#Footnote_450_450" class="fnanchor">[450]</a> This plant, from the deadly virulence of its
juice, which, Mr. Turner says, “is of all poysones the most
hastie poysone,” is compared by Shakespeare to gunpowder,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
as in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“the united vessel of their blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mingled with venom of suggestion,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As, force perforce, the age will pour it in,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall never leak, though it do work as strong<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As aconitum, or rash gunpowder.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is, too, probably alluded to in the following passage in
“Romeo and Juliet” (v. 1), where Romeo says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“let me have<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A dram of poison; such soon-speeding gear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As will disperse itself through all the veins,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That the life-weary taker may fall dead;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And that the trunk may be discharg’d of breath<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As violently, as hasty powder fir’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth hurry from the fatal cannon’s womb.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to Ovid, it derived its name from growing upon
rock (Metamorphoses, bk. vii. l. 418):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Quæ, quia nascuntur, dura vivacia caute,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Agrestes aconita vocant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is probably derived from the Greek ἀκόνιτος, “without a
struggle,” in allusion to the intensity of its poisonous qualities.
Vergil<a name="FNanchor_451_451" id="FNanchor_451_451"></a><a href="#Footnote_451_451" class="fnanchor">[451]</a> speaks of it, and tells us how the aconite
deceives the wretched gatherers, because often mistaken for
some harmless plant.<a name="FNanchor_452_452" id="FNanchor_452_452"></a><a href="#Footnote_452_452" class="fnanchor">[452]</a> The ancients fabled it as the invention
of Hecate,<a name="FNanchor_453_453" id="FNanchor_453_453"></a><a href="#Footnote_453_453" class="fnanchor">[453]</a> who caused the plant to spring from the
foam of Cerberus, when Hercules dragged him from the
gloomy regions of Pluto. Ovid pictures the stepdame as
preparing a deadly potion of aconite (Metamorphoses, bk. i.
l. 147):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercæ.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In hunting, the ancients poisoned their arrows with this
venomous plant, as “also when following their mortal brutal
trade of slaughtering their fellow-creatures.”<a name="FNanchor_454_454" id="FNanchor_454_454"></a><a href="#Footnote_454_454" class="fnanchor">[454]</a> Numerous instances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
are on record of fatal results through persons eating
this plant. In the “Philosophical Transactions” (1732,
vol. xxxvii.) we read of a man who was poisoned in that
year, by eating some of it in a salad, instead of celery. Dr.
Turner mentions the case of some Frenchmen at Antwerp,
who, eating the shoots of this plant for masterwort, all died,
with the exception of two, in forty-eight hours. The aconitum
is equally pernicious to animals.</p>

<p><i>Anemone.</i> This favorite flower of early spring is probably
alluded to in the following passage of “Venus and Adonis:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By this, the boy that by her side lay kill’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was melted like a vapour from her sight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in his blood, that on the ground lay spill’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A purple flower sprung up, chequer’d with white,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to Bion, it is said to have sprung from the tears
that Venus wept over the body of Adonis:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Alas, the Paphian! fair Adonis slain!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tears plenteous as his blood she pours amain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But gentle flowers are born, and bloom around;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From every drop that falls upon the ground<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where streams his blood, there blushing springs the rose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And where a tear has dropp’d a wind-flower blows.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Other classical writers make the anemone to be the flower
of Adonis. Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_455_455" id="FNanchor_455_455"></a><a href="#Footnote_455_455" class="fnanchor">[455]</a> says that although Shakespeare
does not actually name the anemone, yet the evidence is in
favor of this plant. The “purple color,” he adds, is no
objection, for purple in Shakespeare’s time had a very wide
signification, meaning almost any bright color, just as “purpureus”
had in Latin.<a name="FNanchor_456_456" id="FNanchor_456_456"></a><a href="#Footnote_456_456" class="fnanchor">[456]</a></p>

<p><i>Apple.</i> Although Shakespeare has so frequently introduced
the apple into his plays, yet he has abstained from
alluding to the extensive folk-lore associated with this favorite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
fruit. Indeed, beyond mentioning some of the popular
nicknames by which the apple was known in his day, little is
said about it. The term apple was not originally confined
to the fruit now so called, but was a generic name applied
to any fruit, as we still speak of the love-apple, pine-apple,
etc.<a name="FNanchor_457_457" id="FNanchor_457_457"></a><a href="#Footnote_457_457" class="fnanchor">[457]</a> So when Shakespeare (Sonnet xciii.) makes mention
of Eve’s apple, he simply means that it was some fruit that
grew in Eden:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>(<i>a</i>) The “apple-John,” called in France <i>deux-années</i> or
<i>deux-ans</i>, because it will keep two years, and considered to
be in perfection when shrivelled and withered,<a name="FNanchor_458_458" id="FNanchor_458_458"></a><a href="#Footnote_458_458" class="fnanchor">[458]</a> is evidently
spoken of in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3), where Falstaff says:
“My skin hangs about me like an old lady’s loose gown; I
am withered like an old apple-John.” In “2 Henry IV.”
(ii. 4) there is a further allusion:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>1st Drawer.</i> What the devil hast thou brought there? apple-Johns?
thou know’st Sir John cannot endure an apple-John.</p>

<p><i>2d Drawer.</i> Mass, thou sayest true. The prince once set a dish of
apple-Johns before him, and told him there were five more Sir Johns,
and, putting off his hat, said, ‘I will now take my leave of these six
dry, round, old, withered knights.’”</p></div>

<p class="ni">This apple, too, is well described by Phillips (“Cider,” bk. i.):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nor John Apple, whose wither’d rind, entrench’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By many a furrow, aptly represents<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Decrepit age.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” (i. 1), where Littlewit
encourages Quarlus to kiss his wife, he says: “she may
call you an apple-John if you use this.” Here apple-John<a name="FNanchor_459_459" id="FNanchor_459_459"></a><a href="#Footnote_459_459" class="fnanchor">[459]</a>
evidently means a procuring John, besides the allusion to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
the fruit so called.<a name="FNanchor_460_460" id="FNanchor_460_460"></a><a href="#Footnote_460_460" class="fnanchor">[460]</a></p>

<p>(<i>b</i>) The “bitter-sweet, or sweeting,” to which Mercutio
alludes in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4): “Thy wit is a very
bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce;” was apparently
a favorite apple, which furnished many allusions to poets.
Gower, in his “Confessio Amantis” (1554, fol. 174), speaks
of it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For all such time of love is lore<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And like unto the <i>bitter swete</i>,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For though it thinke a man first sweete,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He shall well felen atte laste<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That it is sower, and maie not laste.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The name is “now given to an apple of no great value as
a table fruit, but good as a cider apple, and for use in silk
dyeing.”<a name="FNanchor_461_461" id="FNanchor_461_461"></a><a href="#Footnote_461_461" class="fnanchor">[461]</a></p>

<p>(<i>c</i>) The “crab,” roasted before the fire and put into ale,
was a very favorite indulgence, especially at Christmas, in
days gone by, and is referred to in the song of winter in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then nightly sings the staring owl.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The beverage thus formed was called “Lambs-wool,” and
generally consisted of ale, nutmeg, sugar, toast, and roasted
crabs, or apples. It formed the ingredient of the wassail-bowl;<a name="FNanchor_462_462" id="FNanchor_462_462"></a><a href="#Footnote_462_462" class="fnanchor">[462]</a>
and also of the gossip’s bowl<a name="FNanchor_463_463" id="FNanchor_463_463"></a><a href="#Footnote_463_463" class="fnanchor">[463]</a> alluded to in “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1), where Puck says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In very likeness of a roasted crab,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” it is said:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Lay a crab in the fire to roast for lamb’s wool.”<a name="FNanchor_464_464" id="FNanchor_464_464"></a><a href="#Footnote_464_464" class="fnanchor">[464]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in Herrick’s “Poems:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Now crowne the bowle<br /></span>
<span class="i2">With gentle lamb’s wooll,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Add sugar, and nutmegs, and ginger.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>(<i>d</i>) The “codling,” spoken of by Malvolio in “Twelfth
Night” (i. 5)—“Not yet old enough for a man, nor young
enough for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a
codling when ’tis almost an apple”—is not the variety now
so called, but was the popular term for an immature apple,
such as would require cooking to be eaten, being derived
from “coddle,” to stew or boil lightly—hence it denoted a
boiling apple, an apple for coddling or boiling.<a name="FNanchor_465_465" id="FNanchor_465_465"></a><a href="#Footnote_465_465" class="fnanchor">[465]</a> Mr. Gifford<a name="FNanchor_466_466" id="FNanchor_466_466"></a><a href="#Footnote_466_466" class="fnanchor">[466]</a>
says that codling was used by our old writers for that early
state of vegetation when the fruit, after shaking off the blossom,
began to assume a globular and determinate form.</p>

<p>(<i>e</i>) The “leather-coat” was the apple generally known
as “the golden russeting.”<a name="FNanchor_467_467" id="FNanchor_467_467"></a><a href="#Footnote_467_467" class="fnanchor">[467]</a> Davy, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3),
says: “There is a dish of leather-coats for you.”</p>

<p>(<i>f</i>) The “pippin” was formerly a common term for an
apple, to which reference is made in “Hudibras Redivivus” (1705):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A goldsmith telling o’er his cash,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A pipping-monger selling trash.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Taylor’s “Workes”<a name="FNanchor_468_468" id="FNanchor_468_468"></a><a href="#Footnote_468_468" class="fnanchor">[468]</a> (1630) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Lord, who would take him for a pippin squire,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That’s so bedaub’d with lace and rich attire?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_469_469" id="FNanchor_469_469"></a><a href="#Footnote_469_469" class="fnanchor">[469]</a> says the word “pippin” denoted an apple<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
raised from pips and not from grafts, and “is now, and probably
was in Shakespeare’s time, confined to the bright-colored
long-keeping apples of which the golden pippin is the
type.” Justice Shallow, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3), says: “Nay,
you shall see my orchard, where, in an arbour, we will eat a
last year’s pippin of my own graffing.”</p>

<p>(<i>g</i>) The “pomewater” was a species of apple evidently
of a juicy nature, and hence of high esteem in Shakespeare’s
time; for in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 2) Holofernes says:
“The deer was, as you know, <i>sanguis</i>—in blood; ripe as the
pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of <i>cœlo</i>—the
sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a
crab on the face of <i>terra</i>—the soil, the land, the earth.”</p>

<p>Parkinson<a name="FNanchor_470_470" id="FNanchor_470_470"></a><a href="#Footnote_470_470" class="fnanchor">[470]</a> tells us the “pomewater” is an excellent, good,
and great whitish apple, full of sap or moisture, somewhat
pleasant, sharp, but a little bitter withal; it will not last long,
the winter’s frost soon causing it to rot and perish.</p>

<p>It appears that apples and caraways were formerly always
eaten together; and it is said that they are still served up
on particular days at Trinity College, Cambridge. This practice
is probably alluded to by Justice Shallow, in the much-disputed
passage in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3), when he speaks of
eating “a last year’s pippin, ... with a dish of carraways.”
The phrase, too, seems further explained by the following
quotations from Cogan’s “Haven of Health” (1599). After
stating the virtues of the seed, and some of its uses, he says:
“For the same purpose <i>careway seeds</i> are used to be made
in comfits, and to be eaten with apples, and surely very good
for that purpose, for all such things as breed wind would
be eaten with other things that break wind.” Again, in his
chapter on Apples, he says: “Howbeit wee are wont to eat
carrawaies or biskets, or some other kind of comfits, or seeds
together with apples, thereby to breake winde ingendred by
them, and surely this is a verie good way for students.”
Mr. Ellacombe,<a name="FNanchor_471_471" id="FNanchor_471_471"></a><a href="#Footnote_471_471" class="fnanchor">[471]</a> however, considers that in “the dish of carraways,”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
mentioned by Justice Shallow, neither caraway
seeds, nor cakes made of caraways, are meant, but the caraway
or caraway-russet apple. Most of the commentators
are in favor of one of the former explanations. Mr. Dyce<a name="FNanchor_472_472" id="FNanchor_472_472"></a><a href="#Footnote_472_472" class="fnanchor">[472]</a>
reads caraways in the sense of comfits or confections made
with caraway-seeds, and quotes from Shadwell’s “Woman-Captain”
the following: “The fruit, crab-apples, sweetings,
and horse-plumbs; and for confections, a few carraways in a
small sawcer, as if his worship’s house had been a lousie
inn.”</p>

<p><i>Apricot.</i> This word, which is spelled by Shakespeare “apricock,”
occurs in “Richard II.” (iii. 4), where the gardener
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Go, bind thou up yond dangling apricocks,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, like unruly children, make their sire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1) Titania gives
directions:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be kind and courteous to this gentleman,<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">Feed him with apricocks, and dewberries.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The spelling “apricock”<a name="FNanchor_473_473" id="FNanchor_473_473"></a><a href="#Footnote_473_473" class="fnanchor">[473]</a> is derived from the Latin <i>præcox</i>,
or <i>præcoquus</i>; and it was called “the precocious tree,”
because it flowered and fruited earlier than the peach. The
term “apricock” is still in use in Northamptonshire.</p>

<p><i>Aspen.</i> According to a mediæval legend, the perpetual
motion of this tree dates from its having supplied the wood
of the Cross, and that its leaves have trembled ever since at
the recollection of their guilt. De Quincey, in his essay on
“Modern Superstition,” says that this belief is coextensive
with Christendom. The following verses,<a name="FNanchor_474_474" id="FNanchor_474_474"></a><a href="#Footnote_474_474" class="fnanchor">[474]</a> after telling how
other trees were passed by in the choice of wood for the
Cross, describe the hewing down of the aspen, and the dragging<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
of it from the forest to Calvary:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“On the morrow stood she, trembling<br /></span>
<span class="i1">At the awful weight she bore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When the sun in midnight blackness<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Darkened on Judea’s shore.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Still, when not a breeze is stirring,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">When the mist sleeps on the hill,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all other trees are moveless,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Stands the aspen, trembling still.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The Germans, says Mr. Henderson, have a theory of their
own, embodied in a little poem, which may be thus translated:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Once, as our Saviour walked with men below,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">His path of mercy through a forest lay;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And mark how all the drooping branches show,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">What homage best a silent tree may pay.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Only the aspen stands erect and free,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Scorning to join that voiceless worship pure;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But see! He casts one look upon the tree,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Struck to the heart she trembles evermore!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another legend tells us<a name="FNanchor_475_475" id="FNanchor_475_475"></a><a href="#Footnote_475_475" class="fnanchor">[475]</a> that the aspen was said to have
been the tree on which Judas hanged himself after the betrayal
of his Master, and ever since its leaves have trembled
with shame. Shakespeare twice alludes to the trembling
of the aspen. In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 4) Marcus exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, had the monster seen those lily hands<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tremble, like aspen leaves, upon a lute;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) the hostess says: “Feel, masters,
how I shake. Yea, in very truth, do I, an ’twere an aspen
leaf.”</p>

<p><i>Bachelor’s Buttons.</i> This was a name given to several
flowers, and perhaps in Shakespeare’s time was more loosely
applied to any flower in bud. It is now usually understood
to be a <i>double variety</i> of ranunculus; according to others,
the <i>Lychnis sylvestris</i>; and in some counties it is applied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
to the <i>Scabiosa succisa</i>.<a name="FNanchor_476_476" id="FNanchor_476_476"></a><a href="#Footnote_476_476" class="fnanchor">[476]</a> According to Gerarde, this plant
was so called from the similitude of its flowers “to the jagged
cloathe buttons, anciently worne in this kingdome.” It
was formerly supposed, by country people, to have some
magical effect upon the fortunes of lovers. Hence it was
customary for young people to carry its flowers in their pockets,
judging of their good or bad success in proportion as
these retained or lost their freshness. It is to this sort of
divination that Shakespeare probably refers in “Merry Wives
of Windsor” (iii. 2), where he makes the hostess say, “What
say you to young Master Fenton? he capers, he dances, he
has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he
smells April and May; he will carry ’t, he will carry ’t; ’tis
in his buttons; he will carry ’t.” Mr. Warter, in one of his
notes in Southey’s “Commonplace Book” (1851, 4th series,
p. 244), says that this practice was common in his time, in
Shropshire and Staffordshire. The term “to wear bachelor’s
buttons” seems to have grown into a phrase for being
unmarried.<a name="FNanchor_477_477" id="FNanchor_477_477"></a><a href="#Footnote_477_477" class="fnanchor">[477]</a></p>

<p><i>Balm.</i> From very early times the balm, or balsam, has
been valued for its curative properties, and, as such, is alluded
to in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But, saying thus, instead of oil and balm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou lay’st in every gash that love hath given me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The knife that made it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “3 Henry VI.” (iv. 8) King Henry says:<a name="FNanchor_478_478" id="FNanchor_478_478"></a><a href="#Footnote_478_478" class="fnanchor">[478]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My pity hath been balm to heal their wounds.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Alcibiades, in “Timon of Athens” (iii. 5), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Is this the balsam, that the usuring senate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pours into captains’ wounds? Banishment!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Macbeth, too, in the well-known passage ii. 2, introduces
it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
<span class="i0">The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As the oil of consecration<a name="FNanchor_479_479" id="FNanchor_479_479"></a><a href="#Footnote_479_479" class="fnanchor">[479]</a> it is spoken of by King Richard
(“Richard II.,” iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Not all the water in the rough rude sea<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Can wash the balm from an anointed king.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 1), King Henry, when in
disguise, speaks thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy place is fill’d, thy sceptre wrung from thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy balm wash’d off wherewith thou wast anointed:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No bending knee will call thee Cæsar now.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The origin of balsam, says Mr. Ellacombe,<a name="FNanchor_480_480" id="FNanchor_480_480"></a><a href="#Footnote_480_480" class="fnanchor">[480]</a> “was for a long
time a secret, but it is now known to have been the produce
of several gum-bearing trees, especially the <i>Pistacia lentiscus</i>
and the <i>Balsamodendron Gileadense</i>, and now, as then, the
name is not strictly confined to the produce of any one
plant.”</p>

<p><i>Barley.</i> The barley broth, of which the Constable, in
“Henry V.” (iii. 5), spoke so contemptuously as the food of
English soldiers, was probably beer,<a name="FNanchor_481_481" id="FNanchor_481_481"></a><a href="#Footnote_481_481" class="fnanchor">[481]</a> which long before the
time of Henry was so celebrated that it gave its name to
the plant (barley being simply the beer-plant):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Can sodden water,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley broth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bay-tree.</i> The withering and death of this tree were reckoned
a prognostic of evil, both in ancient and modern times,
a notion<a name="FNanchor_482_482" id="FNanchor_482_482"></a><a href="#Footnote_482_482" class="fnanchor">[482]</a> to which Shakespeare refers in “Richard II.” (ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis thought, the king is dead; we will not stay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—having obtained it probably from Holinshed, who says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
“In this yeare, in a manner throughout all the realme of
Englande, old baie trees withered.” Lupton, in his “Syxt
Booke of Notable Things,” mentions this as a bad omen:
“Neyther falling-sickness, neyther devyll, wyll infest or hurt
one in that place whereas a bay-tree is. The Romaynes call
it the plant of the good angel.”<a name="FNanchor_483_483" id="FNanchor_483_483"></a><a href="#Footnote_483_483" class="fnanchor">[483]</a></p>

<p><i>Camomile.</i> It was formerly imagined that this plant grew
the more luxuriantly for being frequently trodden or pressed
down; a notion alluded to in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) by Falstaff:
“For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on
the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner
it wears.” Nares<a name="FNanchor_484_484" id="FNanchor_484_484"></a><a href="#Footnote_484_484" class="fnanchor">[484]</a> considers that the above was evidently
written in ridicule of the following passage, in a book very
fashionable in Shakespeare’s day, Lyly’s “Euphues,” of which
it is a parody: “Though the camomile, the more it is trodden
and pressed down, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet,
the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth
and decayeth,” etc.</p>

<p><i>Clover.</i> According to Johnson, the “honey-stalks” in the
following passage (“Titus Andronicus,” iv. 4) are “clover-flowers,
which contain a sweet juice.” It is not uncommon
for cattle to overcharge themselves with clover, and die,
hence the allusion by Tamora:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I will enchant the old Andronicus<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With words more sweet, and yet more dangerous,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than baits to fish, or honey-stalks to sheep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Columbine.</i> This was anciently termed “a thankless flower,”
and was also emblematical of forsaken lovers. It is
somewhat doubtful to what Ophelia alludes in “Hamlet”
(iv. 5), where she seems to address the king: “There’s fennel
for you, and columbines.” Perhaps she regarded it as
symbolical of ingratitude.</p>

<p><i>Crow-flowers.</i> This name, which in Shakespeare’s time
was applied to the “ragged robin,” is now used for the buttercup.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
It was one of the flowers that poor Ophelia wove
into her garland (“Hamlet,” iv. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There with fantastic garlands did she come<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cuckoo-buds.</i> Commentators are uncertain to what flower
Shakespeare refers in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When daisies pied and violets blue,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And lady-smocks all silver-white,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Do paint the meadows with delight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Miller, in his “Gardener’s Dictionary,” says that the
flower here alluded to is the <i>Ranunculus bulbosus</i>; but
Mr. Beisly, in his “Shakespeare’s Garden,” considers it to
be the <i>Ranunculus ficaria</i> (lesser celandine), or pile-wort, as
this flower appears earlier in spring, and is in bloom at the
same time as the other flowers named in the song. Mr.
Swinfen Jervis, however, in his “Dictionary of the Language
of Shakespeare” (1868), decides in favor of cowslips:<a name="FNanchor_485_485" id="FNanchor_485_485"></a><a href="#Footnote_485_485" class="fnanchor">[485]</a> and
Dr. Prior suggests the buds of the crowfoot. At the present
day the nickname cuckoo-bud is assigned to the meadow
cress (<i>Cardamine pratensis</i>).</p>

<p><i>Cuckoo-flowers.</i> By this flower, Mr. Beisly<a name="FNanchor_486_486" id="FNanchor_486_486"></a><a href="#Footnote_486_486" class="fnanchor">[486]</a> says, the ragged
robin is meant, a well-known meadow and marsh plant,
with rose-colored flowers and deeply-cut, narrow segments.
It blossoms at the time the cuckoo comes, hence one of its
names. In “King Lear” (iv. 4) Cordelia narrates how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“he was met even now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As mad as the vex’d sea; singing aloud;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Crown’d with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In our sustaining corn.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cypress.</i> From the earliest times the cypress has had a
mournful history, being associated with funerals and churchyards,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
and as such is styled by Spenser “cypress funereal.”</p>

<p>In Quarles’s “Argalus and Parthenia” (1726, bk. iii.) a
knight is introduced, whose</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“horse was black as jet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His furniture was round about beset<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With branches slipt from the sad cypress tree.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Formerly coffins were frequently made of cypress wood, a
practice to which Shakespeare probably alludes in “Twelfth
Night” (ii. 4), where the Clown says: “In sad cypress let me
be laid.” Some, however, prefer<a name="FNanchor_487_487" id="FNanchor_487_487"></a><a href="#Footnote_487_487" class="fnanchor">[487]</a> understanding cypress to
mean “a shroud of cyprus or cypress”—a fine, transparent
stuff, similar to crape, either white or black, but more commonly
the latter.<a name="FNanchor_488_488" id="FNanchor_488_488"></a><a href="#Footnote_488_488" class="fnanchor">[488]</a> Douce<a name="FNanchor_489_489" id="FNanchor_489_489"></a><a href="#Footnote_489_489" class="fnanchor">[489]</a> thinks that the expression “laid”
seems more applicable to a coffin than to a shroud, and also
adds that the shroud is afterwards expressly mentioned by
itself.</p>

<p><i>Daffodil.</i> The daffodil of Shakespeare is the wild daffodil
which grows so abundantly in many parts of England. Perdita,
in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), mentions a little piece of
weather-lore, and tells us how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“daffodils,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That come before the swallow dares, and take<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The winds of March with beauty.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And Autolycus, in the same play (iv. 3), sings thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When daffodils begin to peer,—<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With, heigh! the doxy over the dale,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Darnel.</i> This plant, like the cockle, was used in Shakespeare’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
day to denote any hurtful weed. Newton,<a name="FNanchor_490_490" id="FNanchor_490_490"></a><a href="#Footnote_490_490" class="fnanchor">[490]</a> in his
“Herbal to the Bible,” says that “under the name of cockle
and darnel is comprehended all vicious, noisome, and unprofitable
graine, encombring and hindering good corne.” Thus
Cordelia, in “King Lear” (iv. 4), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In our sustaining corn.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to Gerarde, “darnel hurteth the eyes, and
maketh them dim, if it happen either in corne for breade or
drinke.” Hence, it is said, originated the old proverb, “lolio
victitare”—applied to such as were dim-sighted. Steevens
considers that Pucelle, in the following passage from “1 Henry VI.”
(iii. 2), alludes to this property of the darnel—meaning
to intimate that the corn she carried with her had produced
the same effect on the guards of Rouen, otherwise
they would have seen through her disguise and defeated her
stratagem:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good morrow, gallants! want ye corn for bread?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I think the Duke of Burgundy will fast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Before he’ll buy again at such a rate:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Twas full of darnel: do you like the taste?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Date.</i> This fruit of the palm-tree was once a common ingredient
in all kinds of pastry, and some other dishes, and
often supplied a pun for comedy, as, for example, in “All’s
Well That Ends Well” (i. 1), where Parolles says: “Your
date is better in your pie and your porridge, than in your
cheek.” And in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 2): “Ay, a minced
man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie; for
then the man’s date’s out.”</p>

<p><i>Ebony.</i> The wood of this tree was regarded as the typical
emblem of darkness; the tree itself, however, was unknown
in this country in Shakespeare’s time. It is mentioned
in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>King.</i> By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Biron.</i> Is ebony like her? O wood divine!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A wife of such wood were felicity.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the same play we read of “the ebon-coloured ink” (i. 1),
and in “Venus and Adonis” (948) of “Death’s ebon dart.”</p>

<p><i>Elder.</i> This plant, while surrounded by an extensive folk-lore,
has from time immemorial possessed an evil reputation,
and been regarded as one of bad omen. According to a
popular tradition “Judas was hanged on an elder,” a superstition
mentioned by Biron in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2);
and also by Ben Jonson in “Every Man Out of His Humour”
(iv. 4): “He shall be your Judas, and you shall be
his elder-tree to hang on.” In “Piers Plowman’s Vision”
(ll. 593-596) we are told how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Judas, he japed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With jewen silver,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sithen on an eller<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hanged hymselve.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>So firmly rooted was this belief in days gone by that Sir
John Mandeville tells us in his Travels, which he wrote in
1364, that he was actually shown the identical tree at Jerusalem,
“And faste by is zit, the tree of Elder that Judas
henge himself upon, for despeyr that he hadde when he solde
and betrayed oure Lord.” This tradition no doubt, in a
great measure, helped to give it its bad fame, causing it to
be spoken of as “the stinking elder.” Shakespeare makes
it an emblem of grief. In “Cymbeline” (iv. 2) Arviragus
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Grow, patience!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His perishing root with the increasing vine!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The dwarf elder<a name="FNanchor_491_491" id="FNanchor_491_491"></a><a href="#Footnote_491_491" class="fnanchor">[491]</a> (<i>Sambucus ebulus</i>) is said only to grow
where blood has been shed either in battle or in murder.
The Welsh call it “Llysan gward gwyr,” or “plant of the
blood of man.” Shakespeare, perhaps, had this piece of
folk-lore in mind when he represents Bassianus, in “Titus
Andronicus” (ii. 4), as killed at a pit beneath an elder-tree:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is the pit and this the elder tree.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Eringoes.</i> These were formerly said to be strong provocatives,
and as such are mentioned by Falstaff in “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (v. 5): “Let the sky rain potatoes; let
it thunder to the tune of Green Sleeves, hail kissing comfits,
and snow eringoes.” Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_492_492" id="FNanchor_492_492"></a><a href="#Footnote_492_492" class="fnanchor">[492]</a> thinks that in this
passage the globe artichoke is meant, “which is a near ally
of the eryngium, and was a favorite dish in Shakespeare’s
time.”</p>

<p><i>Fennel.</i> This was generally considered as an inflammatory
herb; and to eat “conger and fennel” was “to eat two high
and hot things together,” which was an act of libertinism.<a name="FNanchor_493_493" id="FNanchor_493_493"></a><a href="#Footnote_493_493" class="fnanchor">[493]</a>
Thus in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) Falstaff says of Poins, he “eats
conger and fennel.” Mr. Beisly states<a name="FNanchor_494_494" id="FNanchor_494_494"></a><a href="#Footnote_494_494" class="fnanchor">[494]</a> that fennel was used
as a sauce with fish hard of digestion, being aromatic, and as
the old writers term it, “hot in the third degree.” One of
the herbs distributed by poor Ophelia, in her distraction, is
fennel, which she offers either as a cordial or as an emblem
of flattery: “There’s fennel for you, and columbines.”</p>

<p>Mr. Staunton, however, considers that fennel here signifies
<i>lust</i>, while Mr. Beisly thinks its reputed property of clearing
the sight is alluded to. It is more probable that it denotes
flattery; especially as, in Shakespeare’s time, it was regarded
as emblematical of flattery. In this sense it is often quoted
by old writers. In Greene’s “Quip for an Upstart Courtier,”
we read, “Fennell I meane for flatterers.” In “Phyala Lachrymarum”<a name="FNanchor_495_495" id="FNanchor_495_495"></a><a href="#Footnote_495_495" class="fnanchor">[495]</a>
we find:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nor fennel-finkle bring for flattery,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Begot of his, and fained courtesie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Fern.</i> According to a curious notion fern-seed was supposed
to possess the power of rendering persons invisible.
Hence it was a most important object of superstition, being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
gathered mystically, especially on Midsummer Eve. It was
believed at one time to have neither flower nor seed; the
seed, which lay on the back of the leaf, being so small as to
escape the detection of the hasty observer. On this account,
probably, proceeding on the fantastic doctrine of signatures,
our ancestors derived the notion that those who could obtain
and wear this invisible seed would be themselves invisible:
a belief which is referred to in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Gadshill.</i> We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.</p>

<p><i>Chamberlain.</i> Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to
the night, than to fern-seed, for your walking invisible.”</p></div>

<p class="ni">This superstition is mentioned by many old writers; a proof
of its popularity in times past. It is alluded to in Beaumont
and Fletcher’s “Fair Maid of the Inn” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Did you think that you had Gyges’ ring?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or the herb that gives invisibility?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in Ben Jonson’s “New Inn” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“I had<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No medicine, sir, to go invisible,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No fern-seed in my pocket.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As recently as Addison’s day, we are told in the <i>Tatler</i>
(No. 240) that “it was impossible to walk the streets without
having an advertisement thrust into your hand of a doctor
who had arrived at the knowledge of the green and red
dragon, and had discovered the female fern-seed.”<a name="FNanchor_496_496" id="FNanchor_496_496"></a><a href="#Footnote_496_496" class="fnanchor">[496]</a></p>

<p><i>Fig.</i> Formerly the term fig served as a common expression
of contempt, and was used to denote a thing of the
least importance. Hence the popular phrase, “not to care
a fig for one;” a sense in which it is sometimes used by
Shakespeare, who makes Pistol say, in “Merry Wives of
Windsor” (i. 3), “a fico for the phrase!” and in “Henry V.”
(iii. 6) Pistol exclaims, “figo for thy friendship!” In “Othello”
(i. 3) Iago says, “Virtue! a fig!”</p>

<p>The term “to give or make the fig,” as an expression of
insult, has for many ages been very prevalent among the nations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
of Europe, and, according to Douce,<a name="FNanchor_497_497" id="FNanchor_497_497"></a><a href="#Footnote_497_497" class="fnanchor">[497]</a> was known to the
Romans. It consists in thrusting the thumb between two
of the closed fingers, or into the mouth, a practice, as some
say,<a name="FNanchor_498_498" id="FNanchor_498_498"></a><a href="#Footnote_498_498" class="fnanchor">[498]</a> in allusion to a contemptuous punishment inflicted on
the Milanese, by the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, in 1162,
when he took their city. This, however, is altogether improbable,
the real origin, no doubt, being a coarse representation
of a disease, to which the name of <i>ficus</i> or fig has
always been given.<a name="FNanchor_499_499" id="FNanchor_499_499"></a><a href="#Footnote_499_499" class="fnanchor">[499]</a></p>

<p>The “fig of Spain,” spoken of in “Henry V.” (iii. 6), may
either allude to the poisoned fig employed in Spain as a secret
way of destroying an obnoxious person, as in Webster’s
“White Devil:”<a name="FNanchor_500_500" id="FNanchor_500_500"></a><a href="#Footnote_500_500" class="fnanchor">[500]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I do look now for a Spanish fig, or an Italian salad, daily;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in Shirley’s “Brothers:”<a name="FNanchor_501_501" id="FNanchor_501_501"></a><a href="#Footnote_501_501" class="fnanchor">[501]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“I must poison him;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One fig sends him to Erebus;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">or it may, as Mr. Dyce remarks,<a name="FNanchor_502_502" id="FNanchor_502_502"></a><a href="#Footnote_502_502" class="fnanchor">[502]</a> simply denote contempt or
insult in the sense already mentioned.</p>

<p><i>Flower-de-luce.</i> The common purple iris which adorns
our gardens is now generally agreed upon as the fleur-de-luce,
a corruption of fleur de Louis—being spelled either fleur-de-lys
or fleur-de-lis. It derives its name from Louis VII.,
King of France, who chose this flower as his heraldic emblem
when setting forth on his crusade to the Holy Land.
It had already been used by the other French kings, and by
the emperors of Constantinople; but it is still a matter of
dispute among antiquarians as to what it was originally intended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
to represent. Some say a flower, some a toad, some
a halbert-head. It is uncertain what plant is referred to by
Shakespeare when he alludes to the flower-de-luce in the
following passage<a name="FNanchor_503_503" id="FNanchor_503_503"></a><a href="#Footnote_503_503" class="fnanchor">[503]</a> in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), where the Duke
of York says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A sceptre shall it have,—have I a soul,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On which I’ll toss the flower-de-luce of France.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “1 Henry VI.” (i. 2) Pucelle declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am prepared; here is my keen-edged sword,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Deck’d with five flower-de-luces on each side.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Some think the lily is meant, others the iris. For the lily
theory, says Mr. Ellacombe,<a name="FNanchor_504_504" id="FNanchor_504_504"></a><a href="#Footnote_504_504" class="fnanchor">[504]</a> “there are the facts that Shakespeare
calls it one of the lilies, and that the other way of
spelling is fleur-de-lys.”</p>

<p>Chaucer seems to connect it with the lily (“Canterbury
Tales,” Prol. 238):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Her nekke was white as the flour-de-lis.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">On the other hand, Spenser separates the lilies from the
flower-de-luces in his “Shepherd’s Calendar;” and Ben Jonson
mentions “rich carnations, flower-de-luces, lilies.”</p>

<p>The fleur-de-lis was not always confined to royalty as a
badge. Thus, in the square of La Pucelle, in Rouen, there
is a statue of Jeanne D’Arc with fleurs-de-lis sculptured upon
it, and an inscription as follows:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The maiden’s sword protects the royal crown;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beneath the maiden’s sword the lilies safely blow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>St. Louis conferred upon the Chateaubriands the device
of a fleur-de-lis, and the motto, “Mon sang teint les bannièrs
de France.” When Edward III. claimed the crown of France,
in the year 1340, he quartered the ancient shield of France
with the lions of England. It disappeared, however, from
the English shield in the first year of the present century.</p>

<p><i>Gillyflower.</i> This was the old name for the whole class<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
of carnations, pinks, and sweet-williams, from the French
<i>girofle</i>, which is itself corrupted from the Latin <i>caryophyllum</i>.<a name="FNanchor_505_505" id="FNanchor_505_505"></a><a href="#Footnote_505_505" class="fnanchor">[505]</a>
The streaked gillyflowers, says Mr. Beisly,<a name="FNanchor_506_506" id="FNanchor_506_506"></a><a href="#Footnote_506_506" class="fnanchor">[506]</a> noticed
by Perdita in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“the fairest flowers o’ the season<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which some call nature’s bastards”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“are produced by the flowers of one kind being impregnated
by the pollen of another kind, and this art (or law) in nature
Shakespeare alludes to in the delicate language used by Perdita,
as well as to the practice of increasing the plants by
slips.” Tusser, in his “Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry,”
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The gilloflower also the skilful doe know,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth look to be covered in frost and in snow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Harebell.</i> This flower, mentioned in “Cymbeline” (iv. 2),
is no doubt another name for the wild hyacinth.</p>

<p>Arviragus says of Imogen:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“thou shalt not lack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose; nor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The azured harebell, like thy veins.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hemlock.</i> In consequence of its bad and poisonous character,
this plant was considered an appropriate ingredient
for witches’ broth. In “Macbeth” (iv. 1) we read of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Root of hemlock, digged i’ the dark.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Its scientific name, <i>conium</i>, is from the Greek word meaning
cone or top, whose whirling motion resembles the giddiness
produced on the constitution by its poisonous juice. It is
by most persons supposed to be the death-drink of the
Greeks, and the one by which Socrates was put to death.</p>

<p><i>Herb of Grace</i> or <i>Herb Grace</i>. A popular name in days
gone by for rue. The origin of the term is uncertain. Most
probably it arose from the extreme bitterness of the plant,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
which, as it had always borne the name <i>rue</i> (to be sorry for
anything), was not unnaturally associated with repentance.
It was, therefore, the herb of repentance,<a name="FNanchor_507_507" id="FNanchor_507_507"></a><a href="#Footnote_507_507" class="fnanchor">[507]</a> “and this was soon
changed into ‘herb of grace,’ repentance being the chief sign
of grace.” The expression is several times used by Shakespeare.
In “Richard II.” (iii. 4) the gardener narrates:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Here did she fall a tear; here, in this place<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the remembrance of a weeping queen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Hamlet” (iv. 5), Ophelia, when addressing the queen,
says, “There’s rue for you; and here’s some for me: we may
call it herb-grace o’ Sundays: O, you must wear your rue
with a difference.”<a name="FNanchor_508_508" id="FNanchor_508_508"></a><a href="#Footnote_508_508" class="fnanchor">[508]</a></p>

<p>Malone observes that there is no ground for supposing
that rue was called “herb of grace” from its being used in
exorcisms in churches on Sunday, a notion entertained by
Jeremy Taylor, who says, referring to the <i>Flagellum Dæmonum</i>,
“First, they (the Romish exorcisers) are to try the
devil by holy water, incense, sulphur, rue, which from thence,
as we suppose, came to be called ‘herb of grace.’”<a name="FNanchor_509_509" id="FNanchor_509_509"></a><a href="#Footnote_509_509" class="fnanchor">[509]</a> Rue
was also a common subject of puns, from being the same
word which signified sorrow or pity (see “Richard II.,” iii.
4, cited above).</p>

<p><i>Holy Thistle.</i> The Carduus Benedictus, called also “blessed
thistle,” was so named, like other plants which bear the
specific name of “blessed,” from its supposed power of counteracting
the effect of poison.<a name="FNanchor_510_510" id="FNanchor_510_510"></a><a href="#Footnote_510_510" class="fnanchor">[510]</a> Cogan, in his “Haven of
Health,” 1595, says, “This herbe may worthily be called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
<i>Benedictus</i>, or <i>Omnimorbia</i>, that is, a salve for every sore, not
known to physitians of old time, but lately revealed by the
special providence of Almighty God.” It is alluded to in
“Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Margaret.</i> Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and
lay it to your heart; it is the only thing for a qualm.</p>

<p><i>Hero.</i> There thou prickest her with a thistle.</p>

<p><i>Beatrice.</i> Benedictus! why Benedictus? you have some moral in
this Benedictus.</p>

<p><i>Margaret.</i> Moral? no, by my troth, I have no moral meaning. I
meant, plain holy-thistle.”</p></div>

<p><i>Insane Root.</i> There is much doubt as to what plant is
meant by Banquo in “Macbeth” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“have we eaten on the insane root<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That takes the reason prisoner?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The origin of this passage is probably to be found in
North’s “Plutarch,” 1579 (“Life of Antony,” p. 990), where
mention is made of a plant which “made them out of their
wits.” Several plants have been suggested—the hemlock,
belladonna, mandrake, henbane, etc. Douce supports the
last, and cites the following passage:<a name="FNanchor_511_511" id="FNanchor_511_511"></a><a href="#Footnote_511_511" class="fnanchor">[511]</a> “Henbane ... is
called insana, mad, for the use thereof is perillous; for if it
be eate or dronke, it breedeth madness, or slow lykenesse of
sleepe.” Nares<a name="FNanchor_512_512" id="FNanchor_512_512"></a><a href="#Footnote_512_512" class="fnanchor">[512]</a> quotes from Ben Jonson (“Sejanus,” iii. 2),
in support of hemlock:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“well, read my charms,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And may they lay that hold upon thy senses<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As thou hadst snufft up hemlock.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Ivy.</i> It was formerly the general custom in England, as
it is still in France and the Netherlands, to hang a bush of
ivy at the door of a vintner.<a name="FNanchor_513_513" id="FNanchor_513_513"></a><a href="#Footnote_513_513" class="fnanchor">[513]</a> Hence the allusion in “As
You Like It” (v. 4, Epilogue), where Rosalind wittily remarks:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true
that a good play needs no epilogue.” This custom is often
referred to by our old writers, as, for instance, in Nash’s
“Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” 1600:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Green ivy bushes at the vintner’s doors.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in the “Rival Friends,” 1632:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis like the ivy bush unto a tavern.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This plant was no doubt chosen from its being sacred to
Bacchus. The practice was observed at statute hirings,
wakes, etc., by people who sold ale at no other time. The
manner, says Mr. Singer,<a name="FNanchor_514_514" id="FNanchor_514_514"></a><a href="#Footnote_514_514" class="fnanchor">[514]</a> in which they were decorated appears
from a passage in Florio’s “Italian Dictionary,” in
<i>voce tremola</i>, “Gold foile, or thin leaves of gold or silver,
namely, thinne plate, as our vintners adorn their bushes
with.” We may compare the old sign of “An owl in an ivy
bush,” which perhaps denoted the union of wisdom or prudence
with conviviality, with the phrase “be merry and
wise.”</p>

<p><i>Kecksies.</i> These are the dry, hollow stalks of hemlock.
In “Henry V.” (v. 2) Burgundy makes use of the word:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“and nothing teems,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Losing both beauty and utility.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It has been suggested<a name="FNanchor_515_515" id="FNanchor_515_515"></a><a href="#Footnote_515_515" class="fnanchor">[515]</a> that kecksies may be a mistaken
form of the plural kex; and that kex may have been formed
from keck, something so dry that the eater would keck at it,
or be unable to swallow it. The word is probably derived
from the Welsh “cecys,” which is applied to several plants of
the umbelliferous kind. Dr. Prior,<a name="FNanchor_516_516" id="FNanchor_516_516"></a><a href="#Footnote_516_516" class="fnanchor">[516]</a> however, says that kecksies
is from an old English word keek, or kike, retained in
the northern counties in the sense of “peep” or “spy.”</p>

<p><i>Knotgrass.</i><a name="FNanchor_517_517" id="FNanchor_517_517"></a><a href="#Footnote_517_517" class="fnanchor">[517]</a> The allusion to this plant in “A Midsummer-Night’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
Dream” (iii. 2)—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Get you gone, you dwarf!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You bead, you acorn!”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">refers to its supposed power of hindering the growth of
any child or animal, when taken in an infusion, a notion
alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher (“Coxcombe,” ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We want a boy extremely for this function,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kept under for a year with milk and knot-grass.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” (ii. 2) we read: “The
child’s a fatherless child, and say they should put him into a
strait pair of gaskins, ’twere worse than knot-grass; he would
never grow after it.”</p>

<p><i>Lady-smocks.</i> This plant is so called from the resemblance
of its white flowers to little smocks hung out to dry
(“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v. 2), as they used to be at that
season of the year especially</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When daisies pied, and violets blue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And lady-smocks all silver white,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do paint the meadows with delight.<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">And maidens bleach their summer smocks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to another explanation, the lady-smock is a
corruption of “Our Lady’s Smock,” so called from its first
flowering about Lady-tide. This plant has also been called
cuckoo-flower, because, as Gerarde says, “it flowers in April
and May, when the cuckoo doth begin to sing her pleasant
notes without stammering.”</p>

<p><i>Laurel.</i> From the very earliest times this classical plant
has been regarded as symbolical of victory, and used for
crowns. In “Titus Andronicus” (i. 1) Titus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cometh Andronicus, bound with laurel boughs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 3) the latter exclaims:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“upon your sword<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sit laurelled victory.”<a name="FNanchor_518_518" id="FNanchor_518_518"></a><a href="#Footnote_518_518" class="fnanchor">[518]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Leek.</i> The first of March is observed by the Welsh in
honor of St. David, their patron saint, when, as a sign of
their patriotism, they wear a leek. Much doubt exists as to
the origin of this custom. According to the Welsh, it is because
St. David ordered his Britons to place leeks in their
caps, that they might be distinguished in fight from their
Saxon foes. Shakespeare, in “Henry V.” (iv. 7), alludes to
the custom when referring to the battle of Cressy. Fluellen
says, “If your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen
did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing
leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to
this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do
believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon
Saint Tavy’s day.”<a name="FNanchor_519_519" id="FNanchor_519_519"></a><a href="#Footnote_519_519" class="fnanchor">[519]</a> Dr. Owen Pughe<a name="FNanchor_520_520" id="FNanchor_520_520"></a><a href="#Footnote_520_520" class="fnanchor">[520]</a> supposes the custom
arose from the practice of every farmer contributing his
leek to the common repast when they met at the Cymmortha,
an association by which they reciprocated assistance in
ploughing the land. Anyhow, the subject is one involved
in complete uncertainty, and the various explanations given
are purely conjectural (see p. 303).</p>

<p><i>Lily.</i> Although so many pretty legends and romantic
superstitions have clustered round this sweet and favorite
flower, yet they have escaped the notice of Shakespeare, who,
while attaching to it the choicest epithets, has simply made
it the type of elegance and beauty, and the symbol of purity
and whiteness.</p>

<p><i>Long Purples.</i> This plant, mentioned by Shakespeare in
“Hamlet” (iv. 7) as forming part of the nosegay of poor
Ophelia, is generally considered to be the early purple orchis
(<i>Orchis mascula</i>), which blossoms in April or May. It grows
in meadows and pastures, and is about ten inches high.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
Tennyson (“A Dirge”) uses the name:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Round thee blow, self-pleached deep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bramble roses, faint and pale,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And long purples of the dale.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another term applied by Shakespeare to this flower was
“Dead Men’s Fingers,” from the pale color and hand-like
shape of the palmate tubers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Flowers from Stratford-on-Avon,” it is said, “there
can be no doubt that the wild arum is the plant alluded to
by Shakespeare,” but there seems no authority for this statement.</p>

<p><i>Love-in-Idleness</i>, or, with more accuracy, <i>Love-in-Idle</i>,<a name="FNanchor_521_521" id="FNanchor_521_521"></a><a href="#Footnote_521_521" class="fnanchor">[521]</a> is
one of the many nicknames of the pansy or heart’s-ease—a
term said to be still in use in Warwickshire. It occurs in
“Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1),<a name="FNanchor_522_522" id="FNanchor_522_522"></a><a href="#Footnote_522_522" class="fnanchor">[522]</a> where Oberon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It fell upon a little western flower,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And maidens call it love-in-idleness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The phrase literally signifies love in vain, or to no purpose,
as Taylor alludes to it in the following couplet:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When passions are let loose without a bridle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then precious time is turned to <i>love and idle</i>.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>That flowers, and pansies especially, were used as love-philters,<a name="FNanchor_523_523" id="FNanchor_523_523"></a><a href="#Footnote_523_523" class="fnanchor">[523]</a>
or for the object of casting a spell over people, in
Shakespeare’s day, is shown in the passage already quoted.
where Puck and Oberon amuse themselves at Titania’s expense.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
Again, a further reference occurs (iv. 1), where the
fairy king removes the spell:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But first I will release the fairy queen.<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Be as thou wast wont to be:<br /></span>
<span class="i3">See as thou wast wont to see:<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Dian’s bud<a name="FNanchor_524_524" id="FNanchor_524_524"></a><a href="#Footnote_524_524" class="fnanchor">[524]</a> o’er Cupid’s flower<a name="FNanchor_525_525" id="FNanchor_525_525"></a><a href="#Footnote_525_525" class="fnanchor">[525]</a><br /></span>
<span class="i3">Hath such force and blessed power.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now, my Titania; wake you, my sweet queen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“It has been suggested,” says Mr. Aldis Wright,<a name="FNanchor_526_526" id="FNanchor_526_526"></a><a href="#Footnote_526_526" class="fnanchor">[526]</a> “that
the device employed by Oberon to enchant Titania by
anointing her eyelids with the juice of a flower, may have
been borrowed by Shakespeare from the Spanish romance
of ‘Diana’ by George of Montemayor. But apart from the
difficulty which arises from the fact that no English translation
of this romance is known before that published by Young
in 1598, there is no necessity to suppose that Shakespeare
was indebted to any one for what must have been a familiar
element in all incantations at a time when a belief in witchcraft
was common.” Percy (“Reliques,” vol. iii. bk. 2) quotes a
receipt by the celebrated astrologer, Dr. Dee, for “an ungent
to anoynt under the eyelids, and upon the eyelids eveninge
and morninge, but especially when you call,” that is, upon
the fairies. It consisted of a decoction of various flowers.</p>

<p><i>Mandragora</i> or <i>Mandrake</i>. No plant, perhaps, has had,
at different times, a greater share of folk-lore attributed to
it than the mandrake; partly owing, probably, to the fancied
resemblance of its root to the human figure, and the accidental
circumstance of <i>man</i> being the first syllable of the
word. An inferior degree of animal life was assigned to it;
and it was commonly supposed that, when torn from the
ground, it uttered groans of so pernicious a character, that
the person who committed the violence either went mad or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
died. In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) Suffolk says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I would invent,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Juliet (“Romeo and Juliet,” iv. 3) speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That living mortals, hearing them, run mad.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">To escape this danger, it was recommended to tie one end
of a string to the plant and the other to a dog, upon whom
the fatal groan would discharge its whole malignity. The
ancients, it appears, were equally superstitious with regard
to this mysterious plant, and Columella, in his directions for
the site of gardens, says they may be formed where</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“the mandrake’s flowers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Produce, whose root shows half a man, whose juice<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With madness strikes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Pliny<a name="FNanchor_527_527" id="FNanchor_527_527"></a><a href="#Footnote_527_527" class="fnanchor">[527]</a> informs us that those who dug up this plant paid
particular attention to stand so that the wind was at their
back; and, before they began to dig, they made three circles
round the plant with the point of the sword, and then, proceeding
to the west, commenced digging it up. It seems to
have been well known as an opiate in the time of Shakespeare,
who makes Iago say in “Othello” (iii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Not poppy, nor mandragora,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 5), the queen pathetically
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Give me to drink mandragora.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Char.</i><span style="padding-left: 12em">Why, madam?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Cleo.</i> That I might sleep out this great gap of time,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">My Antony is away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lyte, in his translation of “Dodoens” (1578), p. 438, tells
us that “the leaves and fruit be also dangerous, for they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
cause deadly sleepe, and peevish drowsiness, like opium.”
It was sometimes regarded as an emblem of incontinence,
as in “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2): “yet lecherous as a monkey,
and the whores called him—mandrake.” A very diminutive
figure was, too, often compared to a mandrake. In “2 Henry
IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff says: “Thou whoreson mandrake, thou
art fitter to be worn in my cap, than to wait at my heels.”
Tracing back the history of this plant into far-distant times,
it is generally believed that it is the same as that which the
ancient Hebrews called Dudain.<a name="FNanchor_528_528" id="FNanchor_528_528"></a><a href="#Footnote_528_528" class="fnanchor">[528]</a> That these people held
it in the highest esteem in the days of Jacob is evident
from its having been found by Reuben, who carried the
plant to his mother; and the inducement which tempted
Leah to part with it proves the value then set upon this
celebrated plant. According to a curious superstition, this
plant was thought to possess the properties of making childless
wives become mothers, and hence, some suppose, Rachel
became so desirous of possessing the mandrakes which Reuben
had found. Among the many other items of folk-lore
associated with the mandrake, there is one which informs us
that “it is perpetually watched over by Satan, and if it be
pulled up at certain holy times, and with certain invocations,
the evil spirit will appear to do the bidding of the practitioner.”<a name="FNanchor_529_529" id="FNanchor_529_529"></a><a href="#Footnote_529_529" class="fnanchor">[529]</a>
In comparatively recent times, quacks and impostors
counterfeited with the root briony figures resembling
parts of the human body, which were sold to the credulous
as endued with specific virtues.<a name="FNanchor_530_530" id="FNanchor_530_530"></a><a href="#Footnote_530_530" class="fnanchor">[530]</a> The Germans, too, equally
superstitious, formed little idols of the roots of the mandrake,
which were regularly dressed every day, and consulted as oracles—their
repute being such that they were manufactured
in great numbers, and sold in cases. They were, also, imported
into this country during the time of Henry VIII., it
being pretended that they would, with the assistance of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
some mystic words, increase whatever money was placed
near them. In order, too, to enhance the value of these so-called
miracle-workers, it was said that the roots of this plant
were produced from the flesh of criminals which fell from the
gibbet, and that it only grew in such a situation.<a name="FNanchor_531_531" id="FNanchor_531_531"></a><a href="#Footnote_531_531" class="fnanchor">[531]</a></p>

<p><i>Marigold.</i> This flower was a great favorite with our old
writers, from a curious notion that it always opened or shut
its flowers at the sun’s bidding; in allusion to which Perdita
remarks, in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And with him rises weeping.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was also said, but erroneously, to turn its flowers to the
sun, a quality attributed to the sunflower (<i>Helianthus annuus</i>),
and thus described by Moore:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The sunflower turns on her god when he sets<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The same look which she turn’d when he rose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A popular name for the marigold was “mary-bud,” mention
of which we find in “Cymbeline” (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“winking Mary-buds begin<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To ope their golden eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Medlar.</i> This fruit, which Shakespeare describes as only
fit to be eaten when rotten, is applied by Lucio to a woman
of loose character, as in “Measure for Measure” (iv. 3):
“they would else have married me to the rotten medlar.”</p>

<p>Chaucer, in the “Reeve’s Prologue,” applies the same
name to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That ilke fruit is ever lenger the wers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till it be roten in mullok, or in stre.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We olde men, I drede, so faren we,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till we be roten can we not be ripe.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Mistletoe.</i> This plant, which, from the earliest times, has
been an object of interest to naturalists, on account of its
curious growth, deriving its subsistence entirely from the
branch to which it annexes itself, has been the subject of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
widespread superstition. In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3), Tamora
describes it in the graphic passage below as the “baleful
mistletoe,” an epithet which, as Mr. Douce observes, is
extremely appropriate, either conformably to an ancient, but
erroneous, opinion, that the berries of the mistletoe were
poisonous, or on account of the use made of this plant by
the Druids during their detestable human sacrifices.<a name="FNanchor_532_532" id="FNanchor_532_532"></a><a href="#Footnote_532_532" class="fnanchor">[532]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Demetrius.</i> How now, dear sovereign, and our gracious mother,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Why doth your highness look so pale and wan?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Tamora.</i> Have I not reason, think you, to look pale?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">These two have ’tic’d me hither to this place:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A barren detested vale, you see, it is;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unless the nightly owl, or fatal raven.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Mushroom.</i> Besides his notice of the mushroom in the
following passages, Shakespeare alludes to the fairy rings<a name="FNanchor_533_533" id="FNanchor_533_533"></a><a href="#Footnote_533_533" class="fnanchor">[533]</a>
which are formed by fungi, though, as Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_534_534" id="FNanchor_534_534"></a><a href="#Footnote_534_534" class="fnanchor">[534]</a> points
out, he probably knew little of this. In “The Tempest” (v. 1),
Prospero says of the fairies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“you demi-puppets, that<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is to make midnight mushrooms;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the allusion in this passage being to the superstition that
sheep will not eat the grass that grows on fairy rings.</p>

<p><i>Mustard.</i> Tewksbury mustard, to which reference is
made in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where Falstaff speaks of “wit
as thick as Tewksbury mustard,” was formerly very famous.
Shakespeare speaks only of its thickness, but others have
celebrated its pungency. Coles, writing in 1657, says: “In
Gloucestershire, about Teuxbury, they grind mustard and
make it into balls, which are brought to London, and other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
remote places, as being the best that the world affords.”</p>

<p><i>Narcissus.</i> The old legend attached to this flower is mentioned
by Emilia in “The Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That was a fair boy certain, but a fool,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To love himself; were there not maids enough?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Nutmeg.</i> A gilt nutmeg was formerly a common gift at
Christmas and on other festive occasions, a notice of which
occurs in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), in the following
dialogue:<a name="FNanchor_535_535" id="FNanchor_535_535"></a><a href="#Footnote_535_535" class="fnanchor">[535]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Armado.</i> ‘The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gave Hector a gift,—’<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Dumain.</i> A gilt nutmeg.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Oak.</i> A crown of oak was considered by the Romans
worthy of the highest emulation of statesmen and warriors.
To him who had saved the life of a Roman soldier was given
a crown of oak-leaves; one, indeed, which was accounted
more honorable than any other. In “Coriolanus” (ii. 1),
Volumnia says: “he comes the third time home with the
oaken garland.” And again (i. 3): “To a cruel war I sent
him; from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak.”
Montesquieu, indeed, said that it was with two or three hundred
crowns of oak that Rome conquered the world. Although
so much historical and legendary lore have clustered
round the oak, yet scarcely any mention is made of this by
Shakespeare. The legend of Herne the Hunter, which seems
to have been current at Windsor, is several times alluded to,
as, for instance, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Mrs. Page.</i> There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns.<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i1"><i>Page.</i> ... there want not many, that do fear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In deep of night to walk by this Herne’s oak.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Herne’s Oak, so long an object of much curiosity and enthusiasm,
is now no more. According to one theory, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
old tree was blown down August 31, 1863; and a young oak
was planted by her Majesty, September 12, 1863, to mark
the spot where Herne’s Oak stood.<a name="FNanchor_536_536" id="FNanchor_536_536"></a><a href="#Footnote_536_536" class="fnanchor">[536]</a> Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,
however, tells us, “the general opinion is that it was
accidentally destroyed in the year 1796, through an order
of George III. to the bailiff Robinson, that all the unsightly
trees in the vicinity of the castle should be removed; an
opinion confirmed by a well-established fact, that a person
named Grantham, who contracted with the bailiff for the
removal of the trees, fell into disgrace with the king for
having included the oak in his gatherings.”<a name="FNanchor_537_537" id="FNanchor_537_537"></a><a href="#Footnote_537_537" class="fnanchor">[537]</a></p>

<p><i>Olive.</i> This plant, ever famous from its association with
the return of the dove to the ark, has been considered typical
of peace. It was as an emblem of peace that a garland
of olive was given to Judith when she restored peace to the
Israelites by the death of Holofernes (Judith, xv. 13). It
was equally honored by Greeks and Romans. It is, too, in
this sense that Shakespeare speaks of it when he makes
Viola, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 5), say: “I bring no overture
of war, no taxation of homage; I hold the olive in my hand,
my words are as full of peace as matter.” In Sonnet CVII.
occurs the well-known line:<a name="FNanchor_538_538" id="FNanchor_538_538"></a><a href="#Footnote_538_538" class="fnanchor">[538]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And peace proclaims olives of endless age.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Palm.</i> As the symbol of victory, this was carried before
the conqueror in triumphal processions. Its classical use is
noticed by Shakespeare in “Coriolanus” (v. 3). Volumnia
says:<a name="FNanchor_539_539" id="FNanchor_539_539"></a><a href="#Footnote_539_539" class="fnanchor">[539]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And bear the palm, for having bravely shed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy wife and children’s blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2), Cassius exclaims:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Ye gods, it doth amaze me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A man of such a feeble temper should<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So get the start of the majestic world,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And bear the palm alone.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Pilgrims were formerly called “palmers,” from the staff
or bough of palm they were wont to carry. So, in “All’s
Well That Ends Well” (iii. 5), Helena asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Where do the palmers lodge, I do beseech you?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Pear.</i> In his few notices of the pear Shakespeare only
mentions two by name, the warden and the poperin: the
former was chiefly used for roasting or baking, and is mentioned
by the clown in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I must have saffron, to colour the warden pies.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hence Ben Jonson makes a pun upon Church-warden pies.
According to some antiquarians, the name warden is from
the Anglo-Saxon <i>wearden</i>, to preserve, as it keeps for a long
time; but it is more probable that the word had its origin
from the horticultural skill of the Cistercian monks of Wardon
Abbey, in Bedfordshire, founded in the 12th century.
Three warden pears appeared on the armorial bearings of
the abbey.<a name="FNanchor_540_540" id="FNanchor_540_540"></a><a href="#Footnote_540_540" class="fnanchor">[540]</a> It is noticeable that the warden pies of Shakespeare’s
day, colored with saffron, have been replaced by
stewed pears colored with cochineal.</p>

<p>The poperin pear was probably introduced from Flanders
by the antiquary Leland, who was made rector of Popering
by Henry VIII. It is alluded to by Mercutio in “Romeo
and Juliet” (ii. 1), where he wishes that Romeo were “a
poperin pear.” In the old dramas there is much attempt
at wit on this pear.</p>

<p><i>Peas.</i> A practice called “peascod wooing” was formerly
a common mode of divination in love affairs. The cook,
when shelling green peas, would, if she chanced to find a
pod having nine, lay it on the lintel of the kitchen-door, and
the first man who entered was supposed to be her future<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
husband. Another way of divination by peascod consisted
in the lover selecting one growing on the stem, snatching it
away quickly, and if the good omen of the peas remaining
in the husk were preserved, in then presenting it to the lady
of his choice. Touchstone, in “As You Like It” (ii. 4),
alludes to this piece of popular suggestion: “I remember
the wooing of a peascod<a name="FNanchor_541_541" id="FNanchor_541_541"></a><a href="#Footnote_541_541" class="fnanchor">[541]</a> instead of her.” Gay, who has
carefully chronicled many a custom of his time, says, in his
“Fourth Pastoral:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As peascods once I pluck’d, I chanc’d to see,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One that was closely fill’d with three times three,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which when I cropp’d I safely home convey’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And o’er my door the spell in secret laid.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may quote, as a further illustration, the following stanza
from Browne’s “Pastorals” (bk. ii. song 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The peascod greene, oft with no little toyle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He’d seek for in the fattest, fertil’st soile,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And rende it from the stalke to bring it to her,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in her bosom for acceptance wooe her.”<a name="FNanchor_542_542" id="FNanchor_542_542"></a><a href="#Footnote_542_542" class="fnanchor">[542]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Plantain.</i> The leaves of this plant were carefully valued
by our forefathers for their supposed efficacy in healing
wounds, etc. It was also considered as a preventive of poison;
and to this supposed virtue we find an allusion in
“Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Benvolio.</i> Take thou some new infection to thy eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the rank poison of the old will die.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Romeo.</i> Your plantain leaf is excellent for that.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Benvolio.</i>                       For what, I pray thee?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Romeo.</i> For your broken shin.”<a name="FNanchor_543_543" id="FNanchor_543_543"></a><a href="#Footnote_543_543" class="fnanchor">[543]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (i. 2) Palamon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“These poor slight sores<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Need not a plantain.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Poppy.</i> The plant referred to by Shakespeare in “Othello”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
(iii. 3) is the opium poppy, well known in his day for
its deadly qualities. It is described by Spenser in the
“Fairy Queen” (ii. 7, 52) as the “dead-sleeping poppy,”
and Drayton (“Nymphidia,” v.) enumerates it among the
flowers that procure “deadly sleeping.”</p>

<p><i>Potato.</i> It is curious enough, says Nares,<a name="FNanchor_544_544" id="FNanchor_544_544"></a><a href="#Footnote_544_544" class="fnanchor">[544]</a> to find that excellent
root, which now forms a regular portion of the daily
nutriment of every individual, and is the chief or entire support
of multitudes in Ireland, spoken of continually as having
some powerful effect upon the human frame, in exciting
the desires and passions; yet this is the case in all the writings
contemporary with Shakespeare. Thus Falstaff, in
“Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), says: “Let the sky rain
potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of ‘Green Sleeves,’ hail
kissing comfits,” etc. In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 2), Thersites
adds: “How the devil luxury, with his fat rump and
potato finger, tickles these together.”<a name="FNanchor_545_545" id="FNanchor_545_545"></a><a href="#Footnote_545_545" class="fnanchor">[545]</a> It appears, too, that
the medical writers of the times countenanced this fancy.
Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_546_546" id="FNanchor_546_546"></a><a href="#Footnote_546_546" class="fnanchor">[546]</a> observes that the above passages are of peculiar
interest, inasmuch as they contain almost the earliest
notice of potatoes after their introduction into England.</p>

<p><i>Primrose.</i> Although the early primrose has always been
such a popular and favorite flower, yet it seems to have been
associated with sadness,<a name="FNanchor_547_547" id="FNanchor_547_547"></a><a href="#Footnote_547_547" class="fnanchor">[547]</a> or even worse than sadness; for, in
the following passages, the “primrose paths” and “primrose
way” are meant to be suggestive of sinful pleasures. Thus,
in “Hamlet” (i. 3), Ophelia says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“like a puff’d and reckless libertine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And recks not his own rede.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Macbeth” (ii. 3), the Porter declares: “I had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the
primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” Curious to say,
too, Shakespeare’s only epithets for this fair flower are,
“pale,” “faint,” “that die unmarried.” Nearly all the poets
of that time spoke of it in the same strain, with the exception
of Ben Jonson and the two Fletchers.</p>

<p><i>Reed.</i> Among the uses to which the reed was formerly
applied were the thatching of houses and the making of
shepherds’ pipes. The former is alluded to in the “Tempest”
(v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From eaves of reeds;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and the latter in “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 4), where Portia
speaks of “a reed voice.” It has generally been regarded
as the emblem of weakness, as in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(ii. 7): “a reed that will do me no service.”</p>

<p><i>Rose.</i> As might be expected, the rose is the flower most
frequently mentioned by Shakespeare, a symbol, in many
cases, of all that is fair and lovely. Thus, for instance, in
“Hamlet” (iii. 4), Hamlet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Such an act ... takes off the rose<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the fair forehead of an innocent love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sets a blister there.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Ophelia (iii. 1) describes Hamlet as,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The expectancy and rose of the fair state.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In days gone by the rose entered largely into the customs
and superstitions of most nations, and even nowadays there
is an extensive folk-lore associated with it.</p>

<p>It appears that, in Shakespeare’s time, one of the fashions
of the day was the wearing of enormous roses on the shoes, of
which full-length portraits afford striking examples.<a name="FNanchor_548_548" id="FNanchor_548_548"></a><a href="#Footnote_548_548" class="fnanchor">[548]</a> Hamlet
(iii. 2) speaks of “two Provincial roses on my razed shoes;”
meaning, no doubt, rosettes of ribbon in the shape of roses
of Provins or Provence. Douce favors the former, Warton
the latter locality. In either case, it was a large rose. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
Provence, or damask rose, was probably the better known.
Gerarde, in his “Herbal,” says that the damask rose is called
by some <i>Rosa Provincialis</i>.<a name="FNanchor_549_549" id="FNanchor_549_549"></a><a href="#Footnote_549_549" class="fnanchor">[549]</a> Mr. Fairholt<a name="FNanchor_550_550" id="FNanchor_550_550"></a><a href="#Footnote_550_550" class="fnanchor">[550]</a> quotes, from
“Friar Bacon’s Prophecy” (1604), the following, in allusion
to this fashion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When roses in the gardens grew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not in ribbons on a shoe:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now ribbon roses take such place<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That garden roses want their grace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “King John” (i. 1), where the Bastard alludes
to the three-farthing silver pieces of Queen Elizabeth, which
were extremely thin, and had the profile of the sovereign,
with a rose on the back of her head, there doubtless is a fuller
reference to the court fashion of sticking roses in the ear:<a name="FNanchor_551_551" id="FNanchor_551_551"></a><a href="#Footnote_551_551" class="fnanchor">[551]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“my face so thin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lest men should say, ‘Look, where three-farthings goes.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare also mentions the use of the rose in rose-cakes
and rose-water, the former in “Romeo and Juliet”
(v. 1), where Romeo speaks of “old cakes of roses,” the latter
in “Taming of the Shrew” (Induction, 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let one attend him with a silver basin<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Full of rose-water and bestrew’d with flowers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Referring to its historical lore, we may mention its famous
connection with the Wars of the Roses. In the fatal dispute
in the Temple Gardens, Somerset, on the part of Lancaster,
says (“1 Henry VI.” ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let him that is no coward, nor no flatterer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But dare maintain the party of the truth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Warwick, on the part of York, replies:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I love no colours, and, without all colour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of base insinuating flattery,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The trailing white dog-rose is commonly considered to
have been the one chosen by the House of York. A writer,
however, in the <i>Quarterly Review</i> (vol. cxiv.) has shown
that the white rose has a very ancient interest for Englishmen,
as, long before the brawl in the Temple Gardens, the
flower had been connected with one of the most ancient
names of our island. The elder Pliny, in discussing the etymology
of the word Albion, suggests that the land may have
been so named from the white roses which abounded in it.
The York and Lancaster rose, with its pale striped flowers,
is a variety of the French rose known as <i>Rosa Gallica</i>. It
became famous when the two emblematical roses, in the
persons of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York, at last brought
peace and happiness to the country which had been so long
divided by internal warfare. The canker-rose referred to by
Shakespeare is the wild dog-rose, a name occasionally applied
to the common red poppy.</p>

<p><i>Rosemary.</i> This plant was formerly in very high esteem,
and was devoted to various uses. It was supposed to
strengthen the memory; hence it was regarded as a symbol
of remembrance, and on this account was often given to
friends. Thus, in “Hamlet” (iv. 5), where Ophelia seems
to be addressing Laertes, she says: “There’s rosemary, that’s
for remembrance.” In the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4) rosemary
and rue are beautifully put together:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seeming and savour all the winter long:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Grace and remembrance be to you both,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And welcome to our shearing!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Besides being used at weddings, it was also in request at
funerals, probably for its odor, and as a token of remembrance
of the deceased. Thus the Friar, in “Romeo and
Juliet” (iv. 5), says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On this fair corse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This practice is thus touchingly alluded to by Gay, in his
“Pastorals:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To shew their love, the neighbours far and near<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Followed, with wistful look, the damsel’s bier:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sprigg’d rosemary the lads and lasses bore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While dismally the parson walk’d before.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Rosemary, too, was one of the evergreens with which dishes
were anciently garnished during the season of Christmas, an
allusion to which occurs in “Pericles” (iv. 6): “Marry, come
up, my dish of chastity with rosemary and bays.”</p>

<p><i>Rush.</i> Before the introduction of carpets, the floors of
churches and houses were strewed with rushes, a custom to
which Shakespeare makes several allusions. In “Taming
of the Shrew” (iv. 1), Grumio asks: “Is supper ready, the
house trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept?” and Glendower,
in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And rest your gentle head upon her lap.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">At the coronation of Henry V. (“2 Henry IV.,” v. 5), when
the procession is coming, the grooms cry, “More rushes!
more rushes!” which seems to have been the usual cry for
rushes to be scattered on a pavement or a platform when a
procession was approaching.<a name="FNanchor_552_552" id="FNanchor_552_552"></a><a href="#Footnote_552_552" class="fnanchor">[552]</a> Again, in “Richard II.” (i. 3),
the custom is further alluded to by John of Gaunt, who speaks
of “the presence strew’d,” referring to the presence-chamber.
So, too, in “Cymbeline” (ii. 2), Iachimo soliloquizes:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Tarquin thus<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The chastity he wounded.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), Romeo says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Let wantons, light of heart,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">an expression which Middleton has borrowed in his “Blunt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
Master Constable,” 1602:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bid him, whose heart no sorrow feels,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tickle the rushes with his wanton heels,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I have too much lead at mine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 1) the Gaoler’s Daughter
is represented carrying “strewings” for the two prisoners’
chamber.</p>

<p>Rush-bearings were a sort of rural festival, when the parishioners
brought rushes to strew the church.<a name="FNanchor_553_553" id="FNanchor_553_553"></a><a href="#Footnote_553_553" class="fnanchor">[553]</a></p>

<p>The “rush-ring” appears to have been a kind of token for
plighting of troth among rustic lovers. It was afterwards
vilely used, however, for mock-marriages, as appears from
one of the Constitutions of Salisbury. In “All’s Well that
Ends Well” (ii. 2) there seems a covert allusion to the rush-ring:
“As Tib’s rush for Tom’s fore-finger.” Spenser, in
the “Shepherd’s Kalendar,” speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The knotted rush-rings and gilt Rosemarie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Du Breul, in his “Antiquities of Paris,”<a name="FNanchor_554_554" id="FNanchor_554_554"></a><a href="#Footnote_554_554" class="fnanchor">[554]</a> mentions the rush-ring
as “a kind of espousal used in France by such persons
as meant to live together in a state of concubinage; but in
England it was scarcely ever practised except by designing
men, for the purpose of corrupting those young women to
whom they pretended love.”</p>

<p>The “rush candle,” which, in times past, was found in
nearly every house, and served as a night-light for the rich
and candle for the poor, is mentioned in “Taming of the
Shrew” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“be it moon, or sun, or what you please:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An if you please to call it a rush candle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Henceforth, I vow, it shall be so for me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Saffron.</i> In the following passage (“All’s Well that Ends
Well,” iv. 5) there seems to be an allusion<a name="FNanchor_555_555" id="FNanchor_555_555"></a><a href="#Footnote_555_555" class="fnanchor">[555]</a> by Lafeu to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
fashionable and fantastic custom of wearing yellow, and to
that of coloring paste with saffron: “No, no, no, your son
was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there, whose villanous
saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth
of a nation in his colour.”</p>

<p><i>Spear-grass.</i> This plant—perhaps the common reed—is
noticed in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) as used for tickling the nose
and making it bleed. In Lupton’s “Notable Things” it is
mentioned as part of a medical recipe: “Whoever is tormented
with sciatica or the hip-gout, let them take an herb
called spear-grass, and stamp it, and lay a little thereof upon
the grief.” Mr. Ellacombe<a name="FNanchor_556_556" id="FNanchor_556_556"></a><a href="#Footnote_556_556" class="fnanchor">[556]</a> thinks that the plant alluded to
is the common couch-grass (<i>Triticum repens</i>), which is still
known in the eastern counties as spear-grass.</p>

<p><i>Stover.</i> This word, which is often found in the writings
of Shakespeare’s day, denotes fodder and provision of all
sorts for cattle. In Cambridgeshire stover signifies hay
made of coarse, rank grass, such as even cows will not eat
while it is green. In “The Tempest” (iv. 1), Iris says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And flat meads thatch’d with stover, them to keep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to Steevens, stover was used as a thatch for cart-lodges
and other buildings that required but cheap coverings.</p>

<p><i>Strawberry.</i> Shakespeare’s mention of the strawberry in
connection with the nettle, in “Henry V.” (i. 1),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">deserves, says Mr. Ellacombe, a passing note. “It was the
common opinion in his day that plants were affected by the
neighborhood of other plants to such an extent that they
imbibed each others virtues and faults. Thus sweet flowers
were planted near fruit-trees with the idea of improving the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
flavor of the fruit, and evil-smelling trees, like the elder,
were carefully cleared away from fruit-trees, lest they should
be tainted. But the strawberry was supposed to be an exception
to the rule, and was said to thrive in the midst of
‘evil communications, without being corrupted.’”</p>

<p><i>Thorns.</i> The popular tradition, which represents the
marks on the moon<a name="FNanchor_557_557" id="FNanchor_557_557"></a><a href="#Footnote_557_557" class="fnanchor">[557]</a> to be that of a man carrying a thorn-bush
on his head, is alluded to in “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (v. 1), in the Prologue:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Presenteth Moonshine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Little else is mentioned by Shakespeare with regard to
thorns, save that they are generally used by him as the
emblems of desolation and trouble.</p>

<p><i>Violets.</i> An old superstition is alluded to by Shakespeare
when he makes Laertes wish that violets may spring from
the grave of Ophelia (“Hamlet,” v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Lay her i’ the earth:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from her fair and unpolluted flesh<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May violets spring!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">an idea which occurs in Persius’s “Satires” (i. 39):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“E tumulo fortunataque favilla<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nascentur violæ.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The violet has generally been associated with early death.
This, Mr. Ellacombe considers,<a name="FNanchor_558_558" id="FNanchor_558_558"></a><a href="#Footnote_558_558" class="fnanchor">[558]</a> “may have arisen from a
sort of pity for flowers that were only allowed to see the
opening year, and were cut off before the first beauty of
summer had come, and so were looked upon as apt emblems
of those who enjoyed the bright springtide of life, and no
more.” Thus, the violet is one of the flowers which Marina
carries to hang “as a carpet on the grave” in “Pericles”
(iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“the yellows, blues,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
<span class="i0">The purple violets, and marigolds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall, as a carpet, hang upon thy grave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While summer days do last.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in that exquisite passage in the “Winter’s Tale”
(iv. 4), where Perdita enumerates the flowers of spring, she
speaks of,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“violets, dim,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or Cytherea’s breath;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">upon which Mr. Singer<a name="FNanchor_559_559" id="FNanchor_559_559"></a><a href="#Footnote_559_559" class="fnanchor">[559]</a> thus comments: “The eyes of Juno
were as remarkable as those of Pallas, and</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘Of a beauty never yet<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Equalled in height of tincture.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The beauties of Greece and other Asiatic nations tinged
their eyes of an obscure violet color, by means of some unguent,
which was doubtless perfumed, like those for the hair,
etc., mentioned by Athenæus.</p>

<p><i>Willow.</i> From time immemorial the willow has been regarded
as the symbol of sadness. Hence it was customary
for those who were forsaken in love to wear willow garlands,
a practice to which Shakespeare makes several allusions. In
“Othello” (iv. 3), Desdemona, anticipating her death, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My mother had a maid call’d Barbara;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She was in love; and he she lov’d prov’d mad,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And did forsake her: she had a song of—Willow;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An old thing ’twas, but it express’d her fortune,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And she died singing it: that song, to-night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will not go from my mind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The following is the song:<a name="FNanchor_560_560" id="FNanchor_560_560"></a><a href="#Footnote_560_560" class="fnanchor">[560]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
<span class="i2">Sing all a green willow:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Sing willow, willow, willow:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Sing willow, willow, willow:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Sing willow, willow, willow:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sing all a green willow must be my garland.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on Emilia says (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“I will play the swan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And die in music.—[<i>Singing</i>] ‘Willow, willow, willow.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, Lorenzo, in “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), narrates:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“In such a night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon the wild sea-banks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was, too, in reference to this custom that Shakespeare,
in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), represented poor Ophelia hanging her
flowers on the “willow aslant a brook.” “This tree,” says
Douce,<a name="FNanchor_561_561" id="FNanchor_561_561"></a><a href="#Footnote_561_561" class="fnanchor">[561]</a> “might have been chosen as the symbol of sadness
from the cxxxvii. Psalm (verse 2): ‘We hanged our harps
upon the willows;’ or else from a coincidence between the
<i>weeping</i>-willow and falling tears.” Another reason has been
assigned. The <i>Agnus castus</i> was supposed to promote chastity,
and “the willow being of a much like nature,” says
Swan, in his “Speculum Mundi” (1635), “it is yet a custom
that he which is deprived of his love must wear a willow
garland.” Bona, the sister of the King of France, on receiving
news of Edward the Fourth’s marriage with Elizabeth
Grey, exclaimed,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“in hope he’ll prove a widower shortly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll wear the willow garland for his sake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Wormwood.</i> The use of this plant in weaning infants is
alluded to in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3), by Juliet’s nurse,
in the following passage:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of my dug, and felt it bitter, pretty fool.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Yew.</i> This tree, styled by Shakespeare “the dismal yew”
(“Titus Andronicus,” ii. 3), apart from the many superstitions
associated with it, has been very frequently planted
in churchyards, besides being used at funerals. Paris, in
“Romeo and Juliet” (v. 3), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Under yond yew-trees lay thee all along,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Holding thine ear close to the hollow ground;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Being loose, unfirm, with digging up of graves,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But thou shalt hear it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Although various reasons have been assigned for planting
the yew-tree in churchyards, it seems probable that the practice
had a superstitious origin. As witches were supposed
to exercise a powerful influence over the winds, they were
believed occasionally to exert their formidable power against
religious edifices. Thus Macbeth says (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Though you untie the winds, and let them fight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Against the churches.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">To counteract, therefore, this imaginary danger, our ancestors
may have planted the yew-tree in their churchyards,
not only on account of its vitality as an evergreen, but as
connected in some way, in heathen times, with the influence
of evil powers.<a name="FNanchor_562_562" id="FNanchor_562_562"></a><a href="#Footnote_562_562" class="fnanchor">[562]</a> In a statute made in the latter part of Edward
I.’s reign, to prevent rectors from cutting down trees
in churchyards, we find the following: “Verum arbores ipsæ,
propter ventorum impetus ne ecclesiis noceant, sæpe plantantur.”<a name="FNanchor_563_563" id="FNanchor_563_563"></a><a href="#Footnote_563_563" class="fnanchor">[563]</a></p>

<p>The custom of sticking yew in the shroud is alluded to in
the following song in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
<span class="i5">O, prepare it!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My part of death, no one so true<br /></span>
<span class="i5">Did share it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Through being reckoned poisonous, it is introduced in “Macbeth”
(iv. 1) in connection with the witches:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Gall of goat, and slips of yew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“How much the splitting or tearing off of the slip had
to do with magic we learn from a piece of Slavonic folk-lore.
It is unlucky to use for a beam a branch or a tree
broken by the wind. The devil, or storm-spirit, claims it as
his own, and, were it used, the evil spirit would haunt the
house. It is a broken branch the witches choose; a sliver’d
slip the woodman will have none of.”<a name="FNanchor_564_564" id="FNanchor_564_564"></a><a href="#Footnote_564_564" class="fnanchor">[564]</a></p>

<p>Its epithet, “double-fatal” (“Richard II.,” iii. 2), no doubt
refers to the poisonous quality of the leaves, and on account
of its wood being employed for instruments of death. Sir
Stephen Scroop, when telling Richard of Bolingbroke’s revolt,
declares that</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of double-fatal yew against thy state.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been suggested that the poison intended by the
Ghost in “Hamlet” (i. 5), when he speaks of the “juice of
cursed hebenon,” is that of the yew, and is the same as Marlowe’s
“juice of hebon” (“Jew of Malta,” iii. 4). The yew
is called hebon by Spenser and by other writers of Shakespeare’s
age; and, in its various forms of eben, eiben, hiben,
etc., this tree is so named in no less than five different European
languages. From medical authorities, both of ancient
and modern times, it would seem that the juice of the yew
is a rapidly fatal poison; next, that the symptoms attendant
upon yew-poisoning correspond, in a very remarkable
manner, with those which follow the bites of poisonous
snakes; and, lastly, that no other poison but the yew produces
the “lazar-like” ulcerations on the body upon which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
Shakespeare, in this passage, lays so much stress.<a name="FNanchor_565_565" id="FNanchor_565_565"></a><a href="#Footnote_565_565" class="fnanchor">[565]</a></p>

<p>Among the other explanations of this passage is the well-known
one which identifies “hebenon” with henbane. Mr.
Beisly suggests that nightshade may be meant, while Nares
considers that ebony is meant.<a name="FNanchor_566_566" id="FNanchor_566_566"></a><a href="#Footnote_566_566" class="fnanchor">[566]</a></p>

<p>From certain ancient statutes it appears that every Englishman,
while archery was practised, was obliged to keep
in his house either a bow of yew or some other wood.<a name="FNanchor_567_567" id="FNanchor_567_567"></a><a href="#Footnote_567_567" class="fnanchor">[567]</a></p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_450_450" id="Footnote_450_450"></a><a href="#FNanchor_450_450"><span class="label">[450]</span></a> <i>Aconitum napellus</i>, Wolf’s-bane or Monk’s-hood.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_451_451" id="Footnote_451_451"></a><a href="#FNanchor_451_451"><span class="label">[451]</span></a> “Miseros fallunt aconita legentis” (Georgics, bk. ii. l. 152).</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_452_452" id="Footnote_452_452"></a><a href="#FNanchor_452_452"><span class="label">[452]</span></a> See Ellacombe’s “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” 1878, pp. 7, 8.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_453_453" id="Footnote_453_453"></a><a href="#FNanchor_453_453"><span class="label">[453]</span></a> Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, pp. 1, 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_454_454" id="Footnote_454_454"></a><a href="#FNanchor_454_454"><span class="label">[454]</span></a> Phillips, “Flora Historica,” 1829, vol. ii. pp. 122, 128.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_455_455" id="Footnote_455_455"></a><a href="#FNanchor_455_455"><span class="label">[455]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” pp. 10, 11.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_456_456" id="Footnote_456_456"></a><a href="#FNanchor_456_456"><span class="label">[456]</span></a> Phillips, “Flora Historica,” 1829, vol. i. p. 104.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_457_457" id="Footnote_457_457"></a><a href="#FNanchor_457_457"><span class="label">[457]</span></a> Ellacombe’s “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 13.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_458_458" id="Footnote_458_458"></a><a href="#FNanchor_458_458"><span class="label">[458]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” p. 15.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_459_459" id="Footnote_459_459"></a><a href="#FNanchor_459_459"><span class="label">[459]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 29; probably synonymous with
the term “apple-Squire,” which formerly signified a pimp.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_460_460" id="Footnote_460_460"></a><a href="#FNanchor_460_460"><span class="label">[460]</span></a> Forby, in his “Vocabulary of East Anglia,” says of this apple, “we
retain the name, but whether we mean the same variety of fruit which
was so called in Shakespeare’s time, it is not possible to ascertain.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_461_461" id="Footnote_461_461"></a><a href="#FNanchor_461_461"><span class="label">[461]</span></a> Ellacombe’s “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 16; Dyce’s “Glossary,”
p. 430; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 81; Coles’s “Latin and English
Dictionary.” “A bitter-suete [apple]—Amari-mellum.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_462_462" id="Footnote_462_462"></a><a href="#FNanchor_462_462"><span class="label">[462]</span></a> See <a href="#CHAPTER_XI">chapter xi., Customs connected with the Calendar</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_463_463" id="Footnote_463_463"></a><a href="#FNanchor_463_463"><span class="label">[463]</span></a> See <a href="#CHAPTER_XII">chapter on Customs connected with Birth and Baptism</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_464_464" id="Footnote_464_464"></a><a href="#FNanchor_464_464"><span class="label">[464]</span></a> Edited by Dyce, 1861, p. 446. Many fanciful derivations for this
word have been thought of, but it was no doubt named from its smoothness
and softness, resembling the wool of lambs.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_465_465" id="Footnote_465_465"></a><a href="#FNanchor_465_465"><span class="label">[465]</span></a> Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 50.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_466_466" id="Footnote_466_466"></a><a href="#FNanchor_466_466"><span class="label">[466]</span></a> Note on Jonson’s Works, vol. iv. p. 24.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_467_467" id="Footnote_467_467"></a><a href="#FNanchor_467_467"><span class="label">[467]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 242.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_468_468" id="Footnote_468_468"></a><a href="#FNanchor_468_468"><span class="label">[468]</span></a> Quoted by Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 662.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_469_469" id="Footnote_469_469"></a><a href="#FNanchor_469_469"><span class="label">[469]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 16.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_470_470" id="Footnote_470_470"></a><a href="#FNanchor_470_470"><span class="label">[470]</span></a> “Theatrum Botanicum,” 1640.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_471_471" id="Footnote_471_471"></a><a href="#FNanchor_471_471"><span class="label">[471]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” pp. 17, 37.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_472_472" id="Footnote_472_472"></a><a href="#FNanchor_472_472"><span class="label">[472]</span></a> “Glossary,” pp. 65, 66.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_473_473" id="Footnote_473_473"></a><a href="#FNanchor_473_473"><span class="label">[473]</span></a> See “Notes and Queries,” 2d series, bk. i. p. 420.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_474_474" id="Footnote_474_474"></a><a href="#FNanchor_474_474"><span class="label">[474]</span></a> See Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, pp. 151, 152.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_475_475" id="Footnote_475_475"></a><a href="#FNanchor_475_475"><span class="label">[475]</span></a> Napier’s “Folk-Lore of West of Scotland,” 1879, p. 124.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_476_476" id="Footnote_476_476"></a><a href="#FNanchor_476_476"><span class="label">[476]</span></a> Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” p. 13.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_477_477" id="Footnote_477_477"></a><a href="#FNanchor_477_477"><span class="label">[477]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 45.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_478_478" id="Footnote_478_478"></a><a href="#FNanchor_478_478"><span class="label">[478]</span></a> See “Richard III.,” i. 2; “Timon of Athens,” iii. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_479_479" id="Footnote_479_479"></a><a href="#FNanchor_479_479"><span class="label">[479]</span></a> See “2 Henry IV.,” iv. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_480_480" id="Footnote_480_480"></a><a href="#FNanchor_480_480"><span class="label">[480]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 22.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_481_481" id="Footnote_481_481"></a><a href="#FNanchor_481_481"><span class="label">[481]</span></a> Ellacombe’s “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 23.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_482_482" id="Footnote_482_482"></a><a href="#FNanchor_482_482"><span class="label">[482]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 32.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_483_483" id="Footnote_483_483"></a><a href="#FNanchor_483_483"><span class="label">[483]</span></a> See also Evelyn’s “Sylva,” 1776, p. 396.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_484_484" id="Footnote_484_484"></a><a href="#FNanchor_484_484"><span class="label">[484]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 150; see Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 63.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_485_485" id="Footnote_485_485"></a><a href="#FNanchor_485_485"><span class="label">[485]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 212.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_486_486" id="Footnote_486_486"></a><a href="#FNanchor_486_486"><span class="label">[486]</span></a> “Shakespeare’s Garden,” p. 143.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_487_487" id="Footnote_487_487"></a><a href="#FNanchor_487_487"><span class="label">[487]</span></a> See “Winter’s Tale,” iv. 4:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Lawn as white as driven snow;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cyprus black as e’er was crow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>
Its transparency is alluded to in “Twelfth Night,” iii. 1:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“a cyprus, not a bosom,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hides my heart.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_488_488" id="Footnote_488_488"></a><a href="#FNanchor_488_488"><span class="label">[488]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” 1872, p. 113.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_489_489" id="Footnote_489_489"></a><a href="#FNanchor_489_489"><span class="label">[489]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 56. See Mr.
Gough’s “Introduction to Sepulchral Monuments,” p. lxvi.; also
Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 221.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_490_490" id="Footnote_490_490"></a><a href="#FNanchor_490_490"><span class="label">[490]</span></a> See Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 63.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_491_491" id="Footnote_491_491"></a><a href="#FNanchor_491_491"><span class="label">[491]</span></a> “Flower-Lore,” p. 35.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_492_492" id="Footnote_492_492"></a><a href="#FNanchor_492_492"><span class="label">[492]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 66.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_493_493" id="Footnote_493_493"></a><a href="#FNanchor_493_493"><span class="label">[493]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 302; Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 159.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_494_494" id="Footnote_494_494"></a><a href="#FNanchor_494_494"><span class="label">[494]</span></a> “Shakspere’s Garden,” p. 158.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_495_495" id="Footnote_495_495"></a><a href="#FNanchor_495_495"><span class="label">[495]</span></a> Quoted in Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 303.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_496_496" id="Footnote_496_496"></a><a href="#FNanchor_496_496"><span class="label">[496]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. pp. 314-316.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_497_497" id="Footnote_497_497"></a><a href="#FNanchor_497_497"><span class="label">[497]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 302-308.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_498_498" id="Footnote_498_498"></a><a href="#FNanchor_498_498"><span class="label">[498]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 305.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_499_499" id="Footnote_499_499"></a><a href="#FNanchor_499_499"><span class="label">[499]</span></a> See Gifford’s note on Jonson’s Works, vol. i. p. 52; Dyce’s “Glossary,”
p. 161; Du Cange’s “Glossary;” Connelly’s “Spanish and English
Dictionary,” 4to.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_500_500" id="Footnote_500_500"></a><a href="#FNanchor_500_500"><span class="label">[500]</span></a> Edited by Dyce, 1857, p. 30.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_501_501" id="Footnote_501_501"></a><a href="#FNanchor_501_501"><span class="label">[501]</span></a> Edited by Gifford and Dyce, vol. i. p. 231.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_502_502" id="Footnote_502_502"></a><a href="#FNanchor_502_502"><span class="label">[502]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 161.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_503_503" id="Footnote_503_503"></a><a href="#FNanchor_503_503"><span class="label">[503]</span></a> See “Winter’s Tale,” iv. 3; “Henry V.,” v. 2; “1 Henry VI.,” i. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_504_504" id="Footnote_504_504"></a><a href="#FNanchor_504_504"><span class="label">[504]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 73.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_505_505" id="Footnote_505_505"></a><a href="#FNanchor_505_505"><span class="label">[505]</span></a> “Nares’s Glossary,” vol. i. p. 363.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_506_506" id="Footnote_506_506"></a><a href="#FNanchor_506_506"><span class="label">[506]</span></a> “Shakespeare’s Garden,” p. 82; see Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 184.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_507_507" id="Footnote_507_507"></a><a href="#FNanchor_507_507"><span class="label">[507]</span></a> Ellacombe’s “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 204; Prior’s “Popular
Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 111.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_508_508" id="Footnote_508_508"></a><a href="#FNanchor_508_508"><span class="label">[508]</span></a> Cf. “All’s Well that Ends Well,” iv. 5; “Antony and Cleopatra,”
iv. 2; “Romeo and Juliet,” ii. 3, where Friar Laurence says:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_509_509" id="Footnote_509_509"></a><a href="#FNanchor_509_509"><span class="label">[509]</span></a> “A Dissuasive from Popery,” pt. i. chap. ii. sec. 9; see Dyce’s
“Glossary,” p. 371.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_510_510" id="Footnote_510_510"></a><a href="#FNanchor_510_510"><span class="label">[510]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 464.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_511_511" id="Footnote_511_511"></a><a href="#FNanchor_511_511"><span class="label">[511]</span></a> Batman’s “Upon Bartholomæus de Proprietate Rerum,” lib. xvii.
chap. 87.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_512_512" id="Footnote_512_512"></a><a href="#FNanchor_512_512"><span class="label">[512]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 465.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_513_513" id="Footnote_513_513"></a><a href="#FNanchor_513_513"><span class="label">[513]</span></a> See Hotten’s “History of Sign Boards.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_514_514" id="Footnote_514_514"></a><a href="#FNanchor_514_514"><span class="label">[514]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. p. 112.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_515_515" id="Footnote_515_515"></a><a href="#FNanchor_515_515"><span class="label">[515]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 482.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_516_516" id="Footnote_516_516"></a><a href="#FNanchor_516_516"><span class="label">[516]</span></a> “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1879, p. 128.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_517_517" id="Footnote_517_517"></a><a href="#FNanchor_517_517"><span class="label">[517]</span></a> <i>Polygonum aviculare.</i></p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_518_518" id="Footnote_518_518"></a><a href="#FNanchor_518_518"><span class="label">[518]</span></a> See “3 Henry VI.,” iv. 6; “Troilus and Cressida,” i. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_519_519" id="Footnote_519_519"></a><a href="#FNanchor_519_519"><span class="label">[519]</span></a> See “Henry V.,” iv. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_520_520" id="Footnote_520_520"></a><a href="#FNanchor_520_520"><span class="label">[520]</span></a> “Cambrian Biography,” 1803, p. 86; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. i. pp. 102-108.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_521_521" id="Footnote_521_521"></a><a href="#FNanchor_521_521"><span class="label">[521]</span></a> See Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 139.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_522_522" id="Footnote_522_522"></a><a href="#FNanchor_522_522"><span class="label">[522]</span></a> Cf. “Taming of the Shrew,” i. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_523_523" id="Footnote_523_523"></a><a href="#FNanchor_523_523"><span class="label">[523]</span></a> Cf. what Egeus says (i. 1) when speaking of Lysander:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This man hath bewitch’d the bosom of my child;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou, thou Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And interchanged love-tokens with my child.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_524_524" id="Footnote_524_524"></a><a href="#FNanchor_524_524"><span class="label">[524]</span></a> Dian’s bud is the bud of the <i>Agnus castus</i>, or chaste tree. “The
virtue this herbe is, that he will kepe man and woman chaste.” “Macer’s
Herbal,” 1527.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_525_525" id="Footnote_525_525"></a><a href="#FNanchor_525_525"><span class="label">[525]</span></a> Cupid’s flower, another name for the pansy.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_526_526" id="Footnote_526_526"></a><a href="#FNanchor_526_526"><span class="label">[526]</span></a> Notes to “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” 1877. Preface, p. xx.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_527_527" id="Footnote_527_527"></a><a href="#FNanchor_527_527"><span class="label">[527]</span></a> “Natural History,” bk. xxv. chap. 94.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_528_528" id="Footnote_528_528"></a><a href="#FNanchor_528_528"><span class="label">[528]</span></a> Phillips’s “Flora Historica,” 1829, vol. i. pp. 324, 325; see Smith’s
“Dictionary of the Bible,” 1869, vol. ii. p. 1777.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_529_529" id="Footnote_529_529"></a><a href="#FNanchor_529_529"><span class="label">[529]</span></a> “Mystic Trees and Flowers,” by M.&nbsp;D. Conway; <i>Fraser’s Magazine</i>,
1870, vol. ii. p. 705.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_530_530" id="Footnote_530_530"></a><a href="#FNanchor_530_530"><span class="label">[530]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. v. p. 153.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_531_531" id="Footnote_531_531"></a><a href="#FNanchor_531_531"><span class="label">[531]</span></a> See Sir Thomas Browne’s “Vulgar Errors,” 1852, vol. ii. p. 6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_532_532" id="Footnote_532_532"></a><a href="#FNanchor_532_532"><span class="label">[532]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 386.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_533_533" id="Footnote_533_533"></a><a href="#FNanchor_533_533"><span class="label">[533]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_534_534" id="Footnote_534_534"></a><a href="#FNanchor_534_534"><span class="label">[534]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 131.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_535_535" id="Footnote_535_535"></a><a href="#FNanchor_535_535"><span class="label">[535]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 612.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_536_536" id="Footnote_536_536"></a><a href="#FNanchor_536_536"><span class="label">[536]</span></a> See “Windsor Guide,” p. 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_537_537" id="Footnote_537_537"></a><a href="#FNanchor_537_537"><span class="label">[537]</span></a> See “Notes and Queries,” 3d series, vol. xii. p. 160.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_538_538" id="Footnote_538_538"></a><a href="#FNanchor_538_538"><span class="label">[538]</span></a> See also “3 Henry VI.,” iv. 6; “Timon of Athens,” v. 4; “Antony
and Cleopatra,” iv. 6; “2 Henry IV.,” iv. 4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_539_539" id="Footnote_539_539"></a><a href="#FNanchor_539_539"><span class="label">[539]</span></a> See “As You Like It,” iii. 2; “Timon of Athens,” v. 1; cf. “Henry
VIII.,” iv. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_540_540" id="Footnote_540_540"></a><a href="#FNanchor_540_540"><span class="label">[540]</span></a> See “Archæological Journal,” vol. v. p. 301.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_541_541" id="Footnote_541_541"></a><a href="#FNanchor_541_541"><span class="label">[541]</span></a> The cod was what we now call the pod.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_542_542" id="Footnote_542_542"></a><a href="#FNanchor_542_542"><span class="label">[542]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 99.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_543_543" id="Footnote_543_543"></a><a href="#FNanchor_543_543"><span class="label">[543]</span></a> See “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iii. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_544_544" id="Footnote_544_544"></a><a href="#FNanchor_544_544"><span class="label">[544]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 677.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_545_545" id="Footnote_545_545"></a><a href="#FNanchor_545_545"><span class="label">[545]</span></a> See Beaumont and Fletcher, “Elder Brother,” iv. 4; Massinger,
“New Way to Pay Old Debts,” ii. 2; Ben Jonson, “Cynthia’s Revels,”
ii. 1, etc.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_546_546" id="Footnote_546_546"></a><a href="#FNanchor_546_546"><span class="label">[546]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 173.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_547_547" id="Footnote_547_547"></a><a href="#FNanchor_547_547"><span class="label">[547]</span></a> Ibid., p. 179.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_548_548" id="Footnote_548_548"></a><a href="#FNanchor_548_548"><span class="label">[548]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. ix. p. 227.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_549_549" id="Footnote_549_549"></a><a href="#FNanchor_549_549"><span class="label">[549]</span></a> “Notes to Hamlet,” Clark and Wright, 1876, p. 179.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_550_550" id="Footnote_550_550"></a><a href="#FNanchor_550_550"><span class="label">[550]</span></a> “Costume in England,” p. 238. At p. 579 the author gives several
instances of the extravagances to which this fashion led.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_551_551" id="Footnote_551_551"></a><a href="#FNanchor_551_551"><span class="label">[551]</span></a> Some gallants had their ears bored, and wore their mistresses’
silken shoe-strings in them. See Singer’s “Notes,” vol. iv. p. 257.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_552_552" id="Footnote_552_552"></a><a href="#FNanchor_552_552"><span class="label">[552]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 373.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_553_553" id="Footnote_553_553"></a><a href="#FNanchor_553_553"><span class="label">[553]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 13, 14.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_554_554" id="Footnote_554_554"></a><a href="#FNanchor_554_554"><span class="label">[554]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 194.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_555_555" id="Footnote_555_555"></a><a href="#FNanchor_555_555"><span class="label">[555]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 381.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_556_556" id="Footnote_556_556"></a><a href="#FNanchor_556_556"><span class="label">[556]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 319.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_557_557" id="Footnote_557_557"></a><a href="#FNanchor_557_557"><span class="label">[557]</span></a> See p. <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_558_558" id="Footnote_558_558"></a><a href="#FNanchor_558_558"><span class="label">[558]</span></a> “Plant-Lore of Shakespeare,” p. 248.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_559_559" id="Footnote_559_559"></a><a href="#FNanchor_559_559"><span class="label">[559]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” vol. iv. p. 76.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_560_560" id="Footnote_560_560"></a><a href="#FNanchor_560_560"><span class="label">[560]</span></a> “The old ballad on which Shakespeare formed this song is given
in Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient Poetry’ (1794, vol. i. p. 208), from a
copy in the Pepysian collection. A different version of it may be seen
in Chappell’s ‘Popular Music of the Olden Time’ (2d edition, vol. i.
p. 207). The original ditty is the lamentation of a lover for the inconstancy
of his mistress.”—Dyce’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 450.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_561_561" id="Footnote_561_561"></a><a href="#FNanchor_561_561"><span class="label">[561]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 105.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_562_562" id="Footnote_562_562"></a><a href="#FNanchor_562_562"><span class="label">[562]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 244.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_563_563" id="Footnote_563_563"></a><a href="#FNanchor_563_563"><span class="label">[563]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 255-266.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_564_564" id="Footnote_564_564"></a><a href="#FNanchor_564_564"><span class="label">[564]</span></a> “Notes and Queries,” 5th series, vol. xii. p. 468.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_565_565" id="Footnote_565_565"></a><a href="#FNanchor_565_565"><span class="label">[565]</span></a> Extract of a paper read by Rev. W.&nbsp;A. Harrison, New Shakespeare
Society, 12th May. 1882.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_566_566" id="Footnote_566_566"></a><a href="#FNanchor_566_566"><span class="label">[566]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare;” Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. i. p. 412; Beisly’s “Shakespeare’s Garden,” p. 4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_567_567" id="Footnote_567_567"></a><a href="#FNanchor_567_567"><span class="label">[567]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iv. p. 427. See a paper in the “Antiquary”
(1882, vol. vi. p. 13), by Mr. George Black, on the yew in Shakespearian
folk-lore.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span></h2>

<h3>INSECTS AND REPTILES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">As</span> Dr. Johnson has truly remarked, Shakespeare is “the
poet of nature,” for “his attention was not confined to the
actions of men; he was an exact surveyor of the inanimate
world; his descriptions have always some peculiarity, gathered
by contemplating things as they really exist. Whether
life or nature be his subject, Shakespeare shows plainly that
he has seen with his own eyes.” So, too, he was in the
habit of taking minute observation of the popular notions
relating to natural history, so many of which he has introduced
into his plays, using them to no small advantage. In
numerous cases, also, the peculiarities of certain natural objects
have furnished the poet with many excellent metaphors.
Thus, in “Richard II.” (ii. 3), Bolingbroke speaks
of “the caterpillars of the commonwealth;” and in “2 Henry
VI.” (iii. 1) the Duke of York’s reflection on the destruction
of his hopes is,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thus are my blossoms blasted in the bud,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And caterpillars eat my leaves away,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">their destructive powers being familiar.</p>

<p><i>Ant.</i> An ancient name for the ant is “pismire,” probably
a Danish word, from <i>paid</i> and <i>myre</i>, signifying such ants
as live in hillocks. In “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3) Hotspur says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, look you, I am whipp’d and scourg’d with rods,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Blue-bottle.</i> This well-known insect has often been used
as a term of reproach. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 4), it
furnishes an epithet applied by the abusive tongue of Doll
Tearsheet to the beadle who had her in custody. She reviles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
him as a “blue-bottle rogue,” a term, says Mr. Patterson,<a name="FNanchor_568_568" id="FNanchor_568_568"></a><a href="#Footnote_568_568" class="fnanchor">[568]</a>
“evidently suggested by the similarity of the colors
of his costume to that of the insect.”</p>

<p><i>Bots.</i> Our ancestors imagined that poverty or improper
food engendered these worms, or that they were the offspring
of putrefaction. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1), one of
the carriers says: “Peas and beans are as dank here as a
dog, and that is the next way to give poor jades the bots.”
And one of the misfortunes of the miserable nag of Petruchio
(“Taming of the Shrew,” iii. 2), is that he is so “begnawn
with the bots.”</p>

<p><i>Cricket.</i> The presence of crickets in a house has generally
been regarded as a good omen, and said to prognosticate
cheerfulness and plenty. Thus, Poins, in answer to
the Prince’s question in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), “Shall we be
merry?” replies, “As merry as crickets.” By many of our
poets the cricket has been connected with cheerfulness and
mirth. Thus, in Milton, “Il Penseroso” desires to be</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Far from all resort of mirth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Save the cricket on the hearth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has not always, however, been regarded in the same
light, for Gay, in his “Pastoral Dirge,” among the rural
prognostications of death, gives the following:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And shrilling crickets in the chimney cry’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in Dryden’s “Œdipus” occurs the subjoined:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of death.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lady Macbeth, also (“Macbeth,” ii. 2), in replying to the
question of her husband after the murder of Duncan, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Cymbeline” (ii. 2), also, when Iachimo, at midnight,
commences his survey of the chamber where Imogen lies
sleeping, his first words refer to the chirping of crickets,
rendered all the more audible by the repose which at that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
moment prevailed throughout the palace:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-labour’d sense<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Repairs itself by rest.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Gilbert White, in his “History of Selborne” (1853, p. 174),
remarks that “it is the housewife’s barometer, foretelling
her when it will rain; and is prognostic, sometimes, she
thinks, of ill or good luck, of the death of a near relation, or
the approach of an absent lover. By being the constant
companion of her solitary home, it naturally becomes the
object of her superstition.”<a name="FNanchor_569_569" id="FNanchor_569_569"></a><a href="#Footnote_569_569" class="fnanchor">[569]</a></p>

<p>Its supposed keen sense of hearing is referred to in the
“Winter’s Tale” (ii. 1) by Mamillius, who, on being asked
by Hermione to tell a tale, replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“I will tell it softly;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yond crickets shall not hear it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Frog.</i> In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 4), the Gaoler’s
Daughter says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Would I could find a fine frog! he would tell me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">News from all parts o’ the world; then would I make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A carack of a cockle-shell, and sail<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By east and north-east to the King of Pigmies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For he tells fortunes rarely.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In days gone by frogs were extensively used for the purpose
of divination.</p>

<p><i>Gad-fly.</i> A common name for this fly is the “brize” or
“breese,”<a name="FNanchor_570_570" id="FNanchor_570_570"></a><a href="#Footnote_570_570" class="fnanchor">[570]</a> an allusion to which occurs in “Troilus and Cressida”
(i. 3), where Nestor, speaking of the sufferings which
cattle endure from this insect, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The herd hath more annoyance by the breese<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than by the tiger.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 10) Shakespeare
makes the excited Scarus draw a comparison between the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
effect which this insect produces on a herd of cattle and the
abruptness and sudden frenzy of Cleopatra’s retreat from the
naval conflict:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whom leprosy o’ertake! i’ the midst o’ the fight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When vantage like a pair of twins appear’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Both as the same, or rather ours the elder,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The breese upon her, like a cow in June,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hoists sails, and flies.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is said that the terror this insect causes in cattle proceeds
solely from the alarm occasioned by “a peculiar sound
it emits while hovering for the purpose of oviposition.”<a name="FNanchor_571_571" id="FNanchor_571_571"></a><a href="#Footnote_571_571" class="fnanchor">[571]</a></p>

<p><i>Lady-bird.</i> This is used in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3) as
a term of endearment. Lady Capulet having inquired after
her daughter Juliet, the Nurse replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I bade her come. What, lamb! What, lady-bird!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">God forbid! Where’s this girl? What, Juliet!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Mr. Staunton regards this passage as an exquisite touch of
nature. “The old nurse,” he says, “in her fond garrulity,
uses ‘lady-bird’ as a term of endearment; but, recollecting
its application to a female of loose manners, checks herself—‘God
forbid!’ her darling should prove such a one.” Mr.
Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_572_572" id="FNanchor_572_572"></a><a href="#Footnote_572_572" class="fnanchor">[572]</a> however, considers this explanation incorrect, and
gives the subjoined note: “The nurse says that she has
already bid Juliet come; she then calls out, ‘What, lamb!
What, lady-bird!’ and Juliet not yet making her appearance,
she exclaims, ‘God forbid! Where’s this girl?’ The
words ‘God forbid’ being properly an ellipsis of ‘God forbid
that any accident should keep her away,’ but used here
merely as an expression of impatience.”</p>

<p><i>Lizard.</i> It was a common superstition in the time of
Shakespeare that lizards were venomous, a notion which
probably originated in their singular form. Hence the lizard’s
leg was thought a suitable ingredient for the witches’<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
caldron in “Macbeth” (iv. 1). Suffolk, in “2 Henry VI.”
(iii. 2), refers to this idea:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Their chiefest prospect murdering basilisks!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their softest touch as smart as lizards’ stings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Queen Margaret speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1) it is classed with the toad
and owl.</p>

<p><i>Moth.</i> This term, as Mr. Patterson remarks in his “Insects
Mentioned by Shakespeare” (1841, p. 164), does not
awaken many pleasing associations. In the minds of most
people it stands for an insect either contemptible from its
size and inertness, or positively obnoxious from its attacks
on many articles of clothing. Thus Shakespeare, he says,
employs the expression “moth” to denote something trifling
or extremely minute. And in “King John” (iv. 1) we have
the touching appeal of Prince Arthur to Hubert, in which,
for mote, he would substitute moth:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Arthur.</i> Is there no remedy?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Hubert.</i><span style="padding-left: 9em">None, but to lose your eyes.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Arthur.</i> O heaven!—that there were but a mote in yours,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Any annoyance in that precious sense!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your vile intent must needs seem horrible.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">See also “Henry V.” (iv. 1). In these two passages, however,
the correct reading is probably “mote.”<a name="FNanchor_573_573" id="FNanchor_573_573"></a><a href="#Footnote_573_573" class="fnanchor">[573]</a></p>

<p><i>Serpent.</i> A term used by our old writers to signify a serpent
was “a worm,” which is still found in the north of
England in the same sense. It is used several times by
Shakespeare; as, for instance, in “Measure for Measure”
(iii. 1), where the Duke, addressing Claudio, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Thou’rt by no means valiant;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
<span class="i0">For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of a poor worm.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This passage also illustrates an error very prevalent in days
gone by, that the forked tongue of the serpent tribe was
their instrument of offence, without any thought of the
teeth or fangs, which are its real weapons.<a name="FNanchor_574_574" id="FNanchor_574_574"></a><a href="#Footnote_574_574" class="fnanchor">[574]</a> Again, the
“blind-worm” or “slow-worm”—a little snake with very
small eyes, falsely supposed to be venomous—is spoken of
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 2), in that charming
passage where the fairies are represented as singing to
their queen, Titania:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You spotted snakes, with double tongue,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Newts, and blind-worms, do no wrong,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Come not near our fairy queen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Macbeth” (iv. 1), among the ingredients of the
witches’ caldron are</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">To quote a further allusion, Shakespeare, in “Timon of
Athens” (iv. 3), speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The gilded newt and eyeless venom’d worm.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Massinger employs the same term in his “Parliament of
Love” (iv. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“The sad father<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That sees his son stung by a snake to death,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May, with more justice, stay his vengeful hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let the worm escape, than you vouchsafe him<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A minute to repent.”<a name="FNanchor_575_575" id="FNanchor_575_575"></a><a href="#Footnote_575_575" class="fnanchor">[575]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There was an old notion that the serpent caused death
without pain, a popular fancy which Shakespeare has introduced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
in his “Antony and Cleopatra” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That kills and pains not?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The term “worm” was also occasionally used to signify a
“poor creature,” as also was the word “snake.” Thus, in
the “Taming of the Shrew” (v. 2), Katharina says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, come, you froward and unable worms!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My mind hath been as big as one of yours,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My heart as great, my reason, haply, more.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, in “As You Like It” (iv. 3), Rosalind uses “snake” in
the sense of reproach: “Well, go your way to her, for I see
love hath made thee a tame snake.”</p>

<p>The serpent, as the emblem of ingratitude, is alluded to
by King Lear (ii. 4), who, referring to his daughter, says
how she</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“struck me with her tongue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Most serpent-like, upon the very heart:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All the stor’d vengeances of heaven fall<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On her ingrateful top!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to a popular belief, still credited, a poisonous
bite could be cured by the blood of the viper which darted
the poison. Thus, in “Richard II.” (i. 1), Mowbray says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The which no balm can cure, but his heart-blood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which breath’d this poison.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Cornwall it is still believed that the dead body of a
serpent, bruised on the wound it has occasioned, is an infallible
remedy for its bite.<a name="FNanchor_576_576" id="FNanchor_576_576"></a><a href="#Footnote_576_576" class="fnanchor">[576]</a> Hence has originated the following
rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The beauteous adder hath a sting,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Yet bears a balsam too.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The old notion that the snake, in casting off its slough,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
or skin, annually, is supposed to regain new vigor and
fresh youth, is alluded to by King Henry (“Henry V.,”
iv. 1), who speaks of “casted slough and fresh legerity”—legerity
meaning lightness, nimbleness. In “Twelfth Night”
(ii. 5), in the letter which Malvolio finds, there is this passage:
“to inure thyself to what thou art like to be, cast thy
humble slough and appear fresh.” One of the most useful
miracles which St. Patrick is reported to have performed
was his driving the venomous reptiles out of Ireland, and
forbidding them to return. This tradition is probably alluded
to by King Richard (“Richard II.,” ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Now for our Irish wars:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which live like venom, where no venom else,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But only they, hath privilege to live.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The way, we are told, by which the saint performed this
astounding feat of his supernatural power was by means of
a drum. Even spiders, too, runs the legend, were included
in this summary process of excommunicating the serpent
race. One of the customs, therefore, observed on St. Patrick’s
day, is visiting Croagh Patrick. This sacred hill is situated
in the county of Mayo, and is said to have been the
spot chosen by St. Patrick for banishing the serpents and
other noxious animals into the sea.</p>

<p>In “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), where Brutus says,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And that craves wary walking.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">we may compare the popular adage,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“March wind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wakes the ether (<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, adder) and blooms the whin.”<a name="FNanchor_577_577" id="FNanchor_577_577"></a><a href="#Footnote_577_577" class="fnanchor">[577]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Spider.</i> This little creature, which, in daily life, is seldom
noticed except for its cobweb, the presence of which in a
house generally betokens neglect, has, however, an interesting
history, being the subject of many a curious legend and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
quaint superstition. Thus, it has not escaped the all-pervading
eye of Shakespeare, who has given us many curious
scraps of folk-lore concerning it. In days gone by the web
of the common house-spider was much in request for stopping
the effusion of blood; and hence Bottom, in addressing
one of his fairy attendants in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (iii. 1), says: “I shall desire you of more acquaintance,
good Master Cobweb: if I cut my finger, I shall make
bold with you.”</p>

<p>Its medicinal virtues, however, do not end here, for, in
Sussex<a name="FNanchor_578_578" id="FNanchor_578_578"></a><a href="#Footnote_578_578" class="fnanchor">[578]</a> it is used in cases of jaundice, many an old doctress
prescribing “a live spider rolled up in butter.” It is
stated, too, that the web is narcotic, and has been administered
internally in certain cases of fever, with success.<a name="FNanchor_579_579" id="FNanchor_579_579"></a><a href="#Footnote_579_579" class="fnanchor">[579]</a> As
a remedy for ague it has been considered most efficacious.
Some years ago a lady in the south of Ireland was celebrated
far and near for her cure of this disorder. Her remedy
was a large house-spider taken alive, enveloped in treacle
or preserve. Of course, the parties were carefully kept
in ignorance of what the wonderful remedy was.<a name="FNanchor_580_580" id="FNanchor_580_580"></a><a href="#Footnote_580_580" class="fnanchor">[580]</a></p>

<p>According to a universal belief, spiders were formerly
considered highly venomous, in allusion to which notion
King Richard II. (iii. 2), in saluting the “dear earth” on
which he stands, after “late tossing on the breaking seas,”
accosts it thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And heavy-gaited toads, lie in their way,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which with usurping steps do trample thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, Leontes, in the “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 1), remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“There may be in the cup<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A spider steep’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Cymbeline” (iv. 2) and “Richard III.” (i. 2) Shakespeare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
classes it with adders and toads; and in the latter
play (i. 3), when Queen Margaret is hurling imprecations on
her enemies, she is turned from her encounter with Gloster
by a remark made by Queen Elizabeth; and while a pitying
spirit seems for a minute to supplant her rage, she addresses
her successor in these words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In another part of the same play (iv. 4) the epithet “bottled”
is again applied in a similar manner by Queen Elizabeth:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That bottled spider, that foul bunch-back’d toad!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Ritson, on these two passages, has the following remarks on
the term, bottled spider: “A large, bloated, glossy spider,
supposed to contain venom proportionate to its size.”</p>

<p>The origin of the silvery threads of gossamer which are
so frequently seen extending from bush to bush was formerly
unknown. Spenser, for instance, speaks of them as
“scorched dew;” and Thomson, in his “Autumn,” mentions
“the filmy threads of dew evaporate;” which probably, says
Mr. Patterson,<a name="FNanchor_581_581" id="FNanchor_581_581"></a><a href="#Footnote_581_581" class="fnanchor">[581]</a> refers to the same object. The gossamer is
now, however, known to be the production of a minute spider.
It is twice mentioned by Shakespeare, but not in connection
with the little being from which it originates. One
of the passages is in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 6):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A lover may bestride the gossamer<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That idles in the wanton summer air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet not fall; so light is vanity.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The other occurs in “King Lear” (iv. 6), where Edgar accosts
his father, after his supposed leap from that</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“cliff, whose high and bending head<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Looks fearfully in the confined deep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">He says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So many fathom down precipitating,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In each case it is expressive of extreme lightness. Nares, in
his “Glossary” (vol. i. p. 378), considers that the term “gossamer”
originally came from the French <i>gossampine</i>, the cotton-tree,
and is equivalent to cotton-wool. He says that it
also means any light, downy matter, such as the flying seeds
of thistles and other plants, and, in poetry, is not unfrequently
used to denote the long, floating cobwebs seen in
fine weather. In the above passage from “King Lear” he
thinks it has the original sense, and in the one from “Romeo
and Juliet” probably the last. Some are of opinion
that the word is derived from <i>goss</i>, the gorse or furze.<a name="FNanchor_582_582" id="FNanchor_582_582"></a><a href="#Footnote_582_582" class="fnanchor">[582]</a> In
Germany the popular belief attributes the manufacture of
the gossamer to the dwarfs and elves. Of King Oberon, it
may be remembered, we are told,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A rich mantle he did wear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Made of tinsel gossamer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bestarred over with a few<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Diamond drops of morning dew.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hogg, too, introduces it as a vehicle fit for the fairy bands,
which he describes as</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“sailing ’mid the golden air<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In skiffs of yielding gossamer.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Toad.</i> Among the vulgar errors of Shakespeare’s day
was the belief that the head of the toad contained a stone
possessing great medicinal virtues. In “As You Like It,”
(ii. 1), the Duke says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sweet are the uses of adversity;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lupton, in his “One Thousand Notable Things,” says that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
“a toad-stone, called <i>Crepaudina</i>, touching any part envenomed
by the bite of a rat, wasp, spider, or other venomous
beast, ceases the pain and swelling thereof.” In the Londesborough
Collection is a silver ring of the fifteenth century,
in which one of these stones is set.<a name="FNanchor_583_583" id="FNanchor_583_583"></a><a href="#Footnote_583_583" class="fnanchor">[583]</a></p>

<p>It was also generally believed that the toad was highly
venomous—a notion to which there are constant allusions
in Shakespeare’s plays; as, for example, in the above passage,
where it is spoken of as “ugly and venomous.” In
“Richard III.” (i. 2), Lady Anne says to Gloster:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Never hung poison on a fouler toad.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, in another scene (i. 3), Queen Margaret speaks of “this
pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”</p>

<p>Once more, in “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 2), the Nurse describes
Queen Tamora’s babe as being “as loathsome as a
toad.” There is doubtless some truth in this belief, as the
following quotation from Mr. Frank Buckland’s “Curiosities
of Natural History” seems to show: “Toads are generally
reported to be poisonous; and this is perfectly true to a certain
extent. Like the lizards, they have glands in their skin
which secrete a white, highly acid fluid, and just behind the
head are seen two eminences like split beans; if these be
pressed, this acid fluid will come out—only let the operator
mind that it does not get into his eyes, for it generally
comes out with a jet. There are also other glands dispersed
through the skin. A dog will never take a toad in his mouth,
and the reason is that this glandular secretion burns his
tongue and lips. It is also poisonous to the human subject.
Mr. Blick, surgeon, of Islip, Oxfordshire,<a name="FNanchor_584_584" id="FNanchor_584_584"></a><a href="#Footnote_584_584" class="fnanchor">[584]</a> tells me that a man
once made a wager, when half drunk, in a village public-house,
that he would bite a toad’s head off; he did so, but in a
few hours his lips, tongue, and throat began to swell in a
most alarming way, and he was dangerously ill for some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>
time.”</p>

<p>Owing to the supposed highly venomous character of the
toad, “superstition,” says Pennant,<a name="FNanchor_585_585" id="FNanchor_585_585"></a><a href="#Footnote_585_585" class="fnanchor">[585]</a> “gave it preternatural
powers, and made it a principal ingredient in the incantations
of nocturnal hags.” Thus, in Macbeth (iv. 1), the
witch says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Toad that under cold stone,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Days and nights has thirty-one<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Swelter’d venom sleeping got,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Pennant adds that this was intended “for a design of the
first consideration, that of raising and bringing before the
eyes of Macbeth a hateful second-sight of the prosperity of
Banquo’s line. This shows the mighty power attributed to
this animal by the dealers in the magic art.”</p>

<p>The evil spirit, too, has been likened by one of our master
bards to the toad, as a semblance of all that is devilish and
disgusting (“Paradise Lost,” iv. 800):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Him they found,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Assaying with all his devilish art to reach<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The organs of her fancy.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Macbeth” (i. 1), the paddock or toad is made the
name of a familiar spirit:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Paddock<a name="FNanchor_586_586" id="FNanchor_586_586"></a><a href="#Footnote_586_586" class="fnanchor">[586]</a> calls.—Anon!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Wasp.</i> So easily, we are told,<a name="FNanchor_587_587" id="FNanchor_587_587"></a><a href="#Footnote_587_587" class="fnanchor">[587]</a> is the wrathful temperament
of this insect aroused, that extreme irascibility can
scarcely be better expressed than by the term “waspish.”
It is in this sense that Shakespeare has applied the epithet,
“her waspish-headed son,” in the “Tempest” (iv. 1), where
we are told that Cupid is resolved to be a boy outright.
Again, in “As You Like It” (iv. 3), Silvius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I know not the contents; but, as I guess<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
<span class="i0">By the stern brow and waspish action<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which she did use as she was writing of it,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It bears an angry tenor.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Petruchio addresses
his intended spouse in language not highly complimentary:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Pet.</i> Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Kath.</i> If I be waspish, best beware my sting.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Pet.</i> My remedy is, then, to pluck it out.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the celebrated scene in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), in which
the reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius is effected,
the word is used in a similar sense:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll use you for my mirth, yea, for my laughter,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When you are waspish.”<a name="FNanchor_588_588" id="FNanchor_588_588"></a><a href="#Footnote_588_588" class="fnanchor">[588]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Water-Fly.</i> This little insect, which, on a sunny day, may
be seen almost on every pool, dimpling the glassy surface
of the water, is used as a term of reproach by Shakespeare.
Thus, Hamlet (v. 2), speaking of Osric, asks Horatio,
“Dost know this water-fly?” In “Troilus and Cressida”
(v. 1), Thersites exclaims: “Ah, how the poor world is pestered
with such water-flies, diminutives of nature.” Johnson
says it is the proper emblem of a busy trifler, because it
skips up and down upon the surface of the water without
any apparent purpose.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_568_568" id="Footnote_568_568"></a><a href="#FNanchor_568_568"><span class="label">[568]</span></a> “Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare,” 1841, p. 181.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_569_569" id="Footnote_569_569"></a><a href="#FNanchor_569_569"><span class="label">[569]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 190, 191.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_570_570" id="Footnote_570_570"></a><a href="#FNanchor_570_570"><span class="label">[570]</span></a> See Patterson’s “Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare,” 1841, pp.
104, 105.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_571_571" id="Footnote_571_571"></a><a href="#FNanchor_571_571"><span class="label">[571]</span></a> “Linnæan Transactions,” vol. xv. p. 407; cf. Virgil’s “Georgics,” iii.
l. 148.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_572_572" id="Footnote_572_572"></a><a href="#FNanchor_572_572"><span class="label">[572]</span></a> “Glossary,” 1876, p. 238.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_573_573" id="Footnote_573_573"></a><a href="#FNanchor_573_573"><span class="label">[573]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 973.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_574_574" id="Footnote_574_574"></a><a href="#FNanchor_574_574"><span class="label">[574]</span></a> Cf. “Macbeth” (iii. 4):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There the grown serpent lies: the worm, that’s fled,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath nature that in time will venom breed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_575_575" id="Footnote_575_575"></a><a href="#FNanchor_575_575"><span class="label">[575]</span></a> Worm is used for serpent or viper, in the Geneva version of the
New Testament, in Acts xxvii. 4, 5.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_576_576" id="Footnote_576_576"></a><a href="#FNanchor_576_576"><span class="label">[576]</span></a> See Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England,” 1871,
p. 415; and Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 270.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_577_577" id="Footnote_577_577"></a><a href="#FNanchor_577_577"><span class="label">[577]</span></a> Denham’s “Weather Proverbs,” 1842.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_578_578" id="Footnote_578_578"></a><a href="#FNanchor_578_578"><span class="label">[578]</span></a> “Folk-Lore Record,” 1878, vol. i. p. 45.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_579_579" id="Footnote_579_579"></a><a href="#FNanchor_579_579"><span class="label">[579]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii. pp. 223, 287, 381.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_580_580" id="Footnote_580_580"></a><a href="#FNanchor_580_580"><span class="label">[580]</span></a> See article on “Spider-Lore,” in <i>Graphic</i>, November 13, 1880.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_581_581" id="Footnote_581_581"></a><a href="#FNanchor_581_581"><span class="label">[581]</span></a> “Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare,” 1841, p. 220.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_582_582" id="Footnote_582_582"></a><a href="#FNanchor_582_582"><span class="label">[582]</span></a> See Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,”
edited by T. Wright, 1862, p. 215.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_583_583" id="Footnote_583_583"></a><a href="#FNanchor_583_583"><span class="label">[583]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. pp. 50-55; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” pp. 181-183.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_584_584" id="Footnote_584_584"></a><a href="#FNanchor_584_584"><span class="label">[584]</span></a> See “Notes and Queries,” 6th series, vol. v. pp. 32, 173: also, Gilbert
White’s “Natural History of Selborne,” letter xvii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_585_585" id="Footnote_585_585"></a><a href="#FNanchor_585_585"><span class="label">[585]</span></a> “Zoology,” 1766, vol. iii. p. 15.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_586_586" id="Footnote_586_586"></a><a href="#FNanchor_586_586"><span class="label">[586]</span></a> Cf. “Hamlet,” iii. 4; here paddock is used for a toad.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_587_587" id="Footnote_587_587"></a><a href="#FNanchor_587_587"><span class="label">[587]</span></a> Patterson’s “Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare,” 1841, p. 137.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_588_588" id="Footnote_588_588"></a><a href="#FNanchor_588_588"><span class="label">[588]</span></a> Cf. “Titus Andronicus,” ii. 3; “Henry VIII.,” iii. 3.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></h2>

<h3>FOLK-MEDICINE.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Without</span> discussing the extent of Shakespeare’s technical
medical knowledge, the following pages will suffice to
show that he was fully acquainted with many of the popular
notions prevalent in his day respecting certain diseases
and their cures. These, no doubt, he collected partly from
the literature of the period, with which he was so fully conversant,
besides gathering a good deal of information on
the subject from daily observation. Anyhow, he has bequeathed
to us some interesting particulars relating to the
folk-medicine of bygone times, which is of value, in so far as
it helps to illustrate the history of medicine in past years.
In Shakespeare’s day the condition of medical science was
very unlike that at the present day. As Mr. Goadby, in his
“England of Shakespeare” (1881, p. 104), remarks, “the
man of science was always more or less of an alchemist, and
the students of medicine were usually extensive dealers in
charms and philtres.” If a man wanted bleeding he went
to a barber-surgeon, and when he required medicine he consulted
an apothecary; the shop of the latter being well described
by Romeo (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An alligator stuff’d, and other skins<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of ill-shap’d fishes; and about his shelves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A beggarly account of empty boxes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Remnants of pack-thread and old cakes of roses,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Such a man was as ready “to sell love-philtres to a maiden
as narcotics to a friar.”</p>

<p><i>Bleeding.</i> Various remedies were in use in Shakespeare’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
day to stop bleeding. Thus, a key, on account of the coldness
of the metal of which it is composed, was often employed;
hence the term “key-cold” became proverbial,
and is referred to by many old writers. In “Richard III.”
(i. 2), Lady Anne, speaking of the corpse of King Henry the
Sixth, says</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Poor key-cold figure of a holy king.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Rape of Lucrece” (l. 1774) the same expression is
used:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And then in key-cold Lucrece’ bleeding stream<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He falls, and bathes the pale fear in his face.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Wild Goose Chase” (iv. 3)
we read: “For till they be key-cold dead, there’s no trusting
of ’em.”<a name="FNanchor_589_589" id="FNanchor_589_589"></a><a href="#Footnote_589_589" class="fnanchor">[589]</a></p>

<p>Another common remedy was the one alluded to in “King
Lear” (iii. 7), where one of the servants says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“I’ll fetch some flax, and whites of eggs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To apply to his bleeding face.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This passage has been thought to be parodied in Ben Jonson’s
play, “The Case is Altered” (ii. 4): “Go, get a white
of an egg and a little flax, and close the breach of the head;
it is the most conducible thing that can be.” Mr. Gifford,
however, has shown the incorrectness of this assertion, pointing
out that Jonson’s play was written in 1599, some years
before “King Lear” appeared, while the allusion is “to a
method of cure common in Jonson’s time to every barber-surgeon
and old woman in the kingdom.”<a name="FNanchor_590_590" id="FNanchor_590_590"></a><a href="#Footnote_590_590" class="fnanchor">[590]</a></p>

<p>Cobwebs are still used to stanch the bleeding from small
wounds, and Bottom’s words seem to refer to this remedy
of domestic surgery: “I shall desire you of more acquaintance,
good Master Cobweb; if I cut my finger, I shall make
bold with you.”</p>

<p>Anciently, says Mr. Singer, “a superstitious belief was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
annexed to the accident of bleeding at the nose;” hence, in
the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot says: “It was
not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday
last.” In days gone by, it was customary with our forefathers
to be bled periodically, in spring and in autumn, in
allusion to which custom King Richard refers (“Richard
II.,” i. 1), when he says to his uncle:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hence the almanacs of the time generally gave particular
seasons as the most beneficial for bleeding. The forty-seventh
aphorism of Hippocrates (sect. 6) is, that “persons who
are benefited by venesection or purging should be bled or
purged in the spring.”</p>

<p><i>Blindness.</i> The exact meaning of the term “sand-blind,”
which occurs in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), is somewhat
obscure:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Launcelot.</i> O heavens, this is my true-begotten father! who, being
more than sand-blind, high gravel blind, knows me not.</p>

<p><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span></p>

<p><i>Gobbo.</i> Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not.”</p></div>

<p>It probably means very dim-sighted,<a name="FNanchor_591_591" id="FNanchor_591_591"></a><a href="#Footnote_591_591" class="fnanchor">[591]</a> and in Nares’s
“Glossary”<a name="FNanchor_592_592" id="FNanchor_592_592"></a><a href="#Footnote_592_592" class="fnanchor">[592]</a> it is thus explained: “Having an imperfect
sight, as if there was sand in the eye.” The expression is
used by Beaumont and Fletcher in “Love’s Cure” (ii. 1):
“Why, signors, and my honest neighbours, will you impute
that as a neglect of my friends, which is an imperfection in
me? I have been <i>sand-blind</i> from my infancy.” The term
was probably one in vulgar use.<a name="FNanchor_593_593" id="FNanchor_593_593"></a><a href="#Footnote_593_593" class="fnanchor">[593]</a></p>

<p><i>Blister.</i> In the following passage of “Timon of Athens”
(v. 1), Timon appears to refer to the old superstition that a
lie produces a blister on the tongue, though, in the malice
of his rage, he imprecates the minor punishment on truth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
and the old surgery of cauterization on falsehood:<a name="FNanchor_594_594" id="FNanchor_594_594"></a><a href="#Footnote_594_594" class="fnanchor">[594]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn!—Speak, and be hang’d;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For each true word, a blister! and each false<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be as a caut’rizing to the root o’ the tongue,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Consuming it with speaking!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare the passage in “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 2),
where Paulina declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And never to my red-look’d anger be<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The trumpet any more.”<a name="FNanchor_595_595" id="FNanchor_595_595"></a><a href="#Footnote_595_595" class="fnanchor">[595]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bone-ache.</i> This was a nickname, in bygone years, for the
<i>Lues venerea</i>, an allusion to which we find in “Troilus and
Cressida” (ii. 3), where Thersites speaks of “the bone-ache”
as “the curse dependent on those that war for a placket.”
Another name for this disease was the “brenning or burning,”
a notice of which we find in “King Lear” (iv. 6).</p>

<p><i>Bruise.</i> A favorite remedy in days past for bruises was
parmaceti, a corruption of spermaceti, in allusion to which
Hotspur, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3), speaks of it as “the sovereign’st
thing on earth for an inward bruise.” So, too, in Sir
T. Overbury’s “Characters,” 1616 [“An Ordinarie Fencer”]:
“His wounds are seldom skin-deepe; for an <i>inward bruise</i>,
lambstones and sweetbreads are his only spermaceti.” A
well-known plant called the “Shepherd’s Purse” has been
popularly nicknamed the “Poor Man’s Parmacetti,” being a
joke on the Latin word <i>bursa</i>, a purse, which, to a poor
man, is always the best remedy for his bruises.<a name="FNanchor_596_596" id="FNanchor_596_596"></a><a href="#Footnote_596_596" class="fnanchor">[596]</a> In “Romeo
and Juliet” (i. 2), a plantain-leaf is pronounced to be an excellent
cure “for your broken shin.” Plantain-water was a
remedy in common use with the old surgeons.<a name="FNanchor_597_597" id="FNanchor_597_597"></a><a href="#Footnote_597_597" class="fnanchor">[597]</a></p>

<p><i>Bubukle.</i> According to Johnson, this denoted “a red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
pimple.” Nares says it is “a corrupt word for a carbuncle,
or something like;” and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Dictionary
of Archaic and Provincial Words,” defines it as a
botch or imposthume. It occurs in “Henry V.” (iii. 6),
where Fluellen describes Bardolph’s face as “all bubukles.”</p>

<p><i>Burn.</i> The notion of one heat driving out another gave
rise to the old-fashioned custom of placing a burned part
near the fire to drive out the fire—a practice, says Dr. Bucknill,<a name="FNanchor_598_598" id="FNanchor_598_598"></a><a href="#Footnote_598_598" class="fnanchor">[598]</a>
certainly not without benefit, acting on the same principle
as the application of turpentine and other stimulants
to recent burns. This was one of the many instances of
the ancient homœopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also
cure.<a name="FNanchor_599_599" id="FNanchor_599_599"></a><a href="#Footnote_599_599" class="fnanchor">[599]</a> Thus, in “King John” (iii. 1), Pandulph speaks of it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And falsehood falsehood cures; as fire cools fire<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Within the scorched veins of one new burn’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 4), Proteus
tells how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Even as one heat another heat expels,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or as one nail by strength drives out another,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So the remembrance of my former love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is by a newer object quite forgotten.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare the words of Mowbray in “Richard
II.” (i. 1), where a similar idea is contained:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The which no balm can cure, but his heart-blood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which breath’d this poison.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), Benvolio relates
how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“one fire burns out another’s burning,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cataract.</i> One of the popular names for this disease of the
eye was the “web and the pin.” Markham, in his “Cheap<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
and Good Husbandry” (bk. i. chap. 37), thus describes it in
horses: “But for the wart, pearle, pin, or web, which are
evils grown in or upon the eye, to take them off, take the
juyce of the herb betin and wash the eye therewith, it will
weare the spots away.” Florio (“Ital. Dict.”) gives the following:
“Cataratta is a dimnesse of sight occasioned by humores
hardened in the eies, called a cataract or a pin and a
web.” Shakespeare uses the term in the “Winter’s Tale”
(i. 2), where Leontes speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“all eyes blind<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With the pin and web, but theirs;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “King Lear” (iii. 4), alluding to “the foul fiend
Flibbertigibbet,” says, “he gives the web and the pin.”<a name="FNanchor_600_600" id="FNanchor_600_600"></a><a href="#Footnote_600_600" class="fnanchor">[600]</a>
Acerbi, in his “Travels” (vol. ii. p. 290), has given the Lapland
method of cure for this disease. In a fragment of an
old medical treatise it is thus described: “Another sykenes
ther byth of <i>yezen; on a webbe</i>, a nother a wem, that hydyth
the myddel of the yezen; and this hes to maners, other
whilys he is white and thynne, and other whilys he is
thykke, as whenne the obtalmye ne is noght clene yhelyd
up, bote the rote abydyth stylle. Other whilys the webbe is
noght white but rede, other blake.”<a name="FNanchor_601_601" id="FNanchor_601_601"></a><a href="#Footnote_601_601" class="fnanchor">[601]</a> In the Statute of the
34 and 35 of Henry VIII. a pin and web in the eye is
recited among the “customable diseases,” which honest
persons, not being surgeons, might treat with herbs, roots,
and waters, with the knowledge of whose nature God had
endowed them.</p>

<p><i>Chilblains.</i> These are probably alluded to by the Fool in
“King Lear” (i. 5): “If a man’s brains were in’s heels,
were’t not in danger of kibes?” Hamlet, too, says (v. 1):
“the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant
comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.”</p>

<p><i>Deformity.</i> It was an old prejudice, which is not quite extinct,
that those who are defective or deformed are marked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
by nature as prone to mischief. Thus, in “Richard III.”
(i. 3), Margaret says of Richard, Duke of Gloster:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou that was seal’d in thy nativity<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The slave of nature, and the son of hell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">She calls him <i>hog</i>, in allusion to his cognizance, which was a
boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed
person was a “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who
had been <i>stigmatized</i>, or burned with an iron, as an ignominious
punishment, and hence was employed to represent
a person on whom nature has set a mark of deformity.
Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Queen Margaret says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But thou art neither like thy sire, nor dam;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But like a foul misshapen stigmatic<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mark’d by the destinies to be avoided,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), young Clifford says to Richard:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may note, too, how, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
(v. 1), mothers’ marks and congenital forms are deprecated
by Oberon from the issue of the happy lovers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And the blots of Nature’s hand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall not in their issue stand;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor mark prodigious, such as are<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Despised in nativity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall upon their children be.”<a name="FNanchor_602_602" id="FNanchor_602_602"></a><a href="#Footnote_602_602" class="fnanchor">[602]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Indeed, constant allusions are to be met with in our old
writers relating to this subject, showing how strong were the
feelings of our forefathers on the point. But, to give one
further instance of this superstition given by Shakespeare,
we may quote the words of King John (iv. 2), with reference
to Hubert and his supposed murder of Prince Arthur:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A fellow by the hand of Nature mark’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quoted, and sign’d, to do a deed of shame,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This murder had not come into my mind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body
concurs, too, with Bacon’s theory: “Deformed persons are
commonly even with nature; for, as nature hath done ill by
them, so do they by nature, being void of natural affection,
and so they have their revenge on nature.”</p>

<p><i>Drowning.</i> The old superstition<a name="FNanchor_603_603" id="FNanchor_603_603"></a><a href="#Footnote_603_603" class="fnanchor">[603]</a> of its being dangerous
to save a person from drowning is supposed, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,
to be alluded to in “Twelfth Night.” It was
owing to the belief that the person saved would, sooner or
later, injure the man who saved him. Thus, in Sir Walter
Scott’s “Pirate,” Bryce, the pedler, warns the hero not to
attempt to resuscitate an inanimate form which the waves
had washed ashore on the mainland of Shetland. “‘Are you
mad,’ exclaimed the pedler, ‘you that have lived sae lang in
Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye
not if ye bring him to life again he will do you some capital
injury?’”</p>

<p><i>Epilepsy.</i> A popular name for this terrible malady was
the “falling-sickness,” because, when attacked with one
of these fits, the patient falls suddenly to the ground. In
“Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) it is thus mentioned in the following
dialogue:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Cassius.</i> But, soft, I pray you: what, did Cæsar swoon?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Casca.</i> He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Brutus.</i> ’Tis very like; he hath the falling-sickness.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Cassius.</i> No, Cæsar hath it not; but you, and I,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And honest Casca, we have the falling-sickness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Fistula.</i> At the present day a fistula means an abscess
external to the rectum, but in Shakespeare’s day it was used
in a more general signification for a burrowing abscess in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
any situation.<a name="FNanchor_604_604" id="FNanchor_604_604"></a><a href="#Footnote_604_604" class="fnanchor">[604]</a> The play of “All’s Well that Ends Well”
has a special interest, because, as Dr. Bucknill says, its very
plot may be said to be medical. “The orphan daughter of
a physician cures the king of a fistula by means of a secret
remedy left to her as a great treasure by her father. The
royal reward is the choice of a husband among the nobles of
the court, and ‘thereby hangs the tale.’” The story is taken
from the tale of Gilletta of Narbonne, in the “Decameron”
of Boccaccio. It came to Shakespeare through the medium
of Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” and is to be found in the
first volume, which was printed as early as 1566.<a name="FNanchor_605_605" id="FNanchor_605_605"></a><a href="#Footnote_605_605" class="fnanchor">[605]</a> The story
is thus introduced by Shakespeare in the following dialogue
(i. 1), where the Countess of Rousillon is represented as inquiring:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“What hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?</p>

<p><i>Laf.</i> He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose
practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage
in the process but only the losing of hope by time.</p>

<p><i>Count.</i> This young gentlewoman had a father—O, that ‘had!’ how
sad a passage ’tis!—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty;
had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death
should have play for lack of work. Would, for the king’s sake, he
were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s disease.</p>

<p><i>Laf.</i> How called you the man you speak of, madam?</p>

<p><i>Count.</i> He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great
right to be so; Gerard de Narbon.</p>

<p><i>Laf.</i> He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke
of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have
lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.</p>

<p><i>Ber.</i> What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?</p>

<p><i>Laf.</i> A fistula, my lord.”</p></div>

<p>The account given of Helena’s secret remedy and the
king’s reason for rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent
idea of the state of opinion with regard to the practice
of physic in Shakespeare’s time.</p>

<p><i>Fit.</i> Formerly the term “rapture” was synonymous with
a fit or trance. The word is used by Brutus in “Coriolanus”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
(ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“your prattling nurse<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into a rapture lets her baby cry<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While she chats him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Steevens quotes from the “Hospital for London’s Follies”
(1602), where Gossip Luce says: “Your darling will
weep itself into a rapture, if you take not good heed.”<a name="FNanchor_606_606" id="FNanchor_606_606"></a><a href="#Footnote_606_606" class="fnanchor">[606]</a></p>

<p><i>Gold.</i> It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of
gold had great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility
of the metal might be communicated to a body impregnated
with it. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), Prince Henry,
in the course of his address to his father, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I spake unto this crown, as having sense,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath fed upon the body of my father;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Preserving life in medicine potable.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks.
In John Wight’s translation of the “Secretes of Alexis” is
a receipt “to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour,
which conserveth the youth and healthe of a man, and will
heale every disease that is thought incurable, in the space
of seven daies at the furthest.” The receipt, however, is a
highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice
of lemons, honey, common salt, and <i>aqua vitæ</i>, and distillation
frequently repeated from a “urinall of glass”—as the
oftener it is distilled the better it is. “Thus doyng,” it is
said, “ye shall have a right naturall, and perfecte potable
golde, whereof somewhat taken alone every monthe once
or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we have
spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent
to preserve a man’s youthe and healthe, and to heale in a
fewe daies any disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
The said golde will also be good and profitable for
diverse other operations and effectes: as good wittes and
diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily judge.”
A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made
in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), where the King says
to Bertram:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Plutus himself,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath not in nature’s mystery more science,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than I have in this ring.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor’s avarice,
refers to this old belief:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And yet he was but esy of despence:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He kept that he wan in the pestilence.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For gold in physic is a cordial;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Therefore he loved it in special.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby’s “Receipts” (1674), we
are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts,
ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace
with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine
“which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops
for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects.”</p>

<p>The term “grand liquor” is also used by Shakespeare for
the <i>aurum potabile</i> of the alchemist, as in “Tempest” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Where should they<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Find this grand liquor that hath gilded them?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Good Year.</i> This is evidently a corruption of <i>goujère</i>, a
disease derived from the French <i>gouge</i>, a common camp-follower,
and probably alludes to the <i>Morbus Gallicus</i>. Thus,
in “King Lear” (v. 3), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ere they shall make us weep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost
in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
passages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.<a name="FNanchor_607_607" id="FNanchor_607_607"></a><a href="#Footnote_607_607" class="fnanchor">[607]</a>
It was often used in exclamations, as in “Merry Wives of
Windsor” (i. 4): “We must give folks leave to prate: what,
the good-jear!” In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites,
by the “rotten diseases of the south,” probably meant the
<i>Morbus Gallicus</i>.</p>

<p><i>Handkerchief.</i> It was formerly a common practice in
England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their
heads, and still continues at the present day among the
common people in many places. Thus, in “Julius Cæsar”
(ii. 1), we find the following allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“If,” says Fuller, “this county [Cheshire] hath bred no
writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it
be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him
a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not
mend him, then God be merciful to him.”<a name="FNanchor_608_608" id="FNanchor_608_608"></a><a href="#Footnote_608_608" class="fnanchor">[608]</a></p>

<p><i>Hysteria.</i> This disorder, which, in Shakespeare’s day, we
are told, was known as “the mother,” or <i>Hysterica passio</i>,
was not considered peculiar to women only. It is probable
that, when the poet wrote the following lines in “King
Lear” (ii. 4), where he makes the king say,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Hysterica passio!</i> down, thou climbing sorrow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy element’s below!—Where is this daughter?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">he had in view the subjoined passages from Harsnet’s “Declaration
of Popish Impostures” (1603), a work which, it has
been suggested,<a name="FNanchor_609_609" id="FNanchor_609_609"></a><a href="#Footnote_609_609" class="fnanchor">[609]</a> “he may have consulted in order to furnish
out his character of Tom of Bedlam with demoniacal
gibberish.” The first occurs at p. 25: “Ma. Maynie had a
spice of the <i>hysterica passio</i>, as it seems, from his youth; hee
himselfe termes it the moother (as you may see in his confessione).”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>
Master Richard Mainy, who was persuaded by
the priests that he was possessed of the devil, deposes as
follows (p. 263): “The disease I speake of was a spice of the
mother, wherewith I had been troubled (as is before mentioned)
before my going into Fraunce. Whether I doe rightly
terme it the <i>mother</i> or no I know not.” Dr. Jordan, in
1603, published “A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the
Suffocation of the Mother.”</p>

<p><i>Infection.</i> According to an old but erroneous belief, infection
communicated to another left the infector free; in
allusion to which Timon (“Timon of Athens,” iv. 3) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I will not kiss thee; then the rot returns<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To thine own lips again.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among other notions prevalent in days gone by was the
general contagiousness of disease, to which an allusion seems
to be made in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), where
Helena says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Malone considers that Shakespeare, in the following passage
in “Venus and Adonis,” alludes to a practice of his day,
when it was customary, in time of the plague, to strew the
rooms of every house with rue and other strong-smelling
herbs, to prevent infection:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Long may they kiss each other, for this cure!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O, never let their crimson liveries wear!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And as they last, their verdure still endure,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To drive infection from the dangerous year!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, the contagiousness of pestilence is thus alluded to by
Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “O Lord, he
will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than
the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.” The belief,
too, that the poison of pestilence dwells in the air, is
spoken of in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“When Jove<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the sick air.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, in “Richard II.” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Devouring pestilence hangs in our air.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is alluded to, also, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 1), where the
Duke says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Methought she purged the air of pestilence.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>While on this subject, we may quote the following dialogue
from the same play (ii. 3), which, as Dr. Bucknill<a name="FNanchor_610_610" id="FNanchor_610_610"></a><a href="#Footnote_610_610" class="fnanchor">[610]</a> remarks,
“involves the idea that contagion is bound up with
something appealing to the sense of smell, a mellifluous
voice being miscalled contagious; unless one could apply
one organ to the functions of another, and thus admit contagion,
not through its usual portal, the nose:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Sir Andrew.</i> A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Sir Toby.</i> A contagious breath.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Sir Andrew.</i> Very sweet and contagious, i’ faith.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Sir Toby.</i> To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Insanity.</i> That is a common idea that the symptoms of
madness are increased by the full moon. Shakespeare mentions
this popular fallacy in “Othello” (v. 2), where he tells
us that the moon makes men insane when she comes nearer
the earth than she was wont.<a name="FNanchor_611_611" id="FNanchor_611_611"></a><a href="#Footnote_611_611" class="fnanchor">[611]</a></p>

<p>Music as a cure for madness is, perhaps, referred to in
“King Lear” (iv. 7), where the physician of the king
says: “Louder the music there.”<a name="FNanchor_612_612" id="FNanchor_612_612"></a><a href="#Footnote_612_612" class="fnanchor">[612]</a> Mr. Singer, however,
has this note: “Shakespeare considered soft music favorable
to sleep. Lear, we may suppose, had been thus composed
to rest; and now the physician desires louder music
to be played, for the purpose of waking him.”</p>

<p>So, in “Richard II.” (v. 5), the king says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This music mads me: let it sound no more;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For though it have holp madmen to their wits,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In me, it seems, it will make wise men mad.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The power of music as a medical agency has been recognized
from the earliest times, and in mental cases has often
been highly efficacious.<a name="FNanchor_613_613" id="FNanchor_613_613"></a><a href="#Footnote_613_613" class="fnanchor">[613]</a> Referring to music as inducing
sleep, we may quote the touching passage in “2 Henry IV.”
(iv. 5), where the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unless some dull and favourable hand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will whisper music to my weary spirit.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Warwick.</i> Call for the music in the other room.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Ariel, in “The Tempest” (ii. 1), enters playing <i>solemn music</i>
to produce this effect.</p>

<p>A mad-house seems formerly to have been designated a
“dark house.” Hence, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), the
reason for putting Malvolio into a dark room was, to make
him believe that he was mad. In the following act (iv. 2)
he says: “Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad; they
have laid me here in hideous darkness;” and further on
(v. 1) he asks,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kept in a dark house?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind says that “Love is
merely a madness, and ... deserves as well a dark-house and
a whip as madmen do.”</p>

<p>The expression “horn-mad,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, quite mad, occurs in the
“Comedy of Errors” (ii. 1): “Why, mistress, sure my master
is horn-mad.” And, again, in “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(i. 4), Mistress Quickly says, “If he had found the young
man, he would have been horn-mad.”</p>

<p>Madness in cattle was supposed to arise from a distemper
in the internal substance of their horns, and furious or mad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
cattle had their horns bound with straw.</p>

<p><i>King’s Evil.</i> This was a common name in years gone by
for scrofula, because the sovereigns of England were supposed
to possess the power of curing it, “without other medicine,
save only by handling and prayer.” This custom of
“touching for the king’s evil” is alluded to in “Macbeth”
(iv. 3), where the following dialogue is introduced:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Malcolm.</i><span style="padding-left: 4em">Comes the king forth, I pray you?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Doctor.</i> Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched souls<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That stay his cure; their malady convinces<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The great assay of art; but, at his touch—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand——<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They presently amend.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Malcolm.</i><span style="padding-left: 5em">I thank you, doctor.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Macduff.</i> What’s the disease he means?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Malcolm.</i>                            ’Tis call’d the evil:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A most miraculous work in this good king;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which often, since my here-remain in England,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The mere despair of surgery, he cures;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the succeeding royalty he leaves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The healing benediction. With this strange virtue<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sundry blessings hang about his throne,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That speak him full of grace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This reference, which has nothing to do with the progress
of the drama, is introduced, obviously, in compliment
to King James, who fancied himself endowed with the Confessor’s
powers.<a name="FNanchor_614_614" id="FNanchor_614_614"></a><a href="#Footnote_614_614" class="fnanchor">[614]</a> The poet found authority for the passage
in Holinshed (vol. i. p. 279): “As hath bin thought, he
was enspired with the gift of prophecie, and also to haue
hadde the gift of healing infirmities and diseases. Namely,
he vsed to help those that were vexed with the disease,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
commonly called the kyngs euill, and left that vertue as it
were a portion of inheritance vnto his successors the kyngs
of this realme.” Edward’s miraculous powers were believed
in, we are told, by his contemporaries, or at least soon after
his death, and were expressly recognized by Pope Alexander III.,
who canonized him. In Plot’s “Oxfordshire” (chap.
x. sec. 125) there is an account, accompanied with a drawing,
of the touch-piece supposed to have been given by this monarch.
James I.’s practice of touching for the evil is frequently
mentioned in Nichols’s “Progresses.” Charles I.,
when at York, touched seventy persons in one day. Indeed,
few are aware to what an extent this superstition once prevailed.
In the course of twenty years, between 1660 and
1682, no less than 92,107 persons were touched for this disease.
The first English monarch who refused to touch for
the king’s evil was William III., but the practice was resumed
by Queen Anne, who officially announced, in the <i>London Gazette</i>,
March 12, 1712, her royal intention to receive patients
afflicted with the malady in question. It was probably
about that time that Johnson was touched by her majesty,
upon the recommendation of the celebrated physician Sir
John Floyer, of Lichfield. King George I. put an end to
this practice, which is said to have originated with Edward
the Confessor, in 1058.<a name="FNanchor_615_615" id="FNanchor_615_615"></a><a href="#Footnote_615_615" class="fnanchor">[615]</a> The custom was also observed by
French kings; and on Easter Sunday, 1686, Louis XIV. is
said to have touched 1600 persons.</p>

<p><i>Lethargy.</i> This is frequently confounded by medical men
of former times, and by Shakespeare himself, with apoplexy.
The term occurs in the list of diseases quoted by Thersites
in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).<a name="FNanchor_616_616" id="FNanchor_616_616"></a><a href="#Footnote_616_616" class="fnanchor">[616]</a></p>

<p><i>Leprosy.</i> This was, in years gone by, used to denote the
<i>lues venerea</i>, as in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 8):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,—<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Whom leprosy o’ertake!<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">Hoists sails and flies.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Leech.</i> The old medical term for a leech is a “blood-sucker,”
and a knot would be an appropriate term for a
number of clustering leeches. So, in “Richard III.” (iii. 3),
Grey, being led to the block, says of Richard’s minions:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A knot you are of damned blood-suckers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) mention is made by Warwick of
the “blood-sucker of sleeping men,” which, says Dr. Bucknill,
appears to mean the vampire-bat.</p>

<p><i>Measles.</i> This word originally signified leprosy, although
in modern times used for a very different disorder. Its derivation
is the old French word <i>meseau</i>, or <i>mesel</i>, a leper.
Thus, Cotgrave has “Meseau, a meselled, scurvy, leaporous,
lazarous person.” Distempered or scurvied hogs are still
said to be measled. It is in this sense that it is used in
“Coriolanus” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As for my country I have shed my blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Coin words till their decay, against those measles,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The very way to catch them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Pleurisy.</i> This denotes a plethora, or redundancy of
blood, and was so used, probably, from an erroneous idea
that the word was derived from <i>plus pluris</i>. It is employed
by Shakespeare in “Hamlet” (iv. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For goodness, growing to a plurisy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dies in his own too-much.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1) there is a similar phrase:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“that heal’st with blood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The earth when it is sick, and cur’st the world<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O’ the plurisy of people.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The word is frequently used by writers contemporary with
Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, Massinger, in “The Picture”
(iv. 2), says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A plurisy of ill blood you must let out<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By labour.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Mummy.</i> This was a preparation for magical purposes,
made from dead bodies, and was used as a medicine both
long before and long after Shakespeare’s day. Its virtues
seem to have been chiefly imaginary, and even the traffic
in it fraudulent.<a name="FNanchor_617_617" id="FNanchor_617_617"></a><a href="#Footnote_617_617" class="fnanchor">[617]</a> The preparation of mummy is said to
have been first brought into use in medicine by a Jewish
physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good
for the cure of divers diseases, and particularly bruises, to
prevent the blood’s gathering and coagulating. It has,
however, long been known that no use whatever can be derived
from it in medicine, and “that all which is sold in the
shops, whether brought from Venice or Lyons, or even
directly from the Levant by Alexandria, is factitious, the
work of certain Jews, who counterfeit it by drying carcasses
in ovens, after having prepared them with powder of myrrh,
caballine aloes, Jewish pitch, and other coarse or unwholesome
drugs.”<a name="FNanchor_618_618" id="FNanchor_618_618"></a><a href="#Footnote_618_618" class="fnanchor">[618]</a> Shakespeare speaks of this preparation.
Thus Othello (iii. 4), referring to the handkerchief which he
had given to Desdemona, relates how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“it was dyed in mummy which the skilful<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), the “witches’ mummy” forms
one of the ingredients of the boiling caldron. Webster, in
“The White Devil” (1857, p. 5), speaks of it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Your followers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have swallow’d you like mummia, and, being sick,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With such unnatural and horrid physic,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Vomit you up i’ the kennel.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Sir Thomas Browne, in his interesting “Fragment on Mummies,”
tells us that Francis I. always carried mummy<a name="FNanchor_619_619" id="FNanchor_619_619"></a><a href="#Footnote_619_619" class="fnanchor">[619]</a> with
him as a panacea against all disorders. Some used it for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
epilepsy, some for gout, some used it as a styptic. He further
adds: “The common opinion of the virtues of mummy
bred great consumption thereof, and princes and great
men contended for this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt
largely, manufacturing mummies from dead carcasses, and
giving them the names of kings, while specifics were compounded
from crosses and gibbets leavings.”</p>

<p><i>Nightmare.</i> There are various charms practised, in this
and other countries, for the prevention of nightmare, many
of which are exceedingly quaint. In days gone by it appears
that St. Vitalis, whose name has been corrupted into
St. Withold, was invoked; and, by way of illustration, Theobald
quotes from the old play of “King John”<a name="FNanchor_620_620" id="FNanchor_620_620"></a><a href="#Footnote_620_620" class="fnanchor">[620]</a> the following:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sweet S. Withold, of thy lenitie, defend us from extremitie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare, alluding to the nightmare, in his “King Lear”
(iii. 4), refers to the same saint, and gives us a curious old
charm:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Saint Withold footed thrice the old [wold];<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He met the night-mare, and her nine-fold;<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Bid her alight<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And her troth plight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, aroint thee, witch, aroint thee!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">For what purpose, as Mr. Singer<a name="FNanchor_621_621" id="FNanchor_621_621"></a><a href="#Footnote_621_621" class="fnanchor">[621]</a> has pointed out, the incubus
is enjoined to “plight her troth,” will appear from a
charm against the nightmare, in Reginald Scot’s “Discovery
of Witchcraft,” which occurs, with slight variation, in Fletcher’s
“Monsieur Thomas” (iv. 6):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“St. George, St. George, our lady’s knight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He walks by day, so does he by night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when he had her found,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He her beat and her bound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Until to him her troth she plight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She would not stir from him that night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Paralysis.</i> An old term for chronic paralysis was “cold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
palsies,” which is used by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida”
(v. 1).<a name="FNanchor_622_622" id="FNanchor_622_622"></a><a href="#Footnote_622_622" class="fnanchor">[622]</a></p>

<p><i>Philosopher’s Stone.</i> This was supposed, by its touch, to
convert base metal into gold. It is noticed by Shakespeare
in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Alexas.</i><span style="padding-left: 5em">Sovereign of Egypt, hail!</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Cleopatra.</i> How much unlike art thou Mark Antony!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hath<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With his tinct gilded thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The alchemists call the matter, whatever it may be, says
Johnson, by which they perform transmutation, a medicine.
Thus, Chapman, in his “Shadow of Night” (1594): “O, then,
thou <i>great elixir</i> of all treasures;” on which passage he has
the following note: “The philosopher’s stone, or <i>philosophica
medicina</i>, is called the <i>great elixir</i>.” Another reference occurs
in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2), where the Fool, in reply
to the question of Varro’s Servant, “What is a whoremaster,
fool?” answers, “A fool in good clothes, and something like
thee. ’Tis a spirit: sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime
like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher, with two
stones moe than’s artificial one,” etc.; a passage which Johnson
explains as meaning “more than the philosopher’s stone,”
or twice the value of a philosopher’s stone; though, as Farmer
observes, “Gower has a chapter, in his ‘Confessio Amantis,’
of the three stones that philosophers made.” Singer,<a name="FNanchor_623_623" id="FNanchor_623_623"></a><a href="#Footnote_623_623" class="fnanchor">[623]</a>
in his note on the philosopher’s stone, says that Sir Thomas
Smith was one of those who lost considerable sums in seeking
of it. Sir Richard Steele was one of the last eminent
men who entertained hopes of being successful in this pursuit.
His laboratory was at Poplar.<a name="FNanchor_624_624" id="FNanchor_624_624"></a><a href="#Footnote_624_624" class="fnanchor">[624]</a></p>

<p><i>Pimple.</i> In the Midland Counties, a common name for a
pimple, which, by rubbing, is made to smart, or <i>rubbed to
sense</i>, is “a quat.” The word occurs in “Othello” (v. 1),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
where Roderigo is so called by Iago:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I have rubb’d this young quat almost to the sense,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And he grows angry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—Roderigo being called a quat by the same mode of speech
as a low fellow is now called a <i>scab</i>. It occurs in Langham’s
“Garden of Health,” p. 153: “The leaves [of coleworts]
laid to by themselves, or bruised with barley meale, are
good for the inflammations, and soft swellings, burnings,
impostumes, and cholerick sores or quats,” etc.</p>

<p><i>Plague.</i> “Tokens,” or “God’s tokens,” were the terms
for those spots on the body which denoted the infection of
the plague. In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 10) there is another
allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Enobarbus.</i><span style="padding-left: 4em">How appears the fight?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Scarus.</i> On our side like the token’d pestilence,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where death is sure.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Ulysses says of Achilles:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He is so plaguy proud that the death tokens of it<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cry—‘No recovery.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">King Lear, too, it would seem, compares Goneril (ii. 4) to
these fatal signs, when he calls her “a plague sore.” When
the <i>tokens</i> had appeared on any of the inhabitants, the house
was shut up, and “Lord have mercy upon us” written or
printed upon the door. Hence Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (v. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Write, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ on those three;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They are infected, in their hearts it lies;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The “red pestilence,” referred to by Volumnia in “Coriolanus”
(iv. 1), probably alludes to the cutaneous eruptions
common in the plague:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And occupations perish!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “The Tempest” (i. 2), Caliban says to Prospero, “The
red plague rid you.”</p>

<p><i>Poison.</i> According to a vulgar error prevalent in days
gone by, poison was supposed to swell the body, an allusion
to which occurs in “Julius Cæsar” (iv. 3), where, in the
quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, the former declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You shall digest the venom of your spleen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though it do split you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may also compare the following passage in “2 Henry
IV.” (iv. 4), where the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Learn this, Thomas,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thou shalt prove a shelter to thy friends;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That the united vessel of their blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mingled with venom of suggestion—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As, force perforce, the age will pour it in—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall never leak, though it do work as strong<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As aconitum, or rash gunpowder.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “King John,” Hubert, when describing the effect of
the poison upon the monk (v. 6), narrates how his “bowels
suddenly burst out.” This passage also contains a reference
to the popular custom prevalent in the olden days, of great
persons having their food tasted by those who were supposed
to have made themselves acquainted with its wholesomeness.
This practice, however, could not always afford
security when the taster was ready to sacrifice his own life,
as in the present case:<a name="FNanchor_625_625" id="FNanchor_625_625"></a><a href="#Footnote_625_625" class="fnanchor">[625]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Hubert.</i> The king, I fear, is poison’d by a monk:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I left him almost speechless....<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Bastard.</i> How did he take it? who did taste to him?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Hubert.</i> A monk, I tell you; a resolved villain.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The natives of Africa have been supposed to be possessed
of the secret how to temper poisons with such art as not
to operate till several years after they were administered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
Their drugs were then as certain in their effect as subtle in
their preparation.<a name="FNanchor_626_626" id="FNanchor_626_626"></a><a href="#Footnote_626_626" class="fnanchor">[626]</a> Thus, in “The Tempest” (iii. 3), Gonzalo
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like poison given to work a great time after,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now ’gins to bite the spirits.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The belief in slow poisoning was general in bygone times,
although no better founded on fact, remarks Dr. Bucknill,<a name="FNanchor_627_627" id="FNanchor_627_627"></a><a href="#Footnote_627_627" class="fnanchor">[627]</a>
than the notion that persons burst with poison, or that
narcotics could, like an alarum clock, be set for a certain
number of hours. So, in “Cymbeline” (v. 5), Cornelius relates
to the king the queen’s confession:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“She did confess, she had<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For you a mortal mineral; which, being took,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should by the minute feed on life, and, lingering,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By inches waste you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Pomander.</i> This was either a composition of various perfumes
wrought in the shape of a ball or other form, and worn
in the pocket or hung about the neck, and even sometimes
suspended to the wrist; or a case for containing such a
mixture of perfumes. It was used as an amulet against the
plague or other infections, as well as for an article of luxury.
There is an allusion to its use in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 3),
by Autolycus, who enumerates it among all his trumpery
that he had sold. The following recipe for making a pomander
we find in an old play:<a name="FNanchor_628_628" id="FNanchor_628_628"></a><a href="#Footnote_628_628" class="fnanchor">[628]</a> “Your only way to make a
pomander is this: take an ounce of the purest garden mould,
cleans’d and steep’d seven days in change of motherless
rose-water. Then take the best labdanum, benjoin, with
storaxes, ambergris, civet, and musk. Incorporate them together,
and work them into what form you please. This,
if your breath be not too valiant, will make you smell as
sweet as any lady’s dog.”</p>

<p><i>Rheumatism.</i> In Shakespeare’s day this was used in a far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
wider sense than nowadays, including, in addition to what
is now understood by the term, distillations from the head,
catarrhs, etc. Malone quotes from the “Sidney Memorials”
(vol. i. p. 94), where the health of Sir Henry Sidney is
described: “He hath verie much distempored divers parts
of his bodie; as namelie, his heade, his stomack, &amp;c., and
thereby is always subject to distillacions, coughes, and other
rumatick diseases.” Among the many superstitions relating
to the moon,<a name="FNanchor_629_629" id="FNanchor_629_629"></a><a href="#Footnote_629_629" class="fnanchor">[629]</a> one is mentioned in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1), where Titania tells how the moon,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pale in her anger, washes all the air,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That rheumatic diseases do abound.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The word “rheumatic” was also formerly used in the sense
of choleric or peevish, as in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where the
Hostess says: “You two never meet but you fall to some
discord: you are both, in good troth, as rheumatic as two
dry toasts.” Again, in “Henry V.” (ii. 3), the Hostess says
of Falstaff: “A’ did in some sort, indeed, handle women;
but then he was rheumatic,<a name="FNanchor_630_630" id="FNanchor_630_630"></a><a href="#Footnote_630_630" class="fnanchor">[630]</a> and talked of the whore of
Babylon.”</p>

<p><i>Serpigo.</i> This appears to have been a term extensively
used by old medical authors for any creeping skin disease,
being especially applied to that known as the <i>herpes circinatus</i>.
The expression occurs in “Measure for Measure”
(iii. 1), being coupled by the Duke with “the gout” and the
“rheum.” In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), Thersites says:
“Now, the dry serpigo on the subject.”</p>

<p><i>Sickness.</i> Sickness of stomach, which the slightest disgust
is apt to provoke, is still expressed by the term “queasy;”
hence the word denoted <i>delicate</i>, <i>unsettled</i>; as in “King
Lear” (ii. 1), where it is used by Edmund:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“I have one thing, of a queasy question,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which I must act.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So Ben Jonson employs it in “Sejanus” (i. 1):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“These times are rather queasy to be touched.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sigh.</i> It was a prevalent notion that sighs impair the
strength and wear out the animal powers. Thus, in “2 Henry
VI.” (iii. 2), Queen Margaret speaks of “blood-drinking
sighs.” We may, too, compare the words of Oberon in “A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2), who refers to “sighs of
love, that cost the fresh blood dear.” In “3 Henry VI.”
(iv. 4), Queen Elizabeth says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“for this I draw in many a tear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And stop the rising of blood-sucking sighs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), the King mentions the
“spendthrift sigh, that hurts by easing.” Fenton, in his
“Tragical Discourses” (1579), alludes to this notion in the
following words: “Your scorching sighes that have already
drayned your body of his wholesome humoures.”</p>

<p>It was also an ancient belief that sorrow consumed the
blood and shortened life. Hence Romeo tells Juliet (iii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And trust me, love, in my eye so do you:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dry sorrow drinks our blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Small-pox.</i> Such a terrible plague was this disease in the
days of our ancestors, that its name was used as an imprecation.
Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the Princess
says: “A pox of that jest.”</p>

<p><i>Saliva.</i> The color of the spittle was, with the medical
men of olden times, an important point of diagnosis. Thus,
in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff exclaims against fighting on
a hot day, and wishes he may “never spit white again,”
should it so happen.<a name="FNanchor_631_631" id="FNanchor_631_631"></a><a href="#Footnote_631_631" class="fnanchor">[631]</a></p>

<p><i>Sterility.</i> The charm against sterility referred to by Cæsar
in “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) is copied from Plutarch, who, in
his description of the festival Lupercalia, tells us how “noble
young men run naked through the city, striking in sport
whom they meet in the way with leather thongs,” which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
blows were commonly believed to have the wonderful effect
attributed to them by Cæsar:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The barren, touched in this holy chase,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shake off their sterile curse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Suicide.</i> Cominius, in “Coriolanus” (i. 9), arguing against
Marcius’s overstrained modesty, refers to the manner in
which suicide was thought preventable in olden times:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If ’gainst yourself you be incens’d, we’ll put you,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then reason safely with you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Toothache.</i> It was formerly a common superstition—and
one, too, not confined to our own country—that toothache
was caused by a little worm, having the form of an eel, which
gradually gnawed a hole in the tooth. In “Much Ado About
Nothing” (iii. 2), Shakespeare speaks of this curious belief:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Don Pedro.</i> What! sigh for the toothache?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Leonato.</i> Where is but a humour, or a worm.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion was, some years ago, prevalent in Derbyshire,<a name="FNanchor_632_632" id="FNanchor_632_632"></a><a href="#Footnote_632_632" class="fnanchor">[632]</a>
where there was an odd way of extracting, as it was thought,
the worm. A small quantity of a mixture, consisting of dry
and powdered herbs, was placed in some small vessel, into
which a live coal from the fire was dropped. The patient
then held his or her open mouth over the vessel, and inhaled
the smoke as long as it could be borne. The cup was then
taken away, and in its place a glass of water was put before
the patient. Into this glass the person breathed hard for a
few moments, when it was supposed the grub or worm could
be seen in the water. In Orkney, too, toothache goes by
the name of “the worm,” and, as a remedy, the following
charm, called “wormy lines,” is written on a piece of paper,
and worn as an amulet, by the person affected, in some part
of his dress:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Peter sat on a marble stone weeping;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Christ came past, and said, ‘What aileth thee, Peter?’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘O my Lord, my God, my tooth doth ache.’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘Arise, O Peter! go thy way; thy tooth shall ache no more.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion is still current in Germany, and is mentioned by
Thorpe, in his “Northern Mythology” (vol. iii. p. 167), who
quotes a North German incantation, beginning,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pear tree, I complain to thee;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Three worms sting me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is found, too, even in China and New Zealand,<a name="FNanchor_633_633" id="FNanchor_633_633"></a><a href="#Footnote_633_633" class="fnanchor">[633]</a> the following
charm being used in the latter country:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“An eel, a spiny back<br /></span>
<span class="i0">True indeed, indeed: true in sooth, in sooth.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You must eat the head<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of said spiny back.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A writer in the <i>Athenæum</i> (Jan. 28, 1860), speaking of the
Rev. R.&nbsp;H. Cobbold’s “Pictures of the Chinese, Drawn by
Themselves,” says: “The first portrait is that of a quack
doctress, who pretends to cure toothache by extracting a
maggot—the cause of the disorder. This is done—or, rather,
pretended to be done—by simply placing a bright steel pin
on the part affected, and tapping the pin with a piece of
wood. Mr. Cobbold compares the operation to procuring
worms for fishing by working a spade backwards and forwards
in the ground. He and a friend submitted to the
process, but in a very short time compelled the doctress to
desist, by the excessive precautions they took against imposition.”
We may further note that John of Gatisden,
one of the oldest medical authors, attributes decay of the
teeth to “a humour or a worm.” In his “Rosa Anglica”<a name="FNanchor_634_634" id="FNanchor_634_634"></a><a href="#Footnote_634_634" class="fnanchor">[634]</a>
he says: “Si vermes sint in dentibus, ℞ semen porri, seu
lusquiami contere et misce cum cera, pone super carbones,
et fumus recipiatur per embotum, quoniam sanat. Solum
etiam semen lusquiami valet coctum in aqua calida, supra
quam aquam patiens palatum apertum si tenuerit, cadent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
vermes evidenter vel in illam aquam, vel in aliam quæ ibi
fuerit ibi posita. De myrrha et aloe ponantur in dentem,
ubi est vermis: semen caulis, et absinthium, per se vermes
interficit.”</p>

<p><i>Tub-fast.</i> In years past “the discipline of sweating in a
heated tub for a considerable time, accompanied with strict
abstinence, was thought necessary for the cure of venereal
taint.”<a name="FNanchor_635_635" id="FNanchor_635_635"></a><a href="#Footnote_635_635" class="fnanchor">[635]</a> Thus, in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3), Timon says
to Timandra:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be a whore still! they love thee not that use thee;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Make use of thy salt hours: season the slaves<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For tubs and baths: bring down rose-cheeked youth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the tub-fast, and the diet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As beef, too, was usually salted down in a tub, the one
process was jocularly compared to the other. So, in “Measure
for Measure” (iii. 2), Pompey, when asked by Lucio
about his mistress, replies, “Troth, sir, she hath eaten up
all her beef, and she is herself in the tub.” Again, in “Henry
V.” (ii. 1), Pistol speaks of “the powdering-tub of infamy.”</p>

<p><i>Vinegar.</i> In Shakespeare’s day this seems to have been
termed “eisel” (from A.&nbsp;S. <i>aisel</i>), being esteemed highly
efficacious in preventing the communication of the plague
and other contagious diseases. In this sense it has been
used by Shakespeare in Sonnet cxi.:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“like a willing patient, I will drink<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Potions of eisel, ’gainst my strong infection.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In a MS. Herbal in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge,
occurs “acetorum, an<sup>ce</sup> vynegre or aysel.” The
word occurs again in “Hamlet” (v. 1), where Laertes is
challenged by Hamlet:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Woo’t drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The word woo’t, in the northern counties, is the common
contraction of <i>wouldst thou</i>, which is the reading of the old
copies. In former years it was the fashion with gallants to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
do some extravagant feat, as a proof of their love, in honor
of their mistresses, and, among others, the swallowing of
some nauseous potion was one of the most frequent. Hence,
in the above passage, some bitter potion is evidently meant,
which it was a penance to drink. Some are of opinion that
<i>wormwood</i> is alluded to; and Mr. Singer thinks it probable
that “the propoma called absinthites, a nauseously bitter
medicament then much in use, may have been in the poet’s
mind, to drink up a quantity of which would be an extreme
pass of amorous demonstration.” It has been suggested by
a correspondent of “Notes and Queries,”<a name="FNanchor_636_636" id="FNanchor_636_636"></a><a href="#Footnote_636_636" class="fnanchor">[636]</a> that the reference
in this passage from “Hamlet” is to a Lake Esyl, which
figures in Scandinavian legends. Messrs. Wright and Clark,
however, in their “Notes to Hamlet” (1876, p. 218), say
that they have consulted Mr. Magnusson on this point, and
he writes as follows: “No such lake as Esyl is known to
Norse mythology and folk-lore.” Steevens supposes it to
be the river Yssell.<a name="FNanchor_637_637" id="FNanchor_637_637"></a><a href="#Footnote_637_637" class="fnanchor">[637]</a></p>

<p><i>Water-casting.</i> The fanciful notion of recognizing diseases
by the mere inspection of the urine was denounced
years ago, by an old statute of the College of Physicians, as
belonging to tricksters and impostors, and any member of
the college was forbidden to give advice by this so-called
“water-casting” without he also saw the patient. The statute
of the college runs as follows: “Statuimus, et ordinamus,
ut nemo, sive socius, sive candidatus, sive permissus
consilii quidquam impertiat veteratoriis, et impostoribus,
super urinarum nuda inspectione, nisi simul ad ægrum vocetur,
ut ibidem, pro re natû, idonea medicamenta ab honesto
aliquo pharmacopoea componenda præscribat.” An allusion
to this vulgar error occurs in the “Two Gentlemen of
Verona” (ii. 1), where, after Speed has given to Valentine
his amusing description of a lover, in which, among other
signs, are “to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence,”
and “to fast, like one that takes diet,” the following quibble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
takes place upon the within and the without of the
symptoms:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Valentine.</i> Are all these things perceived in me?</p>

<p><i>Speed.</i> They are all perceived without ye.</p>

<p><i>Valentine.</i> Without me? they cannot.</p>

<p><i>Speed.</i> Without you? nay, that’s certain; for, without you were so
simple, none else would: but you are so without these follies, that
these follies are within you, and shine through you like the water in
an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but is a physician to comment
on your malady.”</p></div>

<p>This singular pretence, says Dr. Bucknill,<a name="FNanchor_638_638" id="FNanchor_638_638"></a><a href="#Footnote_638_638" class="fnanchor">[638]</a> is “alleged to
have arisen, like the barber surgery, from the ecclesiastical
interdicts upon the medical vocations of the clergy. Priests
and monks, being unable to visit their former patients, are
said first to have resorted to the expedient of divining the
malady, and directing the treatment upon simple inspection
of the urine. However this may be, the practice is of very
ancient date.” Numerous references to this piece of medical
quackery occur in many of our old writers, most of
whom condemn it in very strong terms. Thus Forestus, in
his “Medical Politics,” speaks of it as being, in his opinion,
a practice altogether evil, and expresses an earnest desire
that medical men would combine to repress it. Shakespeare
gives a further allusion to it in the passage where he
makes Macbeth (v. 3) say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“If thou couldst, doctor, cast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The water of my land, find her disease,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And purge it to a sound and pristine health,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I would applaud thee to the very echo.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “2 Henry IV” (i. 2) Falstaff asks the page, “What
says the doctor to my water?” and, once more, in “Twelfth
Night” (iii. 4), Fabian, alluding to Malvolio, says, “Carry his
water to the wise woman.”</p>

<p>It seems probable, too, that, in the “Merry Wives of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>
Windsor” (ii. 3), the term “mock-water,” employed by the
host to the French Dr. Caius, refers to the mockery of
judging of diseases by the water or urine—“mock-water,”
in this passage, being equivalent to “you pretending water-doctor!”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_589_589" id="Footnote_589_589"></a><a href="#FNanchor_589_589"><span class="label">[589]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 482; also, Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. iii. p. 311; Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,”
1879, pp. 168, 169.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_590_590" id="Footnote_590_590"></a><a href="#FNanchor_590_590"><span class="label">[590]</span></a> Aldis Wright’s “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 179.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_591_591" id="Footnote_591_591"></a><a href="#FNanchor_591_591"><span class="label">[591]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 381; cf. the word “Berlué, pur-blinded, made
sand-blind,” Cotgrave’s “Fr. and Eng. Dict.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_592_592" id="Footnote_592_592"></a><a href="#FNanchor_592_592"><span class="label">[592]</span></a> Vol. ii. p. 765.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_593_593" id="Footnote_593_593"></a><a href="#FNanchor_593_593"><span class="label">[593]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 93.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_594_594" id="Footnote_594_594"></a><a href="#FNanchor_594_594"><span class="label">[594]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 258.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_595_595" id="Footnote_595_595"></a><a href="#FNanchor_595_595"><span class="label">[595]</span></a> Cf., too, “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A blister on his sweet tongue, with my heart,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That put Armado’s page out of his part.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_596_596" id="Footnote_596_596"></a><a href="#FNanchor_596_596"><span class="label">[596]</span></a> Dr. Prior’s “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1870, p. 185.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_597_597" id="Footnote_597_597"></a><a href="#FNanchor_597_597"><span class="label">[597]</span></a> “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, p. 78.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_598_598" id="Footnote_598_598"></a><a href="#FNanchor_598_598"><span class="label">[598]</span></a> “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, p. 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_599_599" id="Footnote_599_599"></a><a href="#FNanchor_599_599"><span class="label">[599]</span></a> See Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 761.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_600_600" id="Footnote_600_600"></a><a href="#FNanchor_600_600"><span class="label">[600]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. pp. 660, 661; Dyce’s “Glossary,”
p. 322.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_601_601" id="Footnote_601_601"></a><a href="#FNanchor_601_601"><span class="label">[601]</span></a> Quoted in Singer’s “Shakespeare.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_602_602" id="Footnote_602_602"></a><a href="#FNanchor_602_602"><span class="label">[602]</span></a> Cf. “King John” (iii. 1), where Constance gives a catalogue of congenital
defects.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_603_603" id="Footnote_603_603"></a><a href="#FNanchor_603_603"><span class="label">[603]</span></a> “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 150. See “Notes and
Queries” for superstitions connected with drowning, 5th series, vol.
ix. pp. 111, 218, 478, 516; vol. x. pp. 38, 276; vol. xi. pp. 119, 278.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_604_604" id="Footnote_604_604"></a><a href="#FNanchor_604_604"><span class="label">[604]</span></a> Dr. Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 95.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_605_605" id="Footnote_605_605"></a><a href="#FNanchor_605_605"><span class="label">[605]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. p. 225.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_606_606" id="Footnote_606_606"></a><a href="#FNanchor_606_606"><span class="label">[606]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 347.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_607_607" id="Footnote_607_607"></a><a href="#FNanchor_607_607"><span class="label">[607]</span></a> Wright’s “Notes to King Lear” (1877), p. 196.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_608_608" id="Footnote_608_608"></a><a href="#FNanchor_608_608"><span class="label">[608]</span></a> “Worthies of England” (1662), p. 180.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_609_609" id="Footnote_609_609"></a><a href="#FNanchor_609_609"><span class="label">[609]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” pp. 384, 385; Wright’s “Notes to King
Lear,” pp. 154, 155.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_610_610" id="Footnote_610_610"></a><a href="#FNanchor_610_610"><span class="label">[610]</span></a> “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 121.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_611_611" id="Footnote_611_611"></a><a href="#FNanchor_611_611"><span class="label">[611]</span></a> See p. <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_612_612" id="Footnote_612_612"></a><a href="#FNanchor_612_612"><span class="label">[612]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare” (1866),
p. 333.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_613_613" id="Footnote_613_613"></a><a href="#FNanchor_613_613"><span class="label">[613]</span></a> “A Book of Musical Anecdote,” by F. Crowest (1878), vol. ii. pp.
251, 252.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_614_614" id="Footnote_614_614"></a><a href="#FNanchor_614_614"><span class="label">[614]</span></a> See Beckett’s “Free and Impartial Enquiry into the Antiquity and
Efficacy of Touching for the King’s Evil,” 1722.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_615_615" id="Footnote_615_615"></a><a href="#FNanchor_615_615"><span class="label">[615]</span></a> See “Notes and Queries,” 1861, 2d series, vol. xi. p. 71; Burns’s
“History of Parish Registers,” 1862, pp. 179, 180; Pettigrew’s “Superstitions
Connected with Medicine and Surgery,” 1844, pp. 117-154.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_616_616" id="Footnote_616_616"></a><a href="#FNanchor_616_616"><span class="label">[616]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 235.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_617_617" id="Footnote_617_617"></a><a href="#FNanchor_617_617"><span class="label">[617]</span></a> See Pettigrew’s “History of Mummies,” 1834; also Gannal,
“Traité d’Embaumement,” 1838.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_618_618" id="Footnote_618_618"></a><a href="#FNanchor_618_618"><span class="label">[618]</span></a> Rees’s “Encyclopædia,” 1829, vol. xxiv.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_619_619" id="Footnote_619_619"></a><a href="#FNanchor_619_619"><span class="label">[619]</span></a> Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,”
1866, p. 332, calls it a balsamic liquid.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_620_620" id="Footnote_620_620"></a><a href="#FNanchor_620_620"><span class="label">[620]</span></a> “Six Old Plays,” ed. Nichols, p. 256, quoted by Mr. Aldis Wright,
in his “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 170.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_621_621" id="Footnote_621_621"></a><a href="#FNanchor_621_621"><span class="label">[621]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” vol. ix. p. 413.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_622_622" id="Footnote_622_622"></a><a href="#FNanchor_622_622"><span class="label">[622]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 235.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_623_623" id="Footnote_623_623"></a><a href="#FNanchor_623_623"><span class="label">[623]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. iii. p. 284.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_624_624" id="Footnote_624_624"></a><a href="#FNanchor_624_624"><span class="label">[624]</span></a> See Pettigrew’s “Medical Superstitions,” pp. 13, 14.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_625_625" id="Footnote_625_625"></a><a href="#FNanchor_625_625"><span class="label">[625]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 136.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_626_626" id="Footnote_626_626"></a><a href="#FNanchor_626_626"><span class="label">[626]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 65.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_627_627" id="Footnote_627_627"></a><a href="#FNanchor_627_627"><span class="label">[627]</span></a> “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 226.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_628_628" id="Footnote_628_628"></a><a href="#FNanchor_628_628"><span class="label">[628]</span></a> Quoted in Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 671.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_629_629" id="Footnote_629_629"></a><a href="#FNanchor_629_629"><span class="label">[629]</span></a> See p. <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_630_630" id="Footnote_630_630"></a><a href="#FNanchor_630_630"><span class="label">[630]</span></a> Malone suggests that the hostess may mean “then he was lunatic.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_631_631" id="Footnote_631_631"></a><a href="#FNanchor_631_631"><span class="label">[631]</span></a> Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 150.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_632_632" id="Footnote_632_632"></a><a href="#FNanchor_632_632"><span class="label">[632]</span></a> See “English Folk-Lore,” p. 156.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_633_633" id="Footnote_633_633"></a><a href="#FNanchor_633_633"><span class="label">[633]</span></a> See Shortland’s “Traditions and Superstitions of the New-Zealanders,”
1856, p. 131.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_634_634" id="Footnote_634_634"></a><a href="#FNanchor_634_634"><span class="label">[634]</span></a> Liber Secundus—“De Febribus,” p. 923, ed. 1595.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_635_635" id="Footnote_635_635"></a><a href="#FNanchor_635_635"><span class="label">[635]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 906.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_636_636" id="Footnote_636_636"></a><a href="#FNanchor_636_636"><span class="label">[636]</span></a> See 4th series, vol. x. pp. 108, 150, 229, 282, 356.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_637_637" id="Footnote_637_637"></a><a href="#FNanchor_637_637"><span class="label">[637]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 239.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_638_638" id="Footnote_638_638"></a><a href="#FNanchor_638_638"><span class="label">[638]</span></a> “The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” 1860, pp. 1-64.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></h2>

<h3>CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH THE CALENDAR.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">In</span> years gone by the anniversaries connected with the
calendar were kept up with an amount of enthusiasm and
merry-making quite unknown at the present day. Thus,
for instance, Shakespeare tells us, with regard to the May-day
observance, that it was looked forward to so eagerly
as to render it impossible to make the people sleep on this
festive occasion. During the present century the popular
celebrations of the festivals have been gradually on the decline,
and nearly every year marks the disuse of some local
custom. Shakespeare has not omitted to give a good many
scattered allusions to the old superstitions and popular
usages associated with the festivals of the year, some of
which still survive in our midst.</p>

<p>Alluding to the revels, there can be no doubt that Shakespeare
was indebted to the revel-books for some of his plots.
Thus, in “The Tempest” (iv. 1), Prospero remarks to Ferdinand
and Miranda, after Iris, Ceres, and Juno have appeared,
and the dance of the nymphs is over:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As if you were dismay’d; be cheerful, sir.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our revels now are ended. These our actors,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As I foretold you, were all spirits, and<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are melted into air, into thin air:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The solemn temples, the great globe itself,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Leave not a rack behind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been inferred that Shakespeare was present at
Kenilworth, in 1575, when Elizabeth was so grandly entertained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
there. Lakes and seas are represented in the masque.
Triton, in the likeness of a mermaid, came towards the
queen, says George Gascoigne, and “Arion appeared, sitting
on a dolphin’s back.” In the dialogue in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” between Oberon and Puck (ii. 1), there
seems a direct allusion to this event:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Oberon.</i> My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou remember’st<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since once I sat upon a promontory,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That the rude sea grew civil at her song,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hear the sea-maid’s music.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Puck.</i><span style="padding-left: 10em">I remember.”</span><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Then, too, there were the “Children of the Revels,” a company
who performed at Blackfriars Theatre. In “Hamlet”
(ii. 2), Shakespeare alludes to these “children-players.”<a name="FNanchor_639_639" id="FNanchor_639_639"></a><a href="#Footnote_639_639" class="fnanchor">[639]</a>
Rosencrantz says, in the conversation preceding the entry
of the players, in reply to Hamlet’s inquiry whether the
actors have suffered through the result of the late inhibition,
evidently referring to the plague, “Nay, their endeavour
keeps in the wonted pace; but there is, sir, an aery of
children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question,
and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t; these are now the
fashion; and so berattle the common stages—so they call
them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills,
and dare scarce come thither.”</p>

<p><i>Twelfth-Day.</i> There can be no doubt that the title of
Shakespeare’s play, “Twelfth Night,” took its origin in the
festivities associated with this festival. The season has,
from time immemorial, been one of merriment, “the more
decided from being the proper close of the festivities of
Christmas, when games of chance were traditionally rife,
and the sport of sudden and casual elevation gave the tone
of the time. Of like tone is the play, and to this,”<a name="FNanchor_640_640" id="FNanchor_640_640"></a><a href="#Footnote_640_640" class="fnanchor">[640]</a> says Mr.
Lloyd, “it apparently owes its title.” The play, it appears,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
was probably originally acted at the barristers’ feast at the
Middle Temple, on February 2, 1601-2, as Manningham tells
us in his “Diary” (Camden Society, 1868, ed. J. Bruce, p. 18).
It is worthy of note that the festive doings of the Inns of
Court, in days gone by, at Christmas-tide were conducted
on the most extravagant scale.<a name="FNanchor_641_641" id="FNanchor_641_641"></a><a href="#Footnote_641_641" class="fnanchor">[641]</a> In addition to the merry
disports of the Lord of Misrule, there were various revels.
The Christmas masque at Gray’s Inn, in 1594, was on a magnificent
scale.</p>

<p><i>St. Valentine’s Day</i> (Feb. 14). Whatever may be the historical
origin of this festival, whether heathen or Christian,
there can be no doubt of its antiquity. According to an old
tradition, to which Chaucer refers, birds choose their mates
on this day; and hence, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
(iv. 1), Theseus asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good morrow, friends. St. Valentine is past:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">From this notion, it has been suggested, arose the once popular
practice of choosing valentines, and also the common
belief that the first two single persons who meet in the morning
of St. Valentine’s day have a great chance of becoming
wed to each other. This superstition is alluded to in Ophelia’s
song in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">All in the morning betime,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I a maid at your window,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To be your valentine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There seems every probability that St. Valentine’s day,
with its many customs, has come down to us from the Romans,
but was fathered upon St. Valentine in the earlier
ages of the Church in order to Christianize it.<a name="FNanchor_642_642" id="FNanchor_642_642"></a><a href="#Footnote_642_642" class="fnanchor">[642]</a> In France
St. Valentine’s was a movable feast, celebrated on the first
Sunday in Lent, which was called the <i>jour des brandons</i>, because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
the boys carried about lighted torches on that day.</p>

<p><i>Shrove-Tuesday.</i> This day was formerly devoted to feasting
and merriment of every kind, but whence originated the
custom of eating pancakes is still a matter of uncertainty.
The practice is alluded to in “All’s Well that Ends Well”
(ii. 2), where the clown speaks of “a pancake for Shrove-Tuesday.”<a name="FNanchor_643_643" id="FNanchor_643_643"></a><a href="#Footnote_643_643" class="fnanchor">[643]</a>
In “Pericles” (ii. 1) they are termed “flap-jacks,”
a term used by Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his “Jack-a-Lent
Workes” (1630, vol. i. p. 115): “Until at last by the
skill of the cooke it is transformed into the form of a flap-jack,
which in our translation is called a pancake.” Shrovetide
was, in times gone by, a season of such mirth that <i>shroving</i>,
or <i>to shrove</i>, signified to be merry. Hence, in “2 Henry
IV.” (v. 3), Justice Silence says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be merry, be merry, my wife has all;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For women are shrews, both short and tall;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis merry in hall, when beards wag all,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And welcome merry shrove-tide.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be merry, be merry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was a holiday and a day of license for apprentices, laboring
persons, and others.<a name="FNanchor_644_644" id="FNanchor_644_644"></a><a href="#Footnote_644_644" class="fnanchor">[644]</a></p>

<p><i>Lent.</i> This season was at one time marked by a custom
now fallen into disuse. A figure, made up of straw and cast-off
clothes, was drawn or carried through the streets amid
much noise and merriment; after which it was either burned,
shot at, or thrown down a chimney. This image was called
a “Jack-a-Lent,” and was, according to some, intended to
represent Judas Iscariot. It occurs twice in the “Merry
Wives of Windsor;” once merely as a jocular appellation
(iii. 3), where Mrs. Page says to Robin, “You little Jack-a-Lent,
have you been true to us?” and once (v. 5) as a butt,
or object of satire and attack, Falstaff remarking, “How wit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when ’tis upon ill employment!”
It is alluded to by Ben Jonson in his “Tale of a Tub” (iv. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou cam’st but half a thing into the world,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And wast made up of patches, parings, shreds;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou, that when last thou wert put out of service,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Travell’d to Hamstead Heath on an Ash Wednesday,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where thou didst stand six weeks the Jack of Lent,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For boys to hurl three throws a penny at thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make thee a purse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Elderton, in a ballad called “Lenton Stuff,” in a MS. in
the Ashmolean Museum, thus concludes his account of
Lent:<a name="FNanchor_645_645" id="FNanchor_645_645"></a><a href="#Footnote_645_645" class="fnanchor">[645]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When Jakke a’ Lent comes justlynge in,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With the hedpeece of a herynge,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And saythe, repent yowe of yower syn,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">For shame, syrs, leve yowre swerynge:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And to Palme Sonday doethe he ryde,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With sprots and herryngs by his syde,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And makes an end of Lenton tyde!”<a name="FNanchor_646_646" id="FNanchor_646_646"></a><a href="#Footnote_646_646" class="fnanchor">[646]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the reign of Elizabeth butchers were strictly enjoined
not to sell fleshmeat in Lent, not with a religious view, but
for the double purpose<a name="FNanchor_647_647" id="FNanchor_647_647"></a><a href="#Footnote_647_647" class="fnanchor">[647]</a> of diminishing the consumption of
fleshmeat during that period, and so making it more plentiful
during the rest of the year, and of encouraging the fisheries
and augmenting the number of seamen. Butchers,
however, who had an interest at court frequently obtained
a dispensation to kill a certain number of beasts a week during
Lent; of which indulgence the wants of invalids, who
could not subsist without animal food, was made the pretence.
It is to this practice that Cade refers in “2 Henry
VI.” (iv. 3), where he tells Dick, the butcher of Ashford:
“Therefore, thus will I reward thee,—the Lent shall be as
long again as it is; and thou shalt have a license to kill for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
hundred lacking one.”</p>

<p>In “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Falstaff mentions an indictment
against Hostess Quickly, “for suffering flesh to be eaten in
thy house, contrary to the law; for the which I think thou
wilt howl.” Whereupon she replies, “All victuallers do so:
what’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?”</p>

<p>The sparing fare in olden days, during Lent, is indirectly
referred to by Rosencrantz in “Hamlet” (ii. 2): “To think,
my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment
the players shall receive.” We may compare, too,
Maria’s words in “Twelfth Night” (i. 5), where she speaks
of a good lenten answer, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, short.</p>

<p>By a scrap of proverbial rhyme quoted by Mercutio in
“Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), and the speech introducing it,
it appears that a stale hare might be used to make a pie in
Lent; he says:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“No hare, sir: unless a hare, sir, in a lenten pie, that is something
stale and hoar ere it be spent.</p></div>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">An old hare hoar,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And an old hare hoar,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is very good meat in Lent,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Scambling days.</i> The days so called were Mondays and
Saturdays in Lent, when no regular meals were provided,
and our great families scambled. There may possibly be an
indirect allusion to this custom in “Henry V.” (v. 2), where
Shakespeare makes King Henry say: “If ever thou beest
mine, Kate, as I have a saving faith within me tells me
thou shalt, I get thee with scambling.” In the old household
book of the fifth Earl of Northumberland there is a particular
section appointing the order of service for these days,
and so regulating the licentious contentions of them. We
may, also, compare another passage in the same play (i. 1),
where the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of “the scambling
and unquiet time.”</p>

<p><i>Good Friday.</i> Beyond the bare allusion to this day, Shakespeare
makes no reference to the many observances formerly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
associated with it. In “King John” (i. 1) he makes Philip
the Bastard say to Lady Faulconbridge:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Madam, I was not old Sir Robert’s son:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sir Robert might have eat his part in me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon Good Friday, and ne’er broke his fast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Poins inquires: “Jack, how
agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest
him on Good Friday last, for a cup of Madeira and a cold
capon’s leg?”</p>

<p><i>Easter.</i> According to a popular superstition, it is considered
unlucky to omit wearing new clothes on Easter Day,
to which Shakespeare no doubt alludes in “Romeo and Juliet”
(iii. 1), when he makes Mercutio ask Benvolio whether
he did “not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet
before Easter.” In East Yorkshire, on Easter Eve, young
folks go to the nearest market-town to buy some new article
of dress or personal adornment to wear for the first time
on Easter Day, as otherwise they believe that birds—notably
rooks or “crakes”—will spoil their clothes.<a name="FNanchor_648_648" id="FNanchor_648_648"></a><a href="#Footnote_648_648" class="fnanchor">[648]</a> In “Poor
Robin’s Almanac” we are told:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“At Easter let your clothes be new,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else be sure you will it rue.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Some think that the custom of “clacking” at Easter—which
is not quite obsolete in some counties—is incidentally alluded
to in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 2) by Lucio: “his use
was, to put a ducat in her clack-dish.”<a name="FNanchor_649_649" id="FNanchor_649_649"></a><a href="#Footnote_649_649" class="fnanchor">[649]</a> The clack or clap
dish was a wooden dish with a movable cover, formerly
carried by beggars, which they clacked and clattered to
show that it was empty. In this they received the alms.
Lepers and other paupers deemed infectious originally used
it, that the sound might give warning not to approach too
near, and alms be given without touching the person.</p>

<p>A popular name for Easter Monday was Black Monday,
so called, says Stow, because “in the 34th of Edward III.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
(1360), the 14th of April, and the morrow after Easter Day,
King Edward, with his host, lay before the city of Paris;
which day was full dark of mist and hail, and so bitter cold,
that many men died on their horses’ backs with the cold.
Wherefore unto this day it hath been call’d the Blacke Monday.”
Thus, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot
says, “it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding
on Black Monday last at six o’clock i’ the morning.”</p>

<p><i>St. David’s Day</i> (March 1). This day is observed by the
Welsh in honor of St. David, their patron saint, when, as
a sign of their patriotism, they wear a leek. Much doubt
exists as to the origin of this custom. According to the
Welsh, it is because St. David ordered his Britons to place
leeks in their caps, that they might be distinguished from
their Saxon foes. Shakespeare introduces the custom into
his play of “Henry V.” (iv. 7), where Fluellen, addressing
the monarch, says:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“Your grandfather of famous memory, an’t please your majesty,
and your great uncle Edward the Plack Prince of Wales, as I have
read in the chronicles, fought a most prave pattle here in France.</p>

<p><i>K. Henry.</i> They did, Fluellen.</p>

<p><i>Flu.</i> Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembered
of it, the Welshmen did goot service in a garden where leeks did
grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty
know, to this hour is an honourable padge of the service; and I do
pelieve, your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint
Tavy’s day.”</p></div>

<p>It has been justly pointed out, however, that this allusion
by Fluellen to the Welsh having worn the leek in battle
under the Black Prince is not, as some writers suppose,
wholly decisive of its having originated in the fields of
Cressy, but rather shows that when Shakespeare wrote
Welshmen wore leeks.<a name="FNanchor_650_650" id="FNanchor_650_650"></a><a href="#Footnote_650_650" class="fnanchor">[650]</a> In the same play, too (iv. 1), the
well-remembered Fluellen’s enforcement of Pistol to eat
the leek he had ridiculed further establishes the wearing as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
a usage. Pistol says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Tell him I’ll knock his leek about his pate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon Saint Davy’s day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In days gone by this day was observed by royalty; and
in 1695 we read how William III. wore a leek on St. David’s
Day, “presented to him by his sergeant, Porter, who hath as
perquisites all the wearing apparel his majestie had on that
day, even to his sword.” It appears that formerly, among
other customs, a Welshman was burned in effigy upon “St.
Tavy’s Day,” an allusion to which occurs in “Poor Robin’s
Almanack” for 1757:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But it would make a stranger laugh,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To see th’ English hang poor Taff:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A pair of breeches and a coat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hat, shoes, and stockings, and what not,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are stuffed with hay, to represent<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The Cambrian hero thereby meant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>St. Patrick’s Day</i> (March 17). Shakespeare, in “Hamlet”
(i. 5), makes the Danish prince swear by St. Patrick, on
which Warburton remarks that the whole northern world
had their learning from Ireland.<a name="FNanchor_651_651" id="FNanchor_651_651"></a><a href="#Footnote_651_651" class="fnanchor">[651]</a> As Mr. Singer<a name="FNanchor_652_652" id="FNanchor_652_652"></a><a href="#Footnote_652_652" class="fnanchor">[652]</a> observes,
however, it is more probable that the poet seized the first
popular imprecation that came to his mind, without regarding
whether it suited the country or character of the person
to whom he gave it. Some, again, have supposed that there
is a reference here to St. Patrick’s purgatory, but this does
not seem probable.</p>

<p><i>St. George’s Day</i> (April 23). St. George, the guardian
saint of England, is often alluded to by Shakespeare. His
festival, which was formerly celebrated by feasts of cities
and corporations, is now almost passed over without notice.
Thus, Bedford, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 1), speaks of keeping
“our great Saint George’s feast withal.” “God and St.
George” was once a common battle-cry, several references
to which occur in Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, in “Henry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
V.” (iii. 1), the king says to his soldiers:<a name="FNanchor_653_653" id="FNanchor_653_653"></a><a href="#Footnote_653_653" class="fnanchor">[653]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cry, God for Harry, England, and Saint George.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “1 Henry VI.” (iv. 2), Talbot says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“God and Saint George, Talbot and England’s right,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Prosper our colours in this dangerous fight!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The following injunction, from an old act of war, concerning
the use of St. George’s name in onsets, is curious: “Item,
that all souldiers entering into battaile, assault, skirmish, or
other faction of armes, shall have for their common crye and
word, <i>St. George, forward</i>, or, <i>Upon them, St. George</i>, whereby
the souldier is much comforted, and the enemie dismaied, by
calling to minde the ancient valour of England, with which
that name has so often been victorious.”<a name="FNanchor_654_654" id="FNanchor_654_654"></a><a href="#Footnote_654_654" class="fnanchor">[654]</a></p>

<p>The combat of this saint on horseback with a dragon has
been very long established as a subject for sign-painting.
In “King John” (ii. 1) Philip says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Saint George, that swing’d the dragon, and e’er since<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sits on his horseback at mine hostess’ door.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is still a very favorite sign. In London alone<a name="FNanchor_655_655" id="FNanchor_655_655"></a><a href="#Footnote_655_655" class="fnanchor">[655]</a> there are
said to be no less than sixty-six public-houses and taverns
with the sign of St. George and the Dragon, not counting
beer-houses and coffee-houses.</p>

<p><i>May Day.</i> The festival of May day has, from the earliest
times, been most popular in this country, on account of its
association with the joyous season of spring. It was formerly
celebrated with far greater enthusiasm than nowadays,
for Bourne tells us how the young people were in the
habit of rising a little after midnight and walking to some
neighboring wood, accompanied with music and the blowing
of horns, where they broke down branches from the
trees, which, decorated with nosegays and garlands of flowers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
were brought home soon after sunrise, and placed at
their doors and windows. Shakespeare, alluding to this
practice, informs us how eagerly it was looked forward to,
and that it was impossible to make the people sleep on May
morning. Thus, in “Henry VIII.” (v. 4), it is said:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pray, sir, be patient: ’tis as much impossible—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unless we sweep ’em from the door with cannons—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To scatter ’em, as ’tis to make ’em sleep<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On May-day morning.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), Lysander,
speaking of these May-day observances, says to Hermia:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“If thou lov’st me, then,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in the wood, a league without the town,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where I did meet thee once with Helena,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To do observance to a morn of May,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There will I stay for thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Theseus says (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No doubt they rose up early to observe<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The rite of May.”<a name="FNanchor_656_656" id="FNanchor_656_656"></a><a href="#Footnote_656_656" class="fnanchor">[656]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 3), one of the four countrymen
asks: “Do we all hold against the Maying?”</p>

<p>In Chaucer’s “Court of Love” we read that early on
May day “Fourth goth al the Court, both most and lest, to
fetche the flowris fresh and blome.” In the reign of Henry
VIII. it is on record that the heads of the corporation of
London went out into the high grounds of Kent to gather
the May, and were met on Shooter’s Hill by the king and
his queen, Katherine of Arragon, as they were coming from
the palace of Greenwich. Until within a comparatively recent
period, this custom still lingered in some of the counties.
Thus, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the following doggerel
was sung:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Rise up, maidens, fie for shame!<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
<span class="i0">For I’ve been four long miles from hame,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ve been gathering my garlands gay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rise up, fair maidens, and take in your May.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Many of the ballads sung nowadays, in country places,
by the village children, on May morning, as they carry their
garlands from door to door, undoubtedly refer to the old
practice of going a-Maying, although fallen into disuse.</p>

<p>In olden times nearly every village had its May-pole,
around which, decorated with wreaths of flowers, ribbons,
and flags, our merry ancestors danced from morning till
night. The earliest representation of an English May-pole
is that published in the “Variorum Shakespeare,” and depicted
on a window at Betley, in Staffordshire, then the
property of Mr. Tollet, and which he was disposed to think
as old as the time of Henry VIII. The pole is planted in a
mound of earth, and has affixed to it St. George’s red-cross
banner and a white pennon or streamer with a forked end.
The shaft of the pole is painted in a diagonal line of black
colors upon a yellow ground, a characteristic decoration of
all these ancient May-poles, as alluded to by Shakespeare
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2), where it gives
point to Hermia’s allusion to her rival Helena as “a painted
May-pole.”<a name="FNanchor_657_657" id="FNanchor_657_657"></a><a href="#Footnote_657_657" class="fnanchor">[657]</a> The popularity of the May-pole in former
centuries is shown by the fact that one of our London parishes,
St. Andrew Undershaft, derives its name from the
May-pole which overhung its steeple, a reference to which
we find made by Geoffrey Chaucer, who, speaking of a vain
boaster, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Right well aloft, and high ye bear your head,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As ye would bear the great shaft of Cornhill.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>London, indeed, had several May-poles, one of which stood
in Basing Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a large fir
pole, forty feet high and fifteen inches in diameter, and fabled
to be the justing staff of Gerard the Giant. Only a few,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
however, of the old May-poles remain scattered here and
there throughout the country. One still supports a weathercock
in the churchyard at Pendleton, Manchester; and in
Derbyshire, a few years ago, several were to be seen standing
on some of the village greens. The rhymes made use
of as the people danced round the May-pole varied according
to the locality, and oftentimes combined a curious mixture
of the jocose and sacred.</p>

<p>Another feature of the May-day festivities was the morris-dance,
the principal characters of which generally were
Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Scarlet, Stokesley, Little John,
the Hobby-horse, the Bavian or Fool, Tom the Piper, with
his pipe and tabor. The number of characters varied much
at different times and places. In “All’s Well that Ends
Well” (ii. 2), the clown says: “As fit as ten groats is for the
hand of an attorney ... a morris for May-day.”<a name="FNanchor_658_658" id="FNanchor_658_658"></a><a href="#Footnote_658_658" class="fnanchor">[658]</a></p>

<p>In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1) the Duke of York says of Cade:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“I have seen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Him caper upright, like a wild Morisco,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) Gerrold, the schoolmaster,
thus describes to King Theseus the morris-dance:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If you but favour, our country pastime made is.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We are a few of those collected here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That ruder tongues distinguish villagers;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, to say verity and not to fable,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We are a merry rout, or else a rable,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or company, or, by a figure, choris,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That ’fore thy dignity will dance a morris.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I, that am the rectifier of all,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By title <i>Pædagogus</i>, that let fall<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The birch upon the breeches of the small ones,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And humble with a ferula the tall ones,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do here present this machine, or this frame:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, dainty duke, whose doughty dismal fame,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From Dis to Dædalus, from post to pillar,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Is blown abroad, help me, thy poor well willer,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, with thy twinkling eyes, look right and straight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon this mighty <i>morr</i>—of mickle weight—<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Is</i>—now comes in, which being glu’d together<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Makes <i>morris</i>, and the cause that we came hether,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The body of our sport, of no small study.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I first appear, though rude, and raw, and muddy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To speak, before thy noble grace, this tenner;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At whose great feet I offer up my penner:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The next, the Lord of May and Lady bright,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The chambermaid and serving-man, by night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That seek out silent hanging: then mine host<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And his fat spouse, that welcomes to their cost<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The galled traveller, and with a beck’ning,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Inform the tapster to inflame the reck’ning:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then the beast-eating clown, and next the fool,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bavian, with long tail and eke long tool;<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Cum multis aliis</i> that make a dance:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Say ‘Ay,’ and all shall presently advance.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among the scattered allusions to the characters of this
dance may be noticed that in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3): “and
for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy’s wife of
the ward to thee”—the allusion being to “the degraded
Maid Marian of the later morris-dance, more male than female.”<a name="FNanchor_659_659" id="FNanchor_659_659"></a><a href="#Footnote_659_659" class="fnanchor">[659]</a></p>

<p>The “hobby-horse,” another personage of the morris-dance
on May day, was occasionally omitted, and appears to
have given rise to a popular ballad, a line of which is given
by “Hamlet” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This is quoted again in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iii. 1). The
hobby-horse was formed by a pasteboard horse’s head, and
a light frame made of wicker-work to join the hinder parts.
This was fastened round the body of a man, and covered
with a foot-cloth which nearly reached the ground, and concealed
the legs of the performer, who displayed his antic
equestrian skill, and performed various juggling tricks, to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
amusement of the bystanders. In Sir Walter Scott’s “Monastery”
there is a spirited description of the hobby-horse.</p>

<p>The term “hobby-horse” was applied to a loose woman,
and in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2) it is so used by Leontes,
who says to Camillo:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“Then say<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My wife’s a hobby-horse; deserves a name<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Before her troth-plight.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Othello” (iv. 1), Bianca, speaking of Desdemona’s
handkerchief, says to Cassio: “This is some minx’s token,
and I must take out the work! There, give it your hobby-horse.”
It seems also to have denoted a silly fellow, as in
“Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), where it is so used by
Benedick.</p>

<p>Another character was Friar Tuck, the chaplain of Robin
Hood, and as such is noticed in the “Two Gentlemen of
Verona” (iv. 1), where one of the outlaws swears:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>He is also represented by Tollet as a Franciscan friar in
the full clerical tonsure, for, as he adds, “When the parish
priests were inhibited by the diocesan to assist in the May
games, the Franciscans might give attendance, as being exempted
from episcopal jurisdiction.”<a name="FNanchor_660_660" id="FNanchor_660_660"></a><a href="#Footnote_660_660" class="fnanchor">[660]</a></p>

<p>It was no uncommon occurrence for metrical interludes
of a comic species, and founded on the achievements of the
outlaw Robin Hood, to be performed after the morris, on
the May-pole green. Mr. Drake thinks that these interludes
are alluded to in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), where Fabian exclaims,
on the approach of Sir Andrew Aguecheek with his
challenge, “More matter for a May morning.”</p>

<p><i>Whitsuntide.</i> Apart from its observance as a religious
festival, Whitsuntide was, in times past, celebrated with
much ceremony. In the Catholic times of England it was
usual to dramatize the descent of the Holy Ghost, which this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
festival commemorates—a custom which we find alluded
to in Barnaby Googe’s translation of <i>Naogeorgus</i>:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“On Whit-Sunday white pigeons tame in strings from heaven flie,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And one that framed is of wood still hangeth in the skie,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou seest how they with idols play, and teach the people too:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">None otherwise than little girls with puppets used to do.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This custom appears to have been carried to an extravagant
height in Spain, for Mr. Fosbroke<a name="FNanchor_661_661" id="FNanchor_661_661"></a><a href="#Footnote_661_661" class="fnanchor">[661]</a> tells us that the gift
of the Holy Ghost was represented by “thunder from engines
which did much damage.” Water, oak leaves, burning
torches, wafers, and cakes were thrown down from the church
roof; pigeons and small birds, with cakes tied to their legs,
were let loose; and a long censer was swung up and down.
In our own country, many costly pageants were exhibited at
this season. Thus, at Chester, the Whitsun Mysteries were
acted during the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in Whitsun
week. The performers were carried from one place to
another by means of a scaffold—a huge and ponderous machine
mounted on wheels, gayly decorated with flags, and
divided into two compartments—the upper of which formed
the stage, and the lower, defended from vulgar curiosity by
coarse canvas draperies, answered the purposes of a green-room.
To each craft in the city a separate mystery was
allotted. Thus, the drapers exhibited the “Creation,” the
tanners took the “Fall of Lucifer,” the water-carriers of the
Dee acted the “Deluge,” etc. The production, too, of these
pageants was extremely costly; indeed, each one has been
set down at fifteen or twenty pounds sterling. An allusion
to this custom is made in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”
(iv. 4), where Julia says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“At Pentecost,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When all our pageants of delight were play’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our youth got me to play the woman’s part,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I was trimm’d in Madam Julia’s gown.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The morris-dance, too, was formerly a common accompaniment
to the Whitsun ales, a practice which is still kept<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
up in many parts of the country. In “Henry V.” (ii. 4),
the Dauphin thus alludes to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“I say, ’tis meet we all go forth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To view the sick and feeble parts of France:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And let us do it with no show of fear;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No, with no more than if we heard that England<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), Perdita says
to Florizel:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Methinks I play as I have seen them do<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In Whitsun pastorals.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A custom formerly kept up in connection with Whitsuntide
was the “Whitsun ale.” Ale was so prevalent a drink
among us in olden times as to become a part of the name
of various festal meetings, as Leet ale, Lamb ale, Bride ale
(bridal), and, as we see, Whitsun ale. Thus our ancestors
were in the habit of holding parochial meetings every Whitsuntide,
usually in some barn near the church, consisting of
a kind of picnic, as each parishioner brought what victuals
he could spare. The ale, which had been brewed pretty
strong for the occasion, was sold by the churchwardens, and
from its profits a fund arose for the repair of the church.<a name="FNanchor_662_662" id="FNanchor_662_662"></a><a href="#Footnote_662_662" class="fnanchor">[662]</a>
These meetings are referred to by Shakespeare in “Pericles”
(i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It hath been sung at festivals,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On ember-eves and holy-ales.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 5), when Launce
tells Speed, “thou hast not so much charity in thee as to go
to the ale with a Christian,” these words have been explained
to mean the rural festival so named, though, as Mr. Dyce
remarks (“Glossary,” p. 10), the previous words of Launce,
“go with me to the ale-house,” show this explanation to be
wrong.</p>

<p>In the old miracle-plays performed at this and other seasons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
Herod was a favorite personage, and was generally represented
as a tyrant of a very overbearing, violent character.
Thus Hamlet says (iii. 2): “O, it offends me to the soul, to
hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,
to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who,
for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable
dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped
for o’er-doing Termagant; it out-herods Herod.” On this
account Alexas mentions him as the most daring character
when he tells Cleopatra (“Antony and Cleopatra,”
iii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Good majesty,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But when you are well pleas’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), Mrs. Page speaks
of him in the same signification: “What a Herod of Jewry
is this!”</p>

<p>Mr. Dyce, in his “Glossary” (p. 207), has this note: “If
the reader wishes to know what a swaggering, uproarious
tyrant Herod was represented to be in those old dramatic
performances, let him turn to ‘Magnus Herodes’ in ‘The
Towneley Mysteries,’ p. 140, ed. Surtees Society; to ‘King
Herod’ in the ‘Coventry Mysteries,’ p. 188, ed. Shakespeare
Society; and to ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’ in ‘The
Chester Plays,’ vol. i. p. 172, ed. Shakespeare Society.”</p>

<p>Like Herod, Termagant<a name="FNanchor_663_663" id="FNanchor_663_663"></a><a href="#Footnote_663_663" class="fnanchor">[663]</a> was a hectoring tyrant of the
miracle-plays, and as such is mentioned by Hamlet in the
passage quoted above. Hence, in course of time, the word
was used as an adjective, in the sense of violent, as in “1
Henry IV.” (v. 4), “that hot termagant Scot.” Hall mentions
him in his first satire:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nor fright the reader with the Pagan vaunt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of mighty Mahound and great Termagaunt.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>While speaking of the old mysteries or miracle-plays we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
may also here refer to the “moralities,” a class of religious
plays in which allegorical personifications of the virtues and
vices were introduced as <i>dramatis personæ</i>. These personages
at first only took part in the play along with the Scriptural
or legendary characters, but afterwards entirely superseded
them. They continued in fashion till the time of Queen
Elizabeth. Several allusions are given by Shakespeare to
these moral plays. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (iv. 1), the
clown sings:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am gone, sir,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And anon, sir,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll be with you again<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In a trice,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Like to the old Vice,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your need to sustain;<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Who, with dagger of lath,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In his rage and his wrath,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Cries, Ah, ha! to the devil,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Prince Henry speaks of
“that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity;” and in “2 Henry
IV.” (iii. 2), Falstaff says, “now is this Vice’s dagger become
a squire.”</p>

<p>Again, further allusions occur in “Richard III.” (iii. 1).
Gloster says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I moralize two meanings in one word.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, Hamlet (iii. 4), speaks of “a Vice of kings,”
“a king of shreds and patches.”</p>

<p>According to Nares, “Vice” had the name sometimes of
one vice, sometimes of another, but most commonly of <i>Iniquity</i>,
or Vice itself. He was grotesquely dressed in a cap
with ass’s ears, a long coat, and a dagger of lath. One of
his chief employments was to make sport with the devil,
leaping on his back, and belaboring him with his dagger of
lath, till he made him roar. The devil, however, always carried
him off in the end. He was, in short, the buffoon of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
the morality, and was succeeded in his office by the clown,
whom we see in Shakespeare and others.<a name="FNanchor_664_664" id="FNanchor_664_664"></a><a href="#Footnote_664_664" class="fnanchor">[664]</a></p>

<p>Again, there may be a further allusion to the moralities
in “King Lear” (ii. 2), where Kent says to Oswald, “take
Vanity, the puppet’s, part, against the royalty of her father.”</p>

<p>Then, too, there were the “pageants”—shows which were
usually performed in the highways of our towns, and assimilated
in some degree to the miracle-plays, but were of a more
mixed character, being partly drawn from profane history.
According to Strutt, they were more frequent in London,
being required at stated periods, such as the setting of the
Midsummer Watch, and the Lord Mayor’s Show.<a name="FNanchor_665_665" id="FNanchor_665_665"></a><a href="#Footnote_665_665" class="fnanchor">[665]</a> Among
the allusions to these shows given by Shakespeare, we may
quote one in “Richard III.” (iv. 4), where Queen Margaret
speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The flattering index of a direful pageant”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the pageants displayed on public occasions being generally
preceded by a brief account of the order in which the characters
were to walk. These indexes were distributed among
the spectators, that they might understand the meaning of
such allegorical representations as were usually exhibited.
In the “Merchant of Venice” (i. 1), Salarino calls argosies
“the pageants of the sea,” in allusion, says Douce,<a name="FNanchor_666_666" id="FNanchor_666_666"></a><a href="#Footnote_666_666" class="fnanchor">[666]</a> “to those
enormous machines, in the shapes of castles, dragons, ships,
giants, etc., that were drawn about the streets in the ancient
shows or pageants, and which often constituted the most
important part of them.” Again, in “As You Like It”
(iii. 4), Corin says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If you will see a pageant truly play’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Between the pale complexion of true love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If you will mark it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 14), Antony speaks of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span>
“black vesper’s pageants.”</p>

<p>The nine worthies, originally comprising Joshua, David,
Judas Maccabæus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Arthur,
Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, appear from a very
early period to have been introduced occasionally in the
shows and pageants of our ancestors. Thus, in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the pageant of the nine worthies is
introduced. As Shakespeare, however, introduces Hercules
and Pompey among his presence of worthies, we may infer
that the characters were sometimes varied to suit the circumstances
of the period, or the taste of the auditory. A
MS. preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin,
mentions the “Six Worthies” having been played before
the Lord Deputy Sussex in 1557.<a name="FNanchor_667_667" id="FNanchor_667_667"></a><a href="#Footnote_667_667" class="fnanchor">[667]</a></p>

<p>Another feature of the Whitsun merry-makings were the
Cotswold games, which were generally on the Thursday in
Whitsun week, in the vicinity of Chipping Campden. They
were instituted by an attorney of Burton-on-the-Heath, in
Warwickshire, named Robert Dover, and, like the Olympic
games of the ancients, consisted of most kinds of manly
sports, such as wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, handling
the pike, dancing, and hunting. Ben Jonson, Drayton, and
other poets of that age wrote verses on this festivity, which,
in 1636, were collected into one volume, and published under
the name of “Annalia Dubrensia.”<a name="FNanchor_668_668" id="FNanchor_668_668"></a><a href="#Footnote_668_668" class="fnanchor">[668]</a> In the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), Slender asks Page, “How does
your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say, he was outrun on
Cotsall.” And in “2 Henry IV.”<a name="FNanchor_669_669" id="FNanchor_669_669"></a><a href="#Footnote_669_669" class="fnanchor">[669]</a> (iii. 2), Shallow, by distinguishing
Will Squele as “a Cotswold man,” meant to imply
that he was well versed in manly exercises, and consequently
of a daring spirit and athletic constitution. A sheep was
jocularly called a “Cotsold,” or “Cotswold lion,” from the
extensive pastures in that part of Gloucestershire.</p>

<p>While speaking of Whitsuntide festivities, we may refer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
to the “roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his
belly,” to which Prince Henry alludes in “1 Henry IV.”
(ii. 4). It appears that Manningtree, in Essex, formerly enjoyed
the privilege of fairs, by the tenure of exhibiting a
certain number of Stage Plays yearly. There were, also,
great festivities there, and much good eating, at Whitsun
ales and other times. Hence, it seems that roasting an ox
whole was not uncommon on such occasions. The pudding
spoken of by Prince Henry often accompanied the ox, as
we find in a ballad written in 1658:<a name="FNanchor_670_670" id="FNanchor_670_670"></a><a href="#Footnote_670_670" class="fnanchor">[670]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Just so the people stare<br /></span>
<span class="i2">At an ox in the fair<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Roasted whole with a pudding in ’s belly.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sheep-shearing Time</i> commences as soon as the warm
weather is so far settled that the sheep may, without danger,
lay aside their winter clothing; the following tokens
being laid down by Dyer, in his “Fleece” (bk. i), to mark
out the proper time:<a name="FNanchor_671_671" id="FNanchor_671_671"></a><a href="#Footnote_671_671" class="fnanchor">[671]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“If verdant elder spreads<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her silver flowers; if humble daisies yield<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To yellow crowfoot and luxuriant grass<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gay shearing-time approaches.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Our ancestors, who took advantage of every natural holiday,
to keep it long and gladly, celebrated the time of sheep-shearing
by a feast exclusively rural. Drayton,<a name="FNanchor_672_672" id="FNanchor_672_672"></a><a href="#Footnote_672_672" class="fnanchor">[672]</a> the countryman
of Shakespeare, has graphically described this festive
scene, the Vale of Evesham being the locality of the
sheep-shearing which he has pictured so pleasantly:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“The shepherd king,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose flock hath chanc’d that year the earliest lamb to bring,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In his gay baldric sits at his low, grassy board,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
<span class="i0">With flawns, curds, clouted cream, and country dainties stored;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And whilst the bag-pipe plays, each lusty, jocund swain<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quaffs syllabubs in cans, to all upon the plain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And to their country girls, whose nosegays they do wear;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some roundelays do sing; the rest the burthen bear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Winter’s Tale,” one of the most delicious scenes
(iv. 4) is that of the sheep-shearing, in which we have the
more poetical “shepherd-queen.” Mr. Furnivall,<a name="FNanchor_673_673" id="FNanchor_673_673"></a><a href="#Footnote_673_673" class="fnanchor">[673]</a> in his
introduction to this play, justly remarks: “How happily it
brings Shakespeare before us, mixing with his Stratford
neighbors at their sheep-shearing and country sports, enjoying
the vagabond pedler’s gammon and talk, delighting
in the sweet Warwickshire maidens, and buying them ‘fairings,’
telling goblin stories to the boys, ‘There was a man
dwelt in a churchyard,’ opening his heart afresh to all the
innocent mirth, and the beauty of nature around him.”
The expense attaching to these festivities appears to have
afforded matter of complaint. Thus, the clown asks, “What
am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast?” and then proceeds
to enumerate various things which he will have to
purchase. In Tusser’s “Five Hundred Points of Husbandry”
this festival is described under “The Ploughman’s Feast-days:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corne,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Make wafers and cakes, for our sheep must be shorne;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At sheepe-shearing, neighbours none other things crave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But good cheere and welcome like neighbours to have.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Midsummer Eve</i> appears to have been regarded as a period
when the imagination ran riot, and many a curious
superstition was associated with this season. Thus, people
gathered on this night the rose, St. John’s wort, vervain,
trefoil, and rue, all of which were supposed to have magical
properties. They set the orpine in clay upon pieces of
slate or potsherd in their houses, calling it a “Midsummer
man.” As the stalk was found next morning to incline to
the right or left, the anxious maiden knew whether her lover<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>
would prove true to her or not. Young men sought, also,
for pieces of coal, but, in reality, certain hard, black, dead
roots, often found under the living mugwort, designing to
place these under their pillows, that they might dream of
themselves.<a name="FNanchor_674_674" id="FNanchor_674_674"></a><a href="#Footnote_674_674" class="fnanchor">[674]</a> It was also supposed that any person fasting
on Midsummer-eve, and sitting in the church-porch, would
at midnight see the spirits of those persons of that parish
who would die that year come and knock at the church-door,
in the order and succession in which they would die.
Midsummer was formerly thought to be a season productive
of madness. Thus, Malvolio’s strange conduct is described
by Olivia in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4) as “A very midsummer
madness.” And, hence, “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”
is no inappropriate title for “the series of wild incongruities
of which the play consists.”<a name="FNanchor_675_675" id="FNanchor_675_675"></a><a href="#Footnote_675_675" class="fnanchor">[675]</a> The Low-Dutch have a proverb
that, when men have passed a troublesome night, and
could not sleep, “they have passed St. John Baptist’s night”—that
is, they have not taken any sleep, but watched all
night. Heywood seems to allude to a similar notion when
he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As mad as a March hare: where madness compares,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are not midsummer hares as mad as March hares?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A proverbial phrase, too, to signify that a person was mad,
was, “’Tis midsummer moon with you”—hot weather being
supposed to affect the brain.</p>

<p><i>Dog-days.</i> A popular superstition—in all probability derived
from the Egyptians—referred to the rising and setting
of Sirius, or the Dog-star, as infusing madness into the canine
race. Consequently, the name of “Dog-days” was given by
the Romans to the period between the 3d of July and 11th
of August, to which Shakespeare alludes in “Henry VIII.”
(v. 3), “the dog-days now reign.” It is obvious that the
notion is utterly groundless, for not only does the star vary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
in its rising, but is later and later every year. According
to the Roman belief, “at the rising of the Dog-star the seas
boil, the wines ferment in the cellars, and standing waters
are set in motion; the dogs, also, go mad, and the sturgeon
is blasted.” The term Dog-days is still a common phrase,
and it is difficult to say whether it is from superstitious adherence
to old custom or from a belief of the injurious effect
of heat upon the canine race that the magistrates, often unwisely,
at this season of the year order them to be muzzled
or tied up.</p>

<p><i>Lammas-day</i> (August 1). According to some antiquarians,
Lammas is a corruption of loaf-mass, as our ancestors
made an offering of bread from new wheat on this day.
Others derive it from lamb-mass, because the tenants who
held lands under the Cathedral Church of York were bound
by their tenure to bring a live lamb into the church at high
mass.<a name="FNanchor_676_676" id="FNanchor_676_676"></a><a href="#Footnote_676_676" class="fnanchor">[676]</a> It appears to have been a popular day in times past,
and is mentioned in the following dialogue in “Romeo and
Juliet” (i. 3), where the Nurse inquires:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“How long is it now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To Lammas-tide?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Lady Capulet.</i><span style="padding-left: 2em">A fortnight, and odd days.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Nurse.</i> Even or odd, of all days in the year,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come Lammas-eve at night, shall she be fourteen?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Neale’s “Essays on Liturgiology” (2d. ed., p. 526),
the Welsh equivalent for Lammas-day is given as “dydd
degwm wyn,” lamb-tithing day.</p>

<p><i>St. Charity</i> (August 1). This saint is found in the Martyrology
on the 1st of August: “Romæ passio Sanctaram
Virginum Fidei, Spei, et Charitatis, quæ sub Hadriano principe
martyriæ coronam adeptæ sunt.”<a name="FNanchor_677_677" id="FNanchor_677_677"></a><a href="#Footnote_677_677" class="fnanchor">[677]</a> She is alluded to
by Ophelia, in her song in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By Gis,<a name="FNanchor_678_678" id="FNanchor_678_678"></a><a href="#Footnote_678_678" class="fnanchor">[678]</a> and by Saint Charity,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span>
<span class="i1">Alack, and fie for shame!” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Faire Maide of Bristowe” (1605) we find a similar
allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now, by Saint Charity, if I were judge,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A halter were the least should hamper him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>St. Bartholomew’s Day</i> (August 24). The anniversary of
this festival was formerly signalized by the holding of the
great Smithfield Fair, the only real fair held within the city
of London. One of the chief attractions of Bartholomew
Fair were roasted pigs. They were sold “piping hot, in
booths and on stalls, and ostentatiously displayed to excite
the appetite of passengers.” Hence, a “Bartholomew pig”
became a popular subject of allusion. Falstaff, in “2 Henry
IV.” (ii. 4), in coaxing ridicule of his enormous figure, is playfully
called, by his favorite Doll: “Thou whoreson little tidy
Bartholomew boar-pig.” Dr. Johnson, however, thought
that paste pigs were meant in this passage; but this is improbable,
as the true Bartholomew pigs were real roasted
pigs, as may be seen from Ben Jonson’s play of “Bartholomew
Fair” (i. 6), where Ursula, the pig-woman, is an important
personage.<a name="FNanchor_679_679" id="FNanchor_679_679"></a><a href="#Footnote_679_679" class="fnanchor">[679]</a> Gay, too, speaks of the pig-dressers:
“Like Bartholomew Fair pig-dressers, who look like the
dams, as well as the cooks, of what they roasted.” A further
allusion to this season is found in “Henry V,” (v. 2),
where Burgundy tells how “maids, well-summered and
warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though
they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling,
which before would not abide looking on.”</p>

<p><i>Harvest Home.</i> The ceremonies which graced the ingathering
of the harvest in bygone times have gradually disappeared,
and at the present day only remnants of the old
usages which once prevailed are still preserved. Shakespeare,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span>
who has chronicled so many of our old customs, and
seems to have had a special delight in illustrating his writings
with these characteristics of our social life, has given
several interesting allusions to the observances which, in his
day, graced the harvest-field. Thus, in Warwickshire, the
laborers, at their harvest-home, appointed a judge to try
misdemeanors committed during harvest, and those who
were sentenced to punishment were placed on a bench and
beaten with a pair of boots. Hence the ceremony was called
“giving them the boots.” It has been suggested that this
custom is alluded to in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”
(i. 1), where Shakespeare makes Proteus, parrying Valentine’s
raillery, say, “nay, give me not the boots.”</p>

<p>In Northamptonshire, when any one misconducted himself
in the field during harvest, he was subjected to a mock-trial
at the harvest-home feast, and condemned to be booted,
a description of which we find in the introduction to Clare’s
“Village Minstrel:” “A long form is placed in the kitchen,
upon which the boys who have worked well sit, as a terror
and disgrace to the rest, in a bent posture, with their hands
laid on each other’s backs, forming a bridge for the ‘hogs’
(as the truant boys are called) to pass over; while a strong
chap stands on each side with a boot-legging, soundly strapping
them as they scuffle over the bridge, which is done as
fast as their ingenuity can carry them.” Some, however,
think the allusion in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” is
to the diabolical torture of the boot. Not a great while before
this play was written, it had been inflicted, says Douce,<a name="FNanchor_680_680" id="FNanchor_680_680"></a><a href="#Footnote_680_680" class="fnanchor">[680]</a>
in the presence of King James, on one Dr. Fian, a supposed
wizard, who was charged with raising the storms that the
king encountered in his return from Denmark. The unfortunate
man was afterwards burned. This horrible torture,
we are told,<a name="FNanchor_681_681" id="FNanchor_681_681"></a><a href="#Footnote_681_681" class="fnanchor">[681]</a> consisted in the leg and knee of the criminal
being enclosed within a tight iron boot or case, wedges of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
iron being then driven in with a mallet between the knee
and the iron boot. Sir Walter Scott, in “Old Mortality,”
has given a description of Macbriar undergoing this punishment.
At a later period “the boot” signified, according to
Nares,<a name="FNanchor_682_682" id="FNanchor_682_682"></a><a href="#Footnote_682_682" class="fnanchor">[682]</a> an instrument for tightening the leg or hand, and
was used as a cure for the gout, and called a “bootikins.”
The phrase “to give the boots” seems to have been a proverbial
expression, signifying “Don’t make a laughing-stock
of me; don’t play upon me.”</p>

<p>In the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where Lorenzo says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And draw her home with music,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">we have, doubtless, an allusion to the “Hock Cart” of the
old harvest-home. This was the cart which carried the last
corn away from the harvest-field,<a name="FNanchor_683_683" id="FNanchor_683_683"></a><a href="#Footnote_683_683" class="fnanchor">[683]</a> and was generally profusely
decorated, and accompanied by music, old and young
shouting at the top of their voices a doggerel after the following
fashion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We have ploughed, we have sowed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We have reaped, we have mowed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We have brought home every load,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Hip, hip, hip! harvest home.”<a name="FNanchor_684_684" id="FNanchor_684_684"></a><a href="#Footnote_684_684" class="fnanchor">[684]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Poor Robin’s Almanack” for August, 1676, we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hoacky is brought home with hallowing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Boys with plumb-cake the cart following.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Holyrood Day</i> (September 14). This festival,<a name="FNanchor_685_685" id="FNanchor_685_685"></a><a href="#Footnote_685_685" class="fnanchor">[685]</a> called also
Holy-Cross Day, was instituted by the Romish Church, on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>
account of the recovery of a large piece of the supposed
cross by the Emperor Heraclius, after it had been taken
away, on the plundering of Jerusalem, by Chosroes, king of
Persia. Among the customs associated with this day was
one of going a-nutting, alluded to in the old play of “Grim,
the Collier of Croydon” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To morrow is Holy-rood day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When all a-nutting take their way.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare mentions this festival in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 1),
where he represents the Earl of Westmoreland relating how,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Young Harry Percy and brave Archibald,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That ever-valiant and approved Scot,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At Holmedon met.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>St. Lambert’s Day</i> (September 17). This saint, whose
original name was Landebert, but contracted into Lambert,
was a native of Maestricht, in the seventh century, and was
assassinated early in the eighth.<a name="FNanchor_686_686" id="FNanchor_686_686"></a><a href="#Footnote_686_686" class="fnanchor">[686]</a> His festival is alluded to
in “Richard II.” (i. 1), where the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At Coventry, upon Saint Lambert’s day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Michaelmas</i> (September 29). In the “Merry Wives of
Windsor” (i. 1), this festival is alluded to by Simple, who,
in answer to Slender, whether he had “the Book of riddles”
about him, replies: “Why, did you not lend it to Alice
Shortcake upon All-hallowmas last, a fortnight afore Michaelmas,”—this
doubtless being an intended blunder.</p>

<p>In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Francis says: “Let me see—about
Michaelmas next I shall be.”</p>

<p><i>St. Etheldreda</i>, or <i>Audry</i>, commemorated in the Romish
Calendar on the 23d of June, but in the English Calendar on
the 17th of October, was daughter of Annas, King of the
East Angles. She founded the convent and church of Ely,
on the spot where the cathedral was subsequently erected.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>
Formerly, at Ely, a fair was annually held, called in her
memory St. Audry’s Fair, at which much cheap lace was
sold to the poorer classes, which at first went by the name
of St. Audry’s lace, but in time was corrupted into “tawdry
lace.” Shakespeare makes an allusion to this lace in the
“Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), where Mopsa says: “Come, you
promised me a tawdry lace, and a pair of sweet gloves;”
although in his time the expression rather meant a rustic
necklace.<a name="FNanchor_687_687" id="FNanchor_687_687"></a><a href="#Footnote_687_687" class="fnanchor">[687]</a> An old English historian makes St. Audry die
of a swelling in her throat, which she considered as a particular
judgment for having been in her youth addicted to
wearing fine necklaces.<a name="FNanchor_688_688" id="FNanchor_688_688"></a><a href="#Footnote_688_688" class="fnanchor">[688]</a></p>

<p><i>St. Crispin’s Day</i> (October 25) has for centuries been a
red-letter day in the calendar of the shoemakers, being the
festival of their patron saint. According to tradition, the
brothers Crispin and Crispinian, natives of Rome, having
become converted to Christianity, travelled to Soissons, in
France, in order to preach the gospel. Being desirous, however,
of rendering themselves independent, they earned their
daily bread by making shoes, with which, it is said, they
furnished the poor, at an extremely low price. When the
governor of the town discovered that they maintained the
Christian faith, and also tried to make proselytes of the inhabitants,
he ordered them to be beheaded. From this time
the shoemakers have chosen them for their tutelary saints.
Shakespeare has perpetuated the memory of this festival by
the speech which he has given to Henry V. (iv. 3), before
the battle of Agincourt:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And rouse him at the name of Crispian.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He that shall live this day, and see old age,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>St. Dennis has been adopted as the patron saint of France<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span>
(October 9), in the same manner as the English have chosen
St. George. The guardianship of the two countries is thus
expressed in the chorus to the old ballad:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“St. George he was for England,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">St. Denis was for France,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Singing, Honi soit qui mal y pense.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>King Henry (“Henry V.,” v. 2) says to Princess Katherine:
“Shall not thou and I, between Saint Dennis and
Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English,”
etc. In “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), Charles says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Saint Dennis bless this happy stratagem,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And once again we’ll sleep secure in Rouen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hallowmas</i> (November 1) is one of the names for the feast
of All-hallows, that is, All-Saints. Shakespeare alludes to a
custom relative to this day, some traces of which are still to
be found in Staffordshire, Cheshire, and other counties. The
poor people go from parish to parish <i>a-souling</i>, as they term
it, that is, begging, in a certain lamentable tone, for soul-cakes,
at the same time singing a song which they call the
souler’s song. This practice is, no doubt, a remnant of the
Popish ceremony of praying for departed souls, especially
those of friends, on the ensuing day, November 2, the feast
of All-Souls.<a name="FNanchor_689_689" id="FNanchor_689_689"></a><a href="#Footnote_689_689" class="fnanchor">[689]</a> The following is a specimen of the doggerel
sung on these occasions:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Soul! soul! for a soul-cake;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pray, good mistress, for a soul-cake.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One for Peter, and two for Paul,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Three for them who made us all.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Soul! soul! for an apple or two:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If you’ve got no apples, pears will do.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Up with your kettle, and down with your pan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Give me a good big one, and I’ll be gone.<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Soul! soul! for a soul-cake, etc.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">An apple, a pear, a plum, or a cherry,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is a very good thing to make us merry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 1), Speed thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
speaks of this practice: “To watch, like one that fears robbing;
to speak puling,<a name="FNanchor_690_690" id="FNanchor_690_690"></a><a href="#Footnote_690_690" class="fnanchor">[690]</a> like a beggar at Hallowmas.”</p>

<p>The season of Hallowmas, having been frequently mild, has
been, from time immemorial, proverbially called “All-hallown
summer,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, late summer. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2),
Prince Henry, likening Falstaff, with his old age and young
passions, to this November summer, addresses him: “Farewell,
thou latter spring! Farewell, All-hallown summer.”<a name="FNanchor_691_691" id="FNanchor_691_691"></a><a href="#Footnote_691_691" class="fnanchor">[691]</a>
In some parts of Germany there is a proverb, “All-Saints’
Day brings the second summer;” and in Sweden there is
often about this time a continuance of warm, still weather,
which is called “the All-Saints’ rest.”</p>

<p>There is another reference to this festival in “Richard II.”
(v. 1), where the king says of his wife:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She came adorned hither like sweet May,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>All-Souls’ Day</i> (November 2)—which is set apart by the
Roman Catholic Church for a solemn service for the repose
of the dead—was formerly observed in this country, and
among the many customs celebrated in its honor were ringing
the passing bell, making soul-cakes, blessing beans, etc.<a name="FNanchor_692_692" id="FNanchor_692_692"></a><a href="#Footnote_692_692" class="fnanchor">[692]</a>
In “Richard III.” (v. 1), Buckingham, when led to execution,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is All-Souls’ day, fellows, is it not?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Sheriff.</i> It is, my lord.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Buckingham.</i> Why, then, All-Souls’ day is my body’s doomsday.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Lord Mayor’s Day</i> (November 9). A custom which was
in days gone by observed at the inauguration dinner was that
of the Lord Mayor’s fool leaping, clothes and all, into a large
bowl of custard. It is alluded to in “All’s Well that Ends
Well” (ii. 5), by Lafeu: “You have made shift to run into’t,
boots and spurs and all, like him that leaped into the custard.”
Ben Jonson, in his “Devil’s an Ass” (i. 1), thus refers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span>
to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He may, perchance, in tail of a sheriff’s dinner,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Skip with a rime o’ the table, from new nothing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And take his almain leap into a custard,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall make my lady mayoress and her sisters,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>St. Martin’s Day</i> (November 11). The mild weather
about this time has given rise to numerous proverbs; one
of the well-known ones being “St. Martin’s little summer,”
an allusion to which we find in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 2), where
Joan of Arc says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">which Johnson paraphrases thus: “Expect prosperity after
misfortune, like fair weather at Martlemas, after winter has
begun.” As an illustration, too, of this passage, we may
quote from the <i>Times</i>, October 6, 1864: “It was one of those
rare but lovely exceptions to a cold season, called in the
Mediterranean St. Martin’s summer.”</p>

<p>A corruption of Martinmas is Martlemas. Falstaff is jocularly
so called by Poins, in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 2), as being in
the decline, as the year is at this season: “And how doth
the martlemas, your master?”</p>

<p>This was the customary time for hanging up provisions to
dry, which had been salted for winter use.</p>

<p><i>St. Nicholas</i> (December 6). This saint was deemed the
patron of children in general, but more particularly of all
schoolboys, among whom his festival used to be a very great
holiday. Various reasons have been assigned for his having
been chosen as the patron of children—either because the
legend makes him to have been a bishop while yet a boy,
or from his having restored three young scholars to life who
had been cruelly murdered,<a name="FNanchor_693_693" id="FNanchor_693_693"></a><a href="#Footnote_693_693" class="fnanchor">[693]</a> or, again, on account of his early
abstinence when a boy. In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span>
(iii. 1) he is alluded to in this capacity:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Speed.</i> Come, fool, come; try me in thy paper.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Launce.</i> There; and Saint Nicholas be thy speed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Nicholas’s clerks was, and still is, a cant term for highwaymen
and robbers; but though the expression is very common,
its origin is a matter of uncertainty. In “1 Henry IV.”
(ii. 1) it is thus alluded to:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Gadshill.</i> Sirrah, if they meet not with Saint Nicholas’ clerks, I’ll
give thee this neck.</p>

<p><i>Chamberlain.</i> No. I’ll none of it: I pr’thee, keep that for the hangman:
for I know thou worshippest Saint Nicholas as truly as a man
of falsehood may.”</p></div>

<p><i>Christmas.</i> Among the observances associated with this
season, to which Shakespeare alludes, we may mention the
Christmas Carol, a reference to which is probably made in
“A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), by Titania:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No night is now with hymn or carol blest.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hamlet (ii. 2) quotes two lines from a popular ballad, entitled
the “Song of Jephthah’s Daughter,” and adds: “The
first row of the pious chanson will show you more.”<a name="FNanchor_694_694" id="FNanchor_694_694"></a><a href="#Footnote_694_694" class="fnanchor">[694]</a></p>

<p>In days gone by, the custom of carol-singing was most
popular, and Warton, in his “History of English Poetry,”
notices a license granted in 1562 to John Tysdale for printing
“Certayne goodly carowles to be songe to the glory of
God;” and again “Crestenmas Carowles auctorisshed by
my lord of London.”<a name="FNanchor_695_695" id="FNanchor_695_695"></a><a href="#Footnote_695_695" class="fnanchor">[695]</a></p>

<p>In the “Taming of the Shrew” (Ind., sc. 2) Sly asks
whether “a comonty<a name="FNanchor_696_696" id="FNanchor_696_696"></a><a href="#Footnote_696_696" class="fnanchor">[696]</a> is not a Christmas gambold.” Formerly
the sports and merry-makings at this season were on
a most extensive scale, being presided over by the Lord of
Misrule.<a name="FNanchor_697_697" id="FNanchor_697_697"></a><a href="#Footnote_697_697" class="fnanchor">[697]</a> Again, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span>
speaks of “a Christmas comedy.”</p>

<p>As we have noticed, too, in our chapter on Plants, a gilt
nutmeg was formerly a common gift at Christmas, and on
other festive occasions, to which an allusion is probably
made in the same scene. Formerly, at this season, the head
of the house assembled his family around a bowl of spiced
ale, from which he drank their healths, then passed it to the
rest, that they might drink too. The word that passed
among them was the ancient Saxon phrase <i>wass hael</i><a name="FNanchor_698_698" id="FNanchor_698_698"></a><a href="#Footnote_698_698" class="fnanchor">[698]</a>, <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, to
your health. Hence this came to be recognized as the wassail
or wassel bowl; and was the accompaniment to festivity
of every kind throughout the year. Thus Hamlet (i. 4)
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Keeps wassail.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Biron speaks of:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Macbeth” (i. 7), it is used by Lady Macbeth in the
sense of intemperance, who, speaking of Duncan’s two chamberlains,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Will I with wine and wassail so convince,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That memory, the warder of the brain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A limbeck only.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 4), Cæsar advises Antony
to live more temperately, and to leave his “lascivious wassails.”<a name="FNanchor_699_699" id="FNanchor_699_699"></a><a href="#Footnote_699_699" class="fnanchor">[699]</a></p>

<p>In the same way, a “wassail candle” denoted a large candle
lighted up at a festival, a reference to which occurs in
“2 Henry IV.” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Chief-Justice.</i> You are as a candle, the better part burnt out.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Falstaff.</i> A wassail candle, my lord; all tallow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A custom which formerly prevailed at Christmas, and has
not yet died out, was for mummers to go from house to house,
attired in grotesque attire, performing all kinds of odd antics.<a name="FNanchor_700_700" id="FNanchor_700_700"></a><a href="#Footnote_700_700" class="fnanchor">[700]</a>
Their performances, however, were not confined to this season.
Thus, in “Coriolanus” (ii. 1) Menenius speaks of making
“faces like mummers.”</p>

<p><i>Cakes and Ale.</i> It was formerly customary on holidays
and saints’ days to make cakes in honor of the day. In
“Twelfth Night” (ii. 3), Sir Toby says: “Dost thou think,
because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and
ale?” To which the Clown replies: “Yes, by Saint Anne;
and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.”</p>

<p><i>Wakes.</i> In days gone by, the church wake was an important
institution, and was made the occasion for a thorough
holiday. Each church, when consecrated, was dedicated to a
saint, and on the anniversary of that day was kept the wake.
In many places there was a second wake on the birthday of
the saint. At such seasons, the floor of the church was
strewed with rushes and flowers, and in the churchyard tents
were erected, to supply cakes and ale for the use of the
merrymakers on the following day, which was kept as a
holiday. They are still kept up in many parishes, but in a
very different manner.<a name="FNanchor_701_701" id="FNanchor_701_701"></a><a href="#Footnote_701_701" class="fnanchor">[701]</a> In “King Lear” (iii. 6), Edgar
says: “Come, march to wakes and fairs, and market towns.”
We may also compare “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) and
“Winter’s Tale” (iv. 2). In “Hamlet” (i. 4) it is used in
the sense of revel.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_639_639" id="Footnote_639_639"></a><a href="#FNanchor_639_639"><span class="label">[639]</span></a> “The England of Shakespeare,” E. Goadby, 1881, p. 153.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_640_640" id="Footnote_640_640"></a><a href="#FNanchor_640_640"><span class="label">[640]</span></a> “Critical Essays on the Plays of Shakespeare,” 1875, p. 145; see
Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. pp. 347, 348.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_641_641" id="Footnote_641_641"></a><a href="#FNanchor_641_641"><span class="label">[641]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” p. 473.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_642_642" id="Footnote_642_642"></a><a href="#FNanchor_642_642"><span class="label">[642]</span></a> “Notes and Queries,” 6th series, vol. i. p. 129.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_643_643" id="Footnote_643_643"></a><a href="#FNanchor_643_643"><span class="label">[643]</span></a> Cf. “As You Like It” (i. 2). Touchstone alludes to a “certain
knight, that swore by his honour they were good pancakes.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_644_644" id="Footnote_644_644"></a><a href="#FNanchor_644_644"><span class="label">[644]</span></a> See Hone’s “Every Day Book,” 1836, vol. i. p. 258; “Book of
Days,” vol. i. p. 239; see, also, Dekker’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” 1606,
p. 35; “British Popular Customs,” pp. 62-91.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_645_645" id="Footnote_645_645"></a><a href="#FNanchor_645_645"><span class="label">[645]</span></a> “Notes and Queries,” 1st series, vol. xii. p. 297.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_646_646" id="Footnote_646_646"></a><a href="#FNanchor_646_646"><span class="label">[646]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 443; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849,
vol. i. p. 101. Taylor, the Water-Poet, has a tract entitled “<i>Jack-a-Lent</i>,
his Beginning and Entertainment, with the mad Prankes of
Gentlemen-Usher, Shrove Tuesday.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_647_647" id="Footnote_647_647"></a><a href="#FNanchor_647_647"><span class="label">[647]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vi. p. 219.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_648_648" id="Footnote_648_648"></a><a href="#FNanchor_648_648"><span class="label">[648]</span></a> “Notes and Queries,” 4th series, vol. v. p. 595.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_649_649" id="Footnote_649_649"></a><a href="#FNanchor_649_649"><span class="label">[649]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i. p. 362; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol.
i. p. 164: Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 94.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_650_650" id="Footnote_650_650"></a><a href="#FNanchor_650_650"><span class="label">[650]</span></a> See Hone’s “Every Day Book,” vol. i. p. 318; “British Popular
Customs,” pp. 110-113.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_651_651" id="Footnote_651_651"></a><a href="#FNanchor_651_651"><span class="label">[651]</span></a> St. Patrick rids Ireland of snakes; see p. <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_652_652" id="Footnote_652_652"></a><a href="#FNanchor_652_652"><span class="label">[652]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1870, vol. ix. p. 168.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_653_653" id="Footnote_653_653"></a><a href="#FNanchor_653_653"><span class="label">[653]</span></a> Cf. “Henry V.,” v. 2; “3 Henry VI.,” ii. 1, 2; “Taming of the
Shrew,” ii. 1; “Richard II.,” i. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_654_654" id="Footnote_654_654"></a><a href="#FNanchor_654_654"><span class="label">[654]</span></a> Cited by Warton in a note on “Richard III.,” v. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_655_655" id="Footnote_655_655"></a><a href="#FNanchor_655_655"><span class="label">[655]</span></a> Hotten’s “History of Sign-boards,” 1866, 3d ed., p. 287.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_656_656" id="Footnote_656_656"></a><a href="#FNanchor_656_656"><span class="label">[656]</span></a> Cf. “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4): “More matter for a May morning.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_657_657" id="Footnote_657_657"></a><a href="#FNanchor_657_657"><span class="label">[657]</span></a> “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 575; see “British Popular Customs,”
pp. 228-230, 249.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_658_658" id="Footnote_658_658"></a><a href="#FNanchor_658_658"><span class="label">[658]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. i. pp. 247-270; “Book of Days,”
vol. i. pp. 630-633.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_659_659" id="Footnote_659_659"></a><a href="#FNanchor_659_659"><span class="label">[659]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 550.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_660_660" id="Footnote_660_660"></a><a href="#FNanchor_660_660"><span class="label">[660]</span></a> See Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” 1817, vol. i. p. 163.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_661_661" id="Footnote_661_661"></a><a href="#FNanchor_661_661"><span class="label">[661]</span></a> “Encyclopædia of Antiquities,” 1843, vol. ii. p. 653.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_662_662" id="Footnote_662_662"></a><a href="#FNanchor_662_662"><span class="label">[662]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” p. 278; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. i. p. 276.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_663_663" id="Footnote_663_663"></a><a href="#FNanchor_663_663"><span class="label">[663]</span></a> According to the crusaders and the old romance writers a Saracen
deity. See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ix. p. 214.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_664_664" id="Footnote_664_664"></a><a href="#FNanchor_664_664"><span class="label">[664]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 482.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_665_665" id="Footnote_665_665"></a><a href="#FNanchor_665_665"><span class="label">[665]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 25-28; see Warton’s “History of
English Poetry,” vol. ii. p. 202.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_666_666" id="Footnote_666_666"></a><a href="#FNanchor_666_666"><span class="label">[666]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 154.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_667_667" id="Footnote_667_667"></a><a href="#FNanchor_667_667"><span class="label">[667]</span></a> Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol. i. pp. 147, 148.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_668_668" id="Footnote_668_668"></a><a href="#FNanchor_668_668"><span class="label">[668]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 712.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_669_669" id="Footnote_669_669"></a><a href="#FNanchor_669_669"><span class="label">[669]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. v. p. 206.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_670_670" id="Footnote_670_670"></a><a href="#FNanchor_670_670"><span class="label">[670]</span></a> See Nichol’s “Collection of Poems,” 1780, vol. iii. p. 204.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_671_671" id="Footnote_671_671"></a><a href="#FNanchor_671_671"><span class="label">[671]</span></a> See Knight’s “Life of Shakespeare,” 1845, p. 71; Howitt’s “Pictorial
Calendar of the Seasons,” 1854, pp. 254-267.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_672_672" id="Footnote_672_672"></a><a href="#FNanchor_672_672"><span class="label">[672]</span></a> “Polyolbion,” song 14; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii.
p. 34; Timbs’s “A Garland for the Year,” pp. 74, 75.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_673_673" id="Footnote_673_673"></a><a href="#FNanchor_673_673"><span class="label">[673]</span></a> Introduction to the “Leopold Shakespeare,” p. xci.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_674_674" id="Footnote_674_674"></a><a href="#FNanchor_674_674"><span class="label">[674]</span></a> “Book of Days,” vol. i. p. 816; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. i.
p. 314; Soane’s “Book of the Months.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_675_675" id="Footnote_675_675"></a><a href="#FNanchor_675_675"><span class="label">[675]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. pp. 336, 337.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_676_676" id="Footnote_676_676"></a><a href="#FNanchor_676_676"><span class="label">[676]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 347-351.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_677_677" id="Footnote_677_677"></a><a href="#FNanchor_677_677"><span class="label">[677]</span></a> Douglas’s “Criterion,” p. 68, cited by Ritson; see Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” p. 475.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_678_678" id="Footnote_678_678"></a><a href="#FNanchor_678_678"><span class="label">[678]</span></a> This is, perhaps, a corrupt abbreviation of “By Jesus.” Some
would read “By Cis,” and understand by it “St. Cicely.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_679_679" id="Footnote_679_679"></a><a href="#FNanchor_679_679"><span class="label">[679]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 57; Morley’s “Memoirs of Bartholomew
Fair,” 1859.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_680_680" id="Footnote_680_680"></a><a href="#FNanchor_680_680"><span class="label">[680]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 21.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_681_681" id="Footnote_681_681"></a><a href="#FNanchor_681_681"><span class="label">[681]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 47; Douce has given a representation of this
instrument of torture from Millœus’s “Praxis Criminis Persequendi,”
Paris, 1541.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_682_682" id="Footnote_682_682"></a><a href="#FNanchor_682_682"><span class="label">[682]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 95.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_683_683" id="Footnote_683_683"></a><a href="#FNanchor_683_683"><span class="label">[683]</span></a> Cf. “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“His chin, new reap’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_684_684" id="Footnote_684_684"></a><a href="#FNanchor_684_684"><span class="label">[684]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 16-33.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_685_685" id="Footnote_685_685"></a><a href="#FNanchor_685_685"><span class="label">[685]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 372, 373. In Lincolnshire this
day is called “Hally-Loo Day.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_686_686" id="Footnote_686_686"></a><a href="#FNanchor_686_686"><span class="label">[686]</span></a> See Butler’s “Lives of the Saints.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_687_687" id="Footnote_687_687"></a><a href="#FNanchor_687_687"><span class="label">[687]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 868; Brady’s
“Clavis Calendaria.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_688_688" id="Footnote_688_688"></a><a href="#FNanchor_688_688"><span class="label">[688]</span></a> Nich. Harpsfield, “Hist. Eccl. Anglicana,” p. 86.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_689_689" id="Footnote_689_689"></a><a href="#FNanchor_689_689"><span class="label">[689]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” p. 404.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_690_690" id="Footnote_690_690"></a><a href="#FNanchor_690_690"><span class="label">[690]</span></a> Puling, or singing small, as Bailey explains the word.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_691_691" id="Footnote_691_691"></a><a href="#FNanchor_691_691"><span class="label">[691]</span></a> See Swainson’s “Weather-Lore,” 1873, pp. 141-143.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_692_692" id="Footnote_692_692"></a><a href="#FNanchor_692_692"><span class="label">[692]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” p. 409.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_693_693" id="Footnote_693_693"></a><a href="#FNanchor_693_693"><span class="label">[693]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 25; “The Church
of Our Fathers,” by D. Rock, 1853, vol. iii. p. 215; <i>Gent. Mag.</i>, 1777,
vol. xliii. p. 158; see Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. pp. 601, 602; Brady’s
“Clavis Calendaria.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_694_694" id="Footnote_694_694"></a><a href="#FNanchor_694_694"><span class="label">[694]</span></a> Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. i. p. 198.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_695_695" id="Footnote_695_695"></a><a href="#FNanchor_695_695"><span class="label">[695]</span></a> See Sandy’s “Christmastide, its History, Festivities, and Carols;”
also <i>Athenæum</i>, Dec. 20, 1856.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_696_696" id="Footnote_696_696"></a><a href="#FNanchor_696_696"><span class="label">[696]</span></a> His blunder for comedy.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_697_697" id="Footnote_697_697"></a><a href="#FNanchor_697_697"><span class="label">[697]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” 1876, pp. 459, 463; Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. ii. p. 943; “Antiquarian Repertory,” vol. i. p. 218.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_698_698" id="Footnote_698_698"></a><a href="#FNanchor_698_698"><span class="label">[698]</span></a> This was a deep draught to the health of any one, in which it was
customary to empty the glass or vessel.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_699_699" id="Footnote_699_699"></a><a href="#FNanchor_699_699"><span class="label">[699]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 441-449.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_700_700" id="Footnote_700_700"></a><a href="#FNanchor_700_700"><span class="label">[700]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 461, 469, 478, 480.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_701_701" id="Footnote_701_701"></a><a href="#FNanchor_701_701"><span class="label">[701]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. i. pp. 1-15.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span></h2>

<h3>BIRTH AND BAPTISM.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">As</span> every period of human life has its peculiar rites and
ceremonies, its customs and superstitions, so has that ever
all-eventful hour which heralds the birth of a fresh actor
upon the world’s great stage. From the cradle to the grave,
through all the successive epochs of man’s existence, we find
a series of traditional beliefs and popular notions, which have
been handed down to us from the far-distant past. Although,
indeed, these have lost much of their meaning in the
lapse of years, yet in many cases they are survivals of primitive
culture, and embody the conceptions of the ancestors
of the human race. Many of these have been recorded by
Shakespeare, who, acting upon the great principle of presenting
his audience with matters familiar to them, has
given numerous illustrations of the manners and superstitions
of his own country, as they existed in his day. Thus,
in “Richard III.” (iii. 1), when he represents the Duke of
Gloster saying,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So wise so young, they say, do never live long,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">he alludes to the old superstition, still deeply rooted in the
minds of the lower orders, that a clever child never lives
long. In Bright’s “Treatise of Melancholy” (1586, p. 52),
we read: “I have knowne children languishing of the splene,
obstructed and altered in temper, talke with gravity and
wisdom surpassing those tender years, and their judgments
carrying a marvellous imitation of the wisdome of the ancient,
having after a sort attained that by disease, which
others have by course of yeares; whereof I take it the proverb
ariseth, that ‘they be of shorte life who are of wit so pregnant.’”
There are sundry superstitious notions relating to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span>
the teething of children prevalent in our own and other
countries. In “3 Henry VI.” (v. 6), the Duke of Gloster,
alluding to the peculiarities connected with his, birth, relates
how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The midwife wonder’d; and the women cried<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And so I was; which plainly signified<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That I should snarl, and bite, and play the dog.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is still believed, for instance, in many places, that if a
child’s first tooth appears in the upper jaw it is an omen of
its dying in infancy; and when the teeth come early it is
regarded as an indication that there will soon be another
baby. In Sussex there is a dislike to throwing away the
cast teeth of children, from a notion that, should they be
found and gnawed by any animal, the child’s new tooth
would be exactly like the animal’s that had bitten the old
one. In Durham, when the first teeth come out the cavities
must be filled with salt, and each tooth burned, while
the following words are repeated:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fire, fire, burn bone,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">God send me my tooth again.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the above passage, then, Shakespeare simply makes
the Duke of Gloster refer to that extensive folk-lore associated
with human birth, showing how careful an observer
he was in noticing the whims and oddities of his countrymen.</p>

<p>Again, one of the foremost dangers supposed to hover
round the new-born infant was the propensity of witches
and fairies to steal the most beautiful and well-favored children,
and to leave in their places such as were ugly and
stupid. These were usually called “changelings.” Shakespeare
alludes to this notion in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1), where Puck says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Because that she, as her attendant, hath<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She never had so sweet a changeling.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And further on, in the same scene, Oberon says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I do but beg a little changeling boy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be my henchman.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As a fairy is, in each case, the speaker, the changeling in
this case denotes the child taken by them. So, too, in the
“Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3), in the passage where the Shepherd
relates: “it was told me, I should be rich by the fairies;
this is some changeling:—open’t.” As the child here found
was a beautiful one, the changeling must naturally mean the
child stolen by the fairies, especially as the gold left with it
is conjectured to be fairy gold. The usual signification,
however, of the term <i>changeling</i> is thus marked by Spenser
(“Fairy Queen,” I. x. 65).</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“From thence a faery thee unweeting reft,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There as thou slepst in tender swadling band,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And her base elfin brood there for thee left:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Such men do chaungelings call, so chaunged by faeries theft.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Occasionally fairies played pranks with new-born children
by exchanging them. To this notion King Henry refers
(“1 Henry IV.” i. 1) when, speaking of Hotspur compared
with his own profligate son, he exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“O that it could be prov’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That some night-tripping fairy had exchang’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>To induce the fairies to restore the stolen child, it was
customary in Ireland either to put the one supposed of being
a changeling on a hot shovel, or to torment it in some
other way. It seems that, in Denmark, the mother heats
the oven, and places the changeling on the peel, pretending
to put it in, or whips it severely with a rod, or throws it
into the water. In the Western Isles of Scotland idiots are
supposed to be the fairies’ changelings, and, in order to regain
the lost child, parents have recourse to the following
device. They place the changeling on the beach, below
high-water mark, when the tide is out, and pay no heed to
its screams, believing that the fairies, rather than suffer their
offspring to be drowned by the rising water, will convey it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span>
away, and restore the child they had stolen. The sign that
this has been done is the cessation of the child’s screaming.
The most effectual preservative, however, against fairy influence,
is supposed to be baptism; and hence, among the superstitious,
this rite is performed as soon as possible.</p>

<p>A form of superstition very common in days gone by was
the supposed influence of the “Evil eye,” being designated
by the terms “o’erlooked,” “forelooked,” or “eye-bitten,”
certain persons being thought to possess the power of inflicting
injury by merely looking on those whom they wished
to harm. Even the new-born child was not exempt from
this danger, and various charms were practised to avert it.
In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5), Pistol says of
Falstaff:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Vile worm, thou wast o’erlook’d, even in thy birth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This piece of folk-lore may be traced back to the time of
the Romans, and, in the late Professor Conington’s translation
of the “Satires of Persius,” it is thus spoken of:
“Look here! a grandmother or a superstitious aunt has
taken baby from his cradle, and is charming his forehead
against mischief by the joint action of her middle-finger and
her purifying spittle; for she knows right well how to check
the evil eye.”<a name="FNanchor_702_702" id="FNanchor_702_702"></a><a href="#Footnote_702_702" class="fnanchor">[702]</a> Is is again alluded to in the “Merchant
of Venice” (iii. 2), where Portia, expressing to Bassanio her
feelings of regard, declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Beshrew your eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They have o’erlook’d me, and divided me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One half of me is yours, the other half yours;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), Aaron speaks of Tamora
as:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This superstition, however, is not yet obsolete, but lingers
on in many country places.</p>

<p>We may also compare a similar phrase made use of by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span>
Cleopatra (“Antony and Cleopatra,” iii. 7), in answer to
Enobarbus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the word <i>forespeak</i> having anciently had the meaning of
charm or bewitch, like <i>forbid</i> in “Macbeth” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He shall live a man forbid.”<a name="FNanchor_703_703" id="FNanchor_703_703"></a><a href="#Footnote_703_703" class="fnanchor">[703]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among the numerous customs associated with the birth
of a child may be mentioned the practice of giving presents
at the announcement of this important event. In “Henry
VIII.” (v. 1), on the old lady’s making known to the king
the happy tidings of the birth of a princess, he says to Lovell:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Give her an hundred marks. I’ll to the queen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The old lady, however, resents what she considers a paltry
sum:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“An hundred marks! By this light, I’ll ha’ more.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An ordinary groom is for such payment.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will have more, or scold it out of him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was an ancient custom—one which is not quite out of
use—for the sponsors at christenings to offer silver or gilt
spoons as a present to the child. These were called “apostle
spoons,” because the extremity of the handle was formed
into the figure of one or other of the apostles. Such as
were opulent and generous gave the whole twelve; those
who were moderately rich or liberal escaped at the expense
of the four evangelists, or even sometimes contented themselves
with presenting one spoon only, which exhibited the
figure of any saint, in honor of whom the child received its
name. In “Henry VIII.” (v. 2) it is in allusion to this custom
that, when Cranmer professes to be unworthy of being
a sponsor to the young princess, Shakespeare makes the
king reply:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.”<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
</div></div>

<p>A story is related of Shakespeare promising spoons to
one of Ben Jonson’s children, in a collection of anecdotes
entitled “Merry Passages and Jests,” compiled by Sir Nicholas
L’Estrange (MSS. Harl. 6395): “Shakespeare was godfather
to one of Ben Jonson’s children, and after the christ’ning,
being in a deepe study, Jonson came to cheere him up,
and ask’t him why he was so melancholy. ‘No faith, Ben
(sayes he), not I; but I have been considering a great while
what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my
godchild, and I have resolv’d at last.’ ‘I pr’y thee, what?’
sayes he. ‘I’ faith, Ben, I’le e’en give him a douzen good
Latin spoones, and thou shalt translate them.’” “Shakespeare,”
says Mr. Thoms,<a name="FNanchor_704_704" id="FNanchor_704_704"></a><a href="#Footnote_704_704" class="fnanchor">[704]</a> “willing to show his wit, if not
his wealth, gave a dozen spoons, not of silver, but of latten,
a name formerly used to signify a mixed metal resembling
brass, as being the most appropriate gift to the child of a
father so learned.” In Middleton’s “Chaste Maid of Cheapside,”
1620:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>2 Gossip.</i> What has he given her? What is it, gossip?</p>

<p><i>3 Gossip.</i> A fair, high-standing cup, and two great ’postle spoons,
one of them gilt.”</p></div>

<p class="ni">And Beaumont and Fletcher, in the “Noble Gentleman”
(v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll be a gossip, Beaufort,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I have an odd apostle spoon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The gossip’s feast, held in honor of those who were associated
in the festivities of a christening, was a very ancient
English custom, and is frequently mentioned by dramatists
of the Elizabethan age. The term gossip or godsip, a Saxon
word signifying <i>cognata ex parte dei</i>, or godmother, is
well defined by Richard Verstegan, in his “Restitution of
Decayed Intelligence.” He says: “Our Christian ancestors,
understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents
and such as undertooke for the child at baptism, called
each other by the name of <i>godsib</i>, which is as much as to say<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
that they were <i>sib</i> together, that is, of <i>kin</i> together through
God. And the childe, in like manner, called such his godfathers
or godmothers.”</p>

<p>As might be expected, it is often alluded to by Shakespeare.
Thus, in the “Comedy of Errors” (v. 1), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Abbess.</i> Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of you, my sons: and till this present hour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My heavy burthen ne’er delivered.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The duke, my husband, and my children both,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And you the calendars of their nativity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Go to a gossip’s feast, and go with me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">After so long grief, such festivity!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Duke.</i> With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), the
mischievous Puck says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In very likeness of a roasted crab;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And, once more, we find Capulet, in “Romeo and Juliet”
(iii. 5), saying to the Nurse:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Peace, you mumbling fool!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Utter your gravity o’er a gossip’s bowl;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For here we need it not.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Referring to entertainments at christenings, we find the following
in the “Batchelor’s Banquet,” 1603 (attributed to
Dekker): “What cost and trouble it will be to have all
things fine against the Christening Day; what store of sugar,
biskets, comphets, and caraways, marmalet, and marchpane,
with all kinds of sweet-suckers and superfluous banqueting
stuff, with a hundred other odd and needless trifles, which
at that time must fill the pockets of dainty dames,” by which
it appears the ladies not only ate what they pleased, but
pocketed likewise. Upon this and the falling-off of the
custom of giving “apostle spoons” at the christening, we
read in “Shipman’s Gossip,” 1666:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Especially since gossips now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Eat more at christenings than bestow.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Formerly when they us’d to troul<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gilt bowls of sack, they gave the bowl;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Two spoons at least; an use ill kept;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis well now if our own be left.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Strype tells us that, in 1559, the son of Sir Thomas Chamberlayne
was baptized at St. Benet’s Church, Paul’s Wharf,
when “the Church was hung with cloth of arras, and after
the christening were brought wafers, comfits, and divers
banqueting dishes, and hypocras and Muscadine wine, to
entertain the guests.”</p>

<p>In “Henry VIII.” (v. 4), the Porter says: “Do you look
for ale and cakes here, you rude rascals?”</p>

<p>A term formerly in use for the name given at baptism was
“Christendom,” an allusion to which we find in “All’s Well
that Ends Well” (i. 1), where Helena says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“with a world<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That blinking Cupid gossips,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the meaning evidently being, a number of pretty, fond,
adopted appellations or Christian names to which blind Cupid
stands godfather. The expression is often used for baptism
by old writers; and Singer<a name="FNanchor_705_705" id="FNanchor_705_705"></a><a href="#Footnote_705_705" class="fnanchor">[705]</a> quotes from “King John”
(iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“By my christendom,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So I were out of prison, and kept sheep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I should be as merry as the day is long.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Steevens observes that, in the Puritanical times, it was
usual to christen children with the names of moral and religious
virtues—a practice to which allusion seems to be made
in “The Tempest” (ii. 1) by Antonio:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Temperance was a delicate wench.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his description of a strumpet,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Though bad they be, they will not bate an ace,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span>
<span class="i0">To be call’d Prudence, Temperance, Faith, or Grace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In days gone by a “chrisom” or “christom child” was
one who had recently been baptized, and died within the
month of birth, the term having originated in the “face-cloth,
or piece of linen, put upon the head of a child newly
baptized.” The word was formed from the chrism, that is,
the anointing, which formed a part of baptism before the
Reformation. Thus, in “Henry V.” (ii. 3), the hostess, Mrs.
Quickly, means “chrisom child” in the following passage,
where she speaks of Falstaff’s death: “’A made a finer end,
and went away an it had been any christom child.” In a
beautiful passage of Bishop Taylor’s “Holy Dying” (chap. i.
sec. 2), this custom is thus spoken of: “Every morning
creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an ignorance
and silence deep as midnight, and undiscerned as are the
phantoms that made a chrisom child to smile.” Referring
to the use of the chrisom-cloth in connection with baptism,
it appears that, after the usual immersion in water, the priest
made a cross on the child’s head with oil, after which the
chrisom was put on, the priest asking at the same time the
infant’s name, and saying, “Receive this white, pure, and
holy vestment, which thou shalt wear before the tribunal
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest inherit eternal
life. Amen.” It was to be worn seven days; but after the
Reformation, however, the use of oil was omitted, and the
chrisom was worn by the child till the mother’s churching,
when it was returned to the church. If the child died before
the churching, it was buried in the chrisom, and hence
it may be that the child itself was called a chrisom or chrisomer.<a name="FNanchor_706_706" id="FNanchor_706_706"></a><a href="#Footnote_706_706" class="fnanchor">[706]</a>
Thus, it will be seen that Dame Quickly simply
compares the manner of Falstaff’s death to that of a young
infant. In registers and bills of mortality we find infants
alluded to under the term “Chrisoms.” Burn, in his “History
of Parish Registers” (1862, p. 127), gives the subjoined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span>
entry from a register of Westminster Abbey: “The
Princess Ann’s child a chrissome bu. in y<sup>e</sup> vault, Oct. 22,
1687.”</p>

<p>In Graunt’s “Bills of Mortality,” cited in Johnson’s Dictionary,
we read: “When the convulsions were but were but few,
the number of chrisoms and infants was greater.” The
“bearing-cloth” was the mantle which generally covered
the child when it was carried to the font. It is noticed in
the “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3), by the Shepherd, who, on the
discovery of Perdita, says to the Clown: “Here’s a sight
for thee: look thee, a bearing-cloth for a squire’s child!
Look thee here; take up, take up, boy: open’t.” In Stow’s
“Chronicle” (1631, p. 1039), we are told that about this
time it was not customary “for godfathers and godmothers
generally to give plate at the baptisme of children, but only
to give ‘christening shirts,’ with little bands and cuffs,
wrought either with silk or blue thread. The best of them,
for chief persons, were edged with a small lace of black silk
and gold, the highest price of which, for great men’s children,
was seldom above a noble, and the common sort, two,
three, or four, and six shillings a piece.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_702_702" id="Footnote_702_702"></a><a href="#FNanchor_702_702"><span class="label">[702]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 383; Brand’s “Pop.
Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 44-46, 326.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_703_703" id="Footnote_703_703"></a><a href="#FNanchor_703_703"><span class="label">[703]</span></a> See Napier’s “Folk-Lore of West of Scotland,” 1879, pp. 34-40;
Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology;” Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii.
pp. 73, 74.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_704_704" id="Footnote_704_704"></a><a href="#FNanchor_704_704"><span class="label">[704]</span></a> “Anecdotes and Traditions,” 1839, p. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_705_705" id="Footnote_705_705"></a><a href="#FNanchor_705_705"><span class="label">[705]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. iv. p. 314.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_706_706" id="Footnote_706_706"></a><a href="#FNanchor_706_706"><span class="label">[706]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1859, pp. 299, 300; Nares’s
“Glossary,” vol. i. p. 160; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp.
84, 85.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span></h2>

<h3>MARRIAGE.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">The</span> style of courtship which prevailed in Shakespeare’s
time, and the numerous customs associated with the marriage
ceremony, may be accurately drawn from the many
allusions interspersed through his plays. From these, it
would seem that the mode of love-making was much the
same among all classes, often lacking that polish and refined
expression which are distinguishing characteristics
nowadays. As Mr. Drake remarks,<a name="FNanchor_707_707" id="FNanchor_707_707"></a><a href="#Footnote_707_707" class="fnanchor">[707]</a> the amatory dialogues
of Hamlet, Hotspur, and Henry V. are not more
refined than those which occur between Master Fenton
and Anne Page, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” between
Lorenzo and Jessica, in the “Merchant of Venice,”
and between Orlando and Rosalind, in “As You Like It.”
These last, which may be considered as instances taken
from the middle class of life, together with a few drawn
from the lower rank of rural manners, such as the courtship
of Touchstone and Audrey, and of Silvius and Phœbe,
in “As You Like It,” are good illustrations of this subject,
although it must be added that, in point of fancy, sentiment,
and simplicity, the most pleasing love-scenes in Shakespeare
are those of Romeo and Juliet and of Florizel and
Perdita.</p>

<p>The ancient ceremony of betrothing seems still to have
been in full use in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, he gives us
several interesting passages upon the subject of troth-plight.
Thus, in “Measure for Measure” (iii. 1), we learn that the
unhappiness of the poor, dejected Mariana was caused by a
violation of the troth-plight:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Duke.</i> She should this Angelo have married; was affianced to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span>
by oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract,
and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked
at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. But
mark how heavily this befell to the poor gentlewoman: there she lost
a noble and renowned brother, in his love toward her ever most kind
and natural; with him, the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage-dowry;
with both, her combinate husband, this well-seeming
Angelo.</p>

<p><i>Isabella.</i> Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?</p>

<p><i>Duke.</i> Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort;
swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonour;
in few, bestowed her on her own lamentation, which she yet
wears for his sake; and he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them,
but relents not.”</p></div>

<p>It is evident that Angelo and Mariana were bound by
oath; the nuptial was appointed; there was a prescribed
time between the contract and the performance of the solemnity
of the Church. The lady, however, having lost her
dowry, the contract was violated by her “combinate” or
affianced husband—the oath, no doubt, having been tendered
by a minister of the Church, in the presence of witnesses.
In “Twelfth Night” (iv. 3) we have a minute description
of such a ceremonial; for, when Olivia is hastily
espoused to Sebastian, she says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now go with me and with this holy man<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into the chantry by: there, before him,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And underneath that consecrated roof,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Plight me the full assurance of your faith;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That my most jealous and too doubtful soul<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May live at peace. He shall conceal it,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whiles you are willing it shall come to note:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What time we will our celebration keep<br /></span>
<span class="i0">According to my birth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This, then, was a private ceremony before a single witness,
who would conceal it till the proper period of the
public ceremonial. Olivia, fancying that she has thus espoused
the page, repeatedly calls him “husband;” and, being
rejected, she summons the priest to declare (v. 1):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“what thou dost know<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath newly pass’d between this youth and me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The priest answers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A contract of eternal bond of love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Confirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Attested by the holy close of lips,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Strengthen’d by interchangement of your rings;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all the ceremony of this compact<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seal’d in my function, by my testimony:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my grave<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I have travell’d but two hours.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), which contains
many a perfect picture of real rustic life, it appears that,
occasionally, the troth-plight was exchanged without the
presence of a priest; but that witnesses were essential to
the ceremony:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Florizel.</i> ... O, hear me breathe my life<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Before this ancient sir, who, it should seem,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath sometime lov’d: I take thy hand, this hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As soft as dove’s down and as white as it,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fann’d snow, that’s bolted<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By the northern blasts twice o’er.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Polixenes.</i><span style="padding-left: 7em">What follows this?—</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">How prettily the young swain seems to wash<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The hand, was fair before!—I have put you out:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, to your protestation; let me hear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What you profess.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Florizel.</i><span style="padding-left: 4em">Do, and be witness to’t.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Polixenes.</i> And this my neighbour too?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Florizel.</i><span style="padding-left: 9em">And he, and more</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than he, and men; the earth, the heavens, and all;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That, were I crown’d the most imperial monarch,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That ever made eye swerve; had force and knowledge<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More than was ever man’s, I would not prize them<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Without her love; for her employ them all;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Commend them, and condemn them, to her service,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or to their own perdition.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Polixenes.</i><span style="padding-left: 7em">Fairly offer’d.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Camillo.</i> This shows a sound affection.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Shepherd.</i><span style="padding-left: 10em">But, my daughter,</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Say you the like to him?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Perdita.</i><span style="padding-left: 6em">I cannot speak</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">So well, nothing so well; no, nor mean better:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By the pattern of mine own thoughts I cut out<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The purity of his.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Shepherd.</i><span style="padding-left: 3em">Take hands, a bargain!</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to’t:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I give my daughter to him, and will make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her portion equal his.<a name="FNanchor_708_708" id="FNanchor_708_708"></a><a href="#Footnote_708_708" class="fnanchor">[708]</a><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Florizel.</i><span style="padding-left: 6em">O, that must be</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ the virtue of your daughter: one being dead,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I shall have more than you can dream of yet;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Enough then for your wonder. But, come on,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Contract us ’fore these witnesses.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Shepherd.</i><span style="padding-left: 8em">Come, your hand;</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, daughter, yours.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">To the argument of Polixenes, that the father of Florizel
ought to know of his proceeding, the young man answers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Come, come, he must not.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mark our contract.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And then the father, discovering himself, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mark your divorce, young sir.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Here, then, as Mr. Knight remarks,<a name="FNanchor_709_709" id="FNanchor_709_709"></a><a href="#Footnote_709_709" class="fnanchor">[709]</a> in the publicity of a
village festival, the hand of the loved one is solemnly taken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span>
by her lover, who breathes his love before the ancient stranger
who is accidentally present. The stranger is called to
be a witness to the protestation, and so is the neighbor who
has come with him. The maiden is called upon by her father
to speak, and then the old man adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Take hands, a bargain!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The friends are to bear witness to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I give my daughter to him, and will make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her portion equal his.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The impatient lover then again exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Contract us ’fore these witnesses.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The shepherd takes the hands of the youth and the maiden.
Again the lover exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mark our contract.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The ceremony is left incomplete, for the princely father
discovers himself with:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mark your divorce, young sir.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It appears, therefore, that espousals before witnesses were
considered as constituting a valid marriage, if followed up
within a limited time by the marriage of the Church. However
much the Reformed Church might have endeavored to
abrogate this practice, it was unquestionably the ancient
habit of the people.<a name="FNanchor_710_710" id="FNanchor_710_710"></a><a href="#Footnote_710_710" class="fnanchor">[710]</a> It was derived from the Roman law,
and still prevails in the Lutheran Church.</p>

<p>Besides exchanging kisses,<a name="FNanchor_711_711" id="FNanchor_711_711"></a><a href="#Footnote_711_711" class="fnanchor">[711]</a> accompanied with vows of
everlasting affection, and whispering lovers’ reassurances of
fidelity, it was customary to interchange rings. In Shakespeare’s
plays, however, espousals are made with and without
the use of the ring. Thus, in the case of Ferdinand and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span>
Miranda, we read of their joining hands only (“Tempest,”
iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Ferdinand.</i> Ay, with a heart as willing<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As bondage e’er of freedom; here’s my hand.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Miranda.</i> An mine, with my heart in’t; and now farewell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till half an hour hence.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the passage already quoted from “Twelfth Night” (v. 1)
there seems to have been a mutual interchange of rings.</p>

<p>Some, indeed, considered that a betrothal was not complete
unless each spouse gave the other a circlet. Lady
Anne, in “Richard III.” (i. 2), is made to share in this misconception:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Gloster.</i> Vouchsafe to wear this ring.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Anne.</i> To take, is not to give.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Gloster.</i> Look, how my ring encompasseth thy finger,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 2) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Julia.</i> Keep this remembrance for thy Julia’s sake (<i>giving a ring</i>).<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Proteus.</i> Why, then, we’ll make exchange: here, take you this.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Julia.</i> And seal the bargain with a holy kiss.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A joint, or gimmal, ring was anciently a common token
among lovers, an allusion to which is made by Emilia, in
“Othello” (iv. 3): “I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring.”
Their nature will be best understood by a passage in
Dryden’s “Don Sebastian” (1690, act v.):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“A curious artist wrought them,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With joints so close, as not to be perceiv’d;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet are they both each other’s counterpart,<br /></span>
<span class="i8">... and in the midst,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A heart, divided in two halves, was plac’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>They were generally made of two or three hoops, so chased
and engraved that, when fastened together by a single rivet,
the whole three formed one design, the usual device being
a hand. When an engagement was contracted, the ring was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span>
taken apart, each spouse taking a division, and the third one
being presented to the principal witness of the contract.<a name="FNanchor_712_712" id="FNanchor_712_712"></a><a href="#Footnote_712_712" class="fnanchor">[712]</a>
Hence such a ring was known as a “Sponsalium Annulis,”
to which Herrick thus refers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou sent’st me a true-love knot, but I<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Returned a ring of jimmals, to imply<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy love hath one knot, mine a triple tye.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The term is used by the Duke of Anjou, in “1 Henry VI.”
(i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I think, by some odd gimmors or device,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their arms are set like clocks, still to strike on;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Else ne’er could they hold out so as they do.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Henry V.” (iv. 2), Grandpré tells how,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“in their pale dull mouths the gimmal bit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lies foul with chew’d grass, still and motionless.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Most readers of the “Merchant of Venice” remember
the mirthful use which Shakespeare makes of lovers’ rings.
Portia says (iii. 2), when giving her wealth and self to Bassanio:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I give them with this ring;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which when you part from, lose, or give away,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let it presage the ruin of your love.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The last act, too, gives several particulars about lovers’ rings,
which, in Elizabethan England,<a name="FNanchor_713_713" id="FNanchor_713_713"></a><a href="#Footnote_713_713" class="fnanchor">[713]</a> often had posies engraved
on them, and were worn by men on the left hand. Gratiano,
for example, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That she did give me; whose posy was<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For all the world like cutlers’ poetry<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon a knife, ‘Love me and leave me not.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again Bassanio exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, I were best to cut my left hand off,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And swear I lost the ring defending it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Taming of the Shrew” Shakespeare gives numerous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span>
allusions to the customs of his day connected with courtship
and marriage. Indeed, in the second act (sc. 2) we have
a perfect betrothal scene:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Petruchio.</i> Give me thy hand, Kate: I will unto Venice,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To buy apparel ’gainst the wedding-day.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Provide the feast, father, and bid the guests;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will be sure my Katharine shall be fine.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Baptista.</i> I know not what to say: but give me your hands;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">God send you joy, Petruchio! ’tis a match.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Gremio. Tranio.</i> Amen, say we; we will be witnesses.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Petruchio.</i> Father, and wife, and gentlemen, adieu;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will to Venice; Sunday comes apace.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We will have rings, and things, and fine array;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Although Katharina is only his spouse, and Baptista not
yet his father-in-law, Petruchio, in accordance with fashion,
calls her “wife” and him “father.” The spouses of old
times used to term one another “husband” and “wife,”
for, as they argued, they were as good as husband and wife.</p>

<p>Formerly there was a kind of betrothal or marriage contract
prevalent among the low orders called “hand-fasting,”
or “hand-festing,” said to have been much in use among
the Danes, and which is mentioned by Ray in his “Glossary
of Northumbrian Words.” It simply means hand-fastening
or binding. In “Cymbeline” (i. 5) the phrase is used in its
secondary sense by the Queen, who, speaking of Pisanio,
declares that he is</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“A sly and constant knave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not to be shak’d; the agent for his master,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the remembrancer of her, to hold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The hand-fast to her lord.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Christian State of Matrimony,” 1543, we find the
following illustration of this custom: “Yet in this thing
almost must I warn every reasonable and honest person to
beware that in the contracting of marriage they dissemble
not, nor set forth any lie. Every man, likewise, must esteem
the person to whom he is ‘handfasted’ none otherwise than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span>
for his own spouse; though as yet it be not done in the
church, nor in the street. After the handfasting and making
of the contract, the church-going and wedding should not
be deferred too long.” The author then goes on to rebuke
a custom “that at the handfasting there is made a great
feast and superfluous banquet.” Sir John Sinclair, in the
“Statistical account of Scotland” (1794, vol. xii. p. 615), tells
us that at a fair annually held at Eskdalemuir, Dumfriesshire,
“it was the custom for the unmarried persons of both
sexes to choose a companion according to their liking, with
whom they were to live till that time next year. This was
called ‘handfasting,’ or hand-in-fist. If they were pleased
with each other at that time then they continued together
for life; if not, they separated, and were free to make another
choice as at the first.”</p>

<p>Shakespeare has given us numerous illustrations of the
marriage customs of our forefathers, many of which are
interesting as relics of the past, owing to their having long
ago fallen into disuse. The fashion of introducing a bowl
of wine into the church at a wedding, which is alluded to
in the “Taming of the Shrew” (iii. 2), to be drunk by the
bride and bridegroom and persons present, immediately
after the marriage ceremony, is very ancient. Gremio relates
how Petruchio</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“stamp’d and swore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As if the vicar meant to cozen him.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But after many ceremonies done,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He calls for wine:—‘A health!’ quoth he, as if<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He had been aboard, carousing to his mates<br /></span>
<span class="i0">After a storm:—quaff’d off the muscadel,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And threw the sops<a name="FNanchor_714_714" id="FNanchor_714_714"></a><a href="#Footnote_714_714" class="fnanchor">[714]</a> all in the sexton’s face;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Having no other reason<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But that his beard grew thin and hungerly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And seem’d to ask him sops as he was drinking.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It existed even among our Gothic ancestors, and is mentioned
in the ordinances of the household of Henry VII.,
“For the Marriage of a Princess:—‘Then pottes of ipocrice
to be ready, and to be put into cupps with soppe, and to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span>
borne to the estates, and to take a soppe and drinke.’” It
was also practised at the magnificent marriage of Queen
Mary and Philip, in Winchester Cathedral, and at the marriage
of the Elector Palatine to the daughter of James I., in
1612-13. Indeed, it appears to have been the practice at
most marriages. In Jonson’s “Magnetic Lady” it is called
a “knitting cup;” in Middleton’s “No Wit like a Woman’s,”
the “contracting cup.” In Robert Armin’s comedy of “The
History of the Two Maids of More Clacke,” 1609, the play
begins with:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Enter a maid strewing flowers, and a serving-man perfuming the door.</i><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3"><i>Maid.</i> Strew, strew.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3"><i>Man.</i> The muscadine stays for the bride at church:<br /></span>
<span class="i2">The priest and Hymen’s ceremonies tend<br /></span>
<span class="i2">To make them man and wife.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Scornful Lady” (i. 1),
the custom is referred to:<a name="FNanchor_715_715" id="FNanchor_715_715"></a><a href="#Footnote_715_715" class="fnanchor">[715]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“If my wedding-smock were on,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were the gloves bought and given, the license come,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were the rosemary branches dipp’d, and all<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The hippocras and cakes eat and drunk off.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We find it enjoined in the Hereford missal. By the Sarum
missal it is directed that the sops immersed in this wine, as
well as the liquor itself, and the cup that contained it, should
be blessed by the priest. The beverage used on this occasion
was to be drunk by the bride and bridegroom and the
rest of the company.</p>

<p>The nuptial kiss in the church was anciently part of the
marriage ceremony, as appears from a rubric in one of the
Salisbury missals. In the “Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare
has made an excellent use of this custom, where he
relates how Petruchio (iii. 2)</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“took the bride about the neck<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And kiss’d her lips with such a clamorous smack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That, at the parting, all the church did echo.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “Richard II.” (v. 1), where the Duke of Northumberland<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span>
announces to the king that he is to be sent to
Pomfret, and his wife to be banished to France, the king
exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Doubly divorc’d!—Bad men, ye violate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A twofold marriage,—’twixt my crown and me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And then, betwixt me and my married wife.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let me unkiss the oath twixt thee and me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Marston, too, in his “Insatiate Countess,” mentions it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The kisse thou gav’st me in the church, here take.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The practice is still kept up among the poor; and Brand<a name="FNanchor_716_716" id="FNanchor_716_716"></a><a href="#Footnote_716_716" class="fnanchor">[716]</a>
says it is “still customary among persons of middling rank
as well as the vulgar, in most parts of England, for the
young men present at the marriage ceremony to salute the
bride, one by one, the moment it is concluded.”</p>

<p>Music was the universal accompaniment of weddings in
olden times.<a name="FNanchor_717_717" id="FNanchor_717_717"></a><a href="#Footnote_717_717" class="fnanchor">[717]</a> The allusions to wedding music that may be
found in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other
Elizabethan dramatists, testify, as Mr. Jeaffreson points out,
that, in the opinion of their contemporaries, a wedding without
the braying of trumpets and beating of drums and clashing
of cymbals was a poor affair. In “As You Like It”
(v. 4), Hymen says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It seems to have been customary for the bride at her
wedding to wear her hair unbraided and hanging loose over
her shoulders. There may be an allusion to this custom in
“King John” (iii. 1), where Constance says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O Lewis, stand fast! the devil tempts thee here<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span>
<span class="i0">In likeness of a new untrimmed bride.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">At the celebration of her marriage with the Palatine, Elizabeth
Stuart wore “her hair dishevelled and hanging down
her shoulders.” Heywood speaks of this practice in the
following graphic words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“At length the blushing bride comes, with her hair<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dishevelled ’bout her shoulders.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been suggested that the bride’s veil, which of late
years has become one of the most conspicuous features of
her costume, may be nothing more than a milliner’s substitute,
which in old time concealed not a few of the bride’s
personal attractions, and covered her face when she knelt at
the altar. Mr. Jeaffreson<a name="FNanchor_718_718" id="FNanchor_718_718"></a><a href="#Footnote_718_718" class="fnanchor">[718]</a> thinks it may be ascribed to the
Hebrew ceremony; or has come from the East, where veils
have been worn from time immemorial. Some, again, connect
it with the yellow veil which was worn by the Roman
brides. Strange, too, as it may appear, it is nevertheless
certain that knives and daggers were formerly part of the
customary accoutrements of brides. Thus, Shakespeare, in
the old quarto, 1597, makes Juliet wear a knife at the friar’s
cell, and when she is about to take the potion. This custom,
however, is easily accounted for, when we consider that
women anciently wore a knife suspended from their girdle.
Many allusions to this practice occur in old writers.<a name="FNanchor_719_719" id="FNanchor_719_719"></a><a href="#Footnote_719_719" class="fnanchor">[719]</a> In
Dekker’s “Match Me in London,” 1631, a bride says to her
jealous husband:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“See, at my girdle hang my wedding knives!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With those dispatch me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Witch of Edmonton,” 1658, Somerton says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But see, the bridegroom and bride come; the new<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pair of Sheffield knives fitted both to one sheath.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among other wedding customs alluded to by Shakespeare
we may mention one referred to in “Taming of the Shrew”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span>
(ii. 1), where Katharina, speaking of Bianca, says to her father:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She is your treasure, she must have a husband:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I must dance bare-foot on her wedding-day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">it being a popular notion that unless the elder sisters danced
barefoot at the marriage of a younger one, they would inevitably
become old maids, and be condemned “to lead
apes in hell.” The expression “to lead apes in hell,” applied
above to old maids, has given rise to much discussion,
and the phrase has not yet been satisfactorily explained.
Steevens suggests that it might be considered an act of
posthumous retribution for women who refused to bear children
to be condemned to the care of apes in leading-strings
after death. Malone says that “to lead apes” was in
Shakespeare’s time one of the employments of a bear-ward,
who often carried about one of these animals with his bear.
Nares explains the expression by reference to the word ape
as denoting a fool, it probably meaning that those coquettes
who made fools of men, and led them about without real
intention of marriage, would have them still to lead against
their will hereafter. In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1),
Beatrice says: “therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest
of the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell.” Douce<a name="FNanchor_720_720" id="FNanchor_720_720"></a><a href="#Footnote_720_720" class="fnanchor">[720]</a>
tells us that homicides and adulterers were in ancient times
compelled, by way of punishment, to lead an ape by the
neck, with their mouths affixed in a very unseemly manner
to the animal’s tail.</p>

<p>In accordance with an old custom, the bride, on the wedding-night,
had to dance with every guest, and play the
amiable, however much against her own wishes. In “Henry
VIII.” (v. 2), there seems to be an allusion to this practice,
where the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“I had thought,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They had parted so much honesty among them,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At least, good manners, as not thus to suffer<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A man of his place, and so near our favour,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To dance attendance on their lordships’ pleasures.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Christian State of Matrimony” (1543) we read<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span>
thus: “Then must the poor bryde kepe foote with a dauncers,
and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude,
and shameless soever he be.”</p>

<p>As in our own time, so, too, formerly, flowers entered
largely into the marriage festivities. Most readers will at
once call to mind that touching scene in “Romeo and Juliet”
(iv. 5), where Capulet says, referring to Juliet’s supposed
untimely death:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It seems, too, in days gone by to have been customary to
deck the bridal bed with flowers, various allusions to which
are given by Shakespeare. Thus, in “Hamlet” (v. 1), the
queen, speaking of poor Ophelia, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I hop’d thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Tempest” (iv. 1) we may compare the words of
Prospero, who, alluding to the marriage of his daughter
Miranda with Ferdinand, by way of warning, cautions them
lest</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“barren hate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sour-ey’d disdain and discord shall bestrew<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The union of your bed with weeds so loathly<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That you shall hate it both.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the Papal times no new-married couple could go to
bed together till the bridal-bed had been blessed—this being
considered one of the most important of the marriage ceremonies.
“On the evening of the wedding-day,” says Mr.
Jeaffreson,<a name="FNanchor_721_721" id="FNanchor_721_721"></a><a href="#Footnote_721_721" class="fnanchor">[721]</a> “when the married couple sat in state in the
bridal-bed, before the exclusion of the guests, who assembled
to commend them yet again to Heaven’s keeping, one or
more priests, attended by acolytes swinging to and fro
lighted censers, appeared in the crowded chamber to bless
the couch, its occupants, and the truckle-bed, and fumigate
the room with hallowing incense.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span>
Dream” (v. 1), Oberon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now, until the break of day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Through this house each fairy stray.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the best bride-bed will we,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which by us shall blessed be;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the issue there create<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ever shall be fortunate.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Steevens, in illustration of this custom, quotes from Chaucer’s
“The Merchant’s Tale” (ed. Tyrwhitt), line 9693:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And when the bed was with the preest yblessed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The formula for this curious ceremony is thus given in the
Manual for the use of Salisbury: “Nocte vero sequente
cum sponsus et sponsa ad lectum pervenerint, accedat sacerdos
et benedicat thalamum, dicens. Benedic, Domine,
thalamum istum et omnes habitantes in eo; ut in tua pace
consistant, et in tua voluntate permaneant: et in tuo amore
vivant et senescant et multiplicentur in longitudine dierum.
Per Dominum.—Item benedictio super lectum. Benedic,
Domine, hoc cubiculum, respice, quinon dormis neque dormitas.
Qui custodis Israel, custodi famulos tuos in hoc lecto
quiescentes ab omnibus fantasmaticis demonum illusionibus.
Custodi eos vigilantes ut in preceptis tuis meditentur dormientes,
et te per soporem sentiant; ut hic et ubique depensionis
tuæ muniantur auxilio. Per Dominum.—Deinde
fiat benedictio super eos in lecto tantum cum oremus. Benedicat
Deus corpora vestra et animas vestras; et det super
eos benedictionem sicut benedixit Abraham, Isaac, et Jacob,
Amen. His peractis aspergat eos aqua benedicta, et sic discedat
et dimittat eos in pace.”<a name="FNanchor_722_722" id="FNanchor_722_722"></a><a href="#Footnote_722_722" class="fnanchor">[722]</a></p>

<p>In the French romance of Melusine, the bishop who marries
her to Raymondin blesses the nuptial-bed. The ceremony
is there presented in a very ancient cut, of which
Douce has given a copy. The good prelate is sprinkling
the parties with holy water. It appears that, occasionally,
during the benediction, the married couple only sat on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span>
bed; but they generally received a portion of the consecrated
bread and wine. It is recorded in France, that, on
frequent occasions, the priest was improperly detained till
midnight, while the wedding guests rioted in the luxuries
of the table, and made use of language that was extremely
offensive to the clergy. It was therefore ordained, in the
year 1577, that the ceremony of blessing the nuptial-bed
should for the future be performed in the day-time, or at
least before supper, and in the presence of the bride and
bridegroom, and of their nearest relations only.</p>

<p>On the morning after the celebration of the marriage, it
was formerly customary for friends to serenade a newly married
couple, or to greet them with a morning song to bid
them good-morrow. In “Othello” (iii. 1) this custom is referred
to by Cassio, who, speaking of Othello and Desdemona,
says to the musicians:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Masters, play here; I will content your pains:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Something that’s brief; and bid, ‘Good morrow, general.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to Cotgrave, the morning-song to a newly married
woman was called the “hunt’s up.” It has been suggested
that this may be alluded to by Juliet (iii. 5), who,
when urging Romeo to make his escape, tells him:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O, now I would they had chang’d voices too!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hunting thee hence with hunt’s-up to the day.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O, now be gone.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In olden times torches were used at weddings—a practice,
indeed, dating as far back as the time of the Romans. From
the following lines in Herrick’s “Hesperides,” it has been
suggested that the custom once existed in this country:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Upon a maid that dyed the day she was marryed.</i><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">That morne which saw me made a bride,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The ev’ning witnest that I dy’d.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Those holy lights, wherewith they guide<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Unto the bed the bashful bride,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span>
<span class="i1">Serv’d but as tapers for to burne<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And light my reliques to their urne.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">This epitaph which here you see,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Supply’d the Epithalamie.”<a name="FNanchor_723_723" id="FNanchor_723_723"></a><a href="#Footnote_723_723" class="fnanchor">[723]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare alludes to this custom in “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2),
where Joan of Arc, thrusting out a burning torch on the top
of the tower at Rouen, exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Behold, this is the happy wedding torch,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That joineth Rouen unto her countrymen.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Tempest,” too (iv. 1), Iris says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“no bed-right shall be paid<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till Hymen’s torch be lighted.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to a Roman marriage custom, the bride, on her
entry into her husband’s house, was prohibited from treading
over his threshold, and lest she should even so much as
touch it, she was always lifted over it. Shakespeare seems
inadvertently to have overlooked this usage in “Coriolanus”
(iv. 5), where he represents Aufidius as saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I lov’d the maid I married; never man<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than when I first my wedded mistress saw<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Bestride my threshold.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Lucan in his “Pharsalia” (lib. ii. 1. 359), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Translata vetuit contingere limina planta.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, Sunday appears to have been a popular day
for marriages; the brides of the Elizabethan dramas being
usually represented as married on Sundays. In the “Taming
of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Petruchio, after telling his future
father-in-law “that upon Sunday is the wedding-day,” and
laughing at Katharina’s petulant exclamation, “I’ll see thee
hanged on Sunday first,” says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Father, and wife, and gentlemen, adieu;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will to Venice; Sunday comes apace:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We will have rings, and things, and fine array;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, kiss me, Kate, we will be married o’ Sunday.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Thus Mr. Jeaffreson, speaking of this custom in his “Brides<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span>
and Bridals,” rightly remarks: “A fashionable wedding,
celebrated on the Lord’s Day in London, or any part of
England, would nowadays be denounced by religious people
of all Christian parties. But in our feudal times, and long
after the Reformation, Sunday was of all days of the week
the favorite one for marriages. Long after the theatres had
been closed on Sundays, the day of rest was the chief day
for weddings with Londoners of every social class.”</p>

<p>Love-charms have from the earliest times been much in
request among the credulous, anxious to gain an insight into
their matrimonial prospects.<a name="FNanchor_724_724" id="FNanchor_724_724"></a><a href="#Footnote_724_724" class="fnanchor">[724]</a> In the “Merchant of Venice”
(v. 1), we have an allusion to the practice of kneeling and
praying at wayside crosses for a happy marriage, in the passage
where Stephano tells how his mistress</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“doth stray about<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For happy wedlock hours.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The use of love-potions by a despairing lover, to secure
the affections of another, was a superstitious practice much
resorted to in olden times.<a name="FNanchor_725_725" id="FNanchor_725_725"></a><a href="#Footnote_725_725" class="fnanchor">[725]</a> This mode of enchantment, too,
was formerly often employed in our own country, and Gay,
in his “Shepherd’s Week,” relates how Hobnelia was guilty
of this questionable practice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As I was wont, I trudged, last market-day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To town with new-laid eggs, preserved in hay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I made my market long before ’twas night;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My purse grew heavy, and my basket light.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Straight to the ’pothecary’s shop I went,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in love-powder all my money spent.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Behap what will, next Sunday after prayers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When to the ale-house Lubberkin repairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">These golden flies into his mug I’ll throw,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And soon the swain with fervent love shall glow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Character of a Quack Astrologer,” 1673, quoted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span>
by Brand, we are told how “he trappans a young heiress to
run away with a footman, by persuading a young girl ’tis her
destiny; and sells the old and ugly philtres and love-powder
to procure them sweethearts.” Shakespeare has represented
Othello as accused of winning Desdemona “by conjuration
and mighty magic.” Thus Brabantio (i. 2) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“thou hast practised on her with foul charms;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Abus’d her delicate youth with drugs, or minerals,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That weaken motion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in the following scene he further repeats the same
charge against Othello:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“She is abus’d, stol’n from me, and corrupted<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For nature so preposterously to err,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sans witchcraft could not.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Othello, however, in proving that he had won Desdemona
only by honorable means, addressing the Duke, replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“by your gracious patience,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What conjuration, and what mighty magic,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For such proceeding I am charg’d withal,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I won his daughter.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It may have escaped the poet’s notice that, by the Venetian
law, the giving love-potions was held highly criminal, as
appears in the code “Della Promission del Malefico,” cap.
xvii., “Del Maleficii et Herbarie.”</p>

<p>A further allusion to this practice occurs in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1). where Puck and Oberon amuse
themselves at Titania’s expense.<a name="FNanchor_726_726" id="FNanchor_726_726"></a><a href="#Footnote_726_726" class="fnanchor">[726]</a></p>

<p>An expression common in Shakespeare’s day for any one
born out of wedlock is mentioned by the Bastard in “King
John” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In at the window, or else o’er the hatch.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The old saying also that “Hanging and wiving go by destiny”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span>
is quoted by Nerissa in the “Merchant of Venice”
(ii. 9). In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Don Pedro
makes use of an old popular phrase in asking Claudio: “When
mean you to go to church?” referring to his marriage.</p>

<p>A solemn and even melancholy air was often affected by
the beaux of Queen Elizabeth’s time, as a refined mark of
gentility, a most sad and pathetic allusion to which custom
is made by Arthur in “King John” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Methinks, nobody should be sad but I:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet, I remember, when I was in France,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Only for wantonness.”<a name="FNanchor_727_727" id="FNanchor_727_727"></a><a href="#Footnote_727_727" class="fnanchor">[727]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There are frequent references to this fashion in our old
writers. Thus, in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humor”
(i. 3), we read: “Why, I do think of it; and I will be more
proud, and melancholy, and gentlemanlike than I have been,
I’ll insure you.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_707_707" id="Footnote_707_707"></a><a href="#FNanchor_707_707"><span class="label">[707]</span></a> “Shakespeare and His Times,” 1817, vol. i. p. 220.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_708_708" id="Footnote_708_708"></a><a href="#FNanchor_708_708"><span class="label">[708]</span></a> On entering into any contract, or plighting of troth, the clapping
of the hands together set the seal, as in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2),
where Leontes says:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>I am yours forever</i>.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>
So, too, in “The Tempest” (iii. 1):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Miranda.</i><span style="padding-left: 5em">My husband, then?</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><br /></span>
<span class="i1"><i>Ferdinand.</i> Ay, with a heart as willing<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As bondage e’er of freedom: here’s my hand.<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><br /></span>
<span class="i1"><i>Miranda.</i> And mine, with my heart in’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>
And in the old play of “Ram Alley,” by Barry (1611), we read, “Come,
clap hands, a match.” The custom is not yet disused in common life.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_709_709" id="Footnote_709_709"></a><a href="#FNanchor_709_709"><span class="label">[709]</span></a> “The Stratford Shakespeare,” 1854, vol. i p. 70.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_710_710" id="Footnote_710_710"></a><a href="#FNanchor_710_710"><span class="label">[710]</span></a> Knight’s “Stratford Shakespeare,” p. 73.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_711_711" id="Footnote_711_711"></a><a href="#FNanchor_711_711"><span class="label">[711]</span></a> Cf. “King John” (ii. 2):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>King Philip.</i><span style="padding-left: 3em">Young princes, close your hands.</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><br /></span>
<span class="i1"><i>Austria.</i> And your lips too; for, I am well assured,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That I did so, when I was first assured.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_712_712" id="Footnote_712_712"></a><a href="#FNanchor_712_712"><span class="label">[712]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 363; “Archæologia,” vol. xiv.
p. 7; Jones’s “Finger Ring Lore,” 1877, pp. 313-318.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_713_713" id="Footnote_713_713"></a><a href="#FNanchor_713_713"><span class="label">[713]</span></a> See Jeaffreson’s “Brides and Bridals,” 1873, vol. i. pp. 77, 78.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_714_714" id="Footnote_714_714"></a><a href="#FNanchor_714_714"><span class="label">[714]</span></a> Sops in wine.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_715_715" id="Footnote_715_715"></a><a href="#FNanchor_715_715"><span class="label">[715]</span></a> See “Brand’s Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 136, 139.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_716_716" id="Footnote_716_716"></a><a href="#FNanchor_716_716"><span class="label">[716]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 140.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_717_717" id="Footnote_717_717"></a><a href="#FNanchor_717_717"><span class="label">[717]</span></a> “Brides and Bridals,” 1873, vol. i. p. 252.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_718_718" id="Footnote_718_718"></a><a href="#FNanchor_718_718"><span class="label">[718]</span></a> “Brides and Bridals,” vol. i. p. 177.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_719_719" id="Footnote_719_719"></a><a href="#FNanchor_719_719"><span class="label">[719]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 131-133.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_720_720" id="Footnote_720_720"></a><a href="#FNanchor_720_720"><span class="label">[720]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 203.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_721_721" id="Footnote_721_721"></a><a href="#FNanchor_721_721"><span class="label">[721]</span></a> “Brides and Bridals,” vol. i. p. 98; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol.
ii. p. 175.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_722_722" id="Footnote_722_722"></a><a href="#FNanchor_722_722"><span class="label">[722]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 123, 124.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_723_723" id="Footnote_723_723"></a><a href="#FNanchor_723_723"><span class="label">[723]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 159.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_724_724" id="Footnote_724_724"></a><a href="#FNanchor_724_724"><span class="label">[724]</span></a> See “Merry Wives of Windsor,” iv. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_725_725" id="Footnote_725_725"></a><a href="#FNanchor_725_725"><span class="label">[725]</span></a> See Potter’s “Antiquities of Greece;” Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol.
iii. p. 306.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_726_726" id="Footnote_726_726"></a><a href="#FNanchor_726_726"><span class="label">[726]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_727_727" id="Footnote_727_727"></a><a href="#FNanchor_727_727"><span class="label">[727]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 563.</p></div>
</div>



<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span></h2>

<h3>DEATH AND BURIAL.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">From</span> a very early period there has been a belief in the
existence of a power of prophecy at that period which precedes
death. It took its origin in the assumed fact that the
soul becomes divine in the same ratio as its connection with
the body is loosened. It has been urged in support of this
theory that at the hour of death the soul is, as it were, on
the confines of two worlds, and may possibly at the same
moment possess a power which is both prospective and retrospective.
Shakespeare, in “Richard II.” (ii. 1), makes the
dying Gaunt exclaim, alluding to his nephew, the young and
self-willed king:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Methinks I am a prophet new inspir’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thus, expiring, do foretell of him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, the brave Percy, in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 4), when in
the agonies of death, expresses the same idea:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“O, I could prophesy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But that the earthy and cold hand of death<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lies on my tongue.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare what Nerissa says of Portia’s father
in “Merchant of Venice” (i. 2), “Your father was ever virtuous;
and holy men, at their death, have good inspirations.”</p>

<p>Curious to say, this notion may be traced up to the time
of Homer. Thus Patroclus prophesies the death of Hector
(“Iliad,” π. 852): “You yourself are not destined to live long,
for even now death is drawing nigh unto you, and a violent
fate awaits you—about to be slain in fight by the hands of
Achilles.” Aristotle tells us that the soul, when on the point
of death, foretells things about to happen. Others have
sought for the foundation of this belief in the 49th chapter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span>
of Genesis: “And Jacob called unto his sons, and said,
Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which
shall befall you in the last days.... And when Jacob had made
an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into
the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his
people.” Whether, however, we accept this origin or not,
at any rate it is very certain that the notion in question has
existed from the earliest times, being alluded to also by
Socrates, Xenophon, and Diodorus Siculus. It still lingers
on in Lancashire and other parts of England.</p>

<p>Among other omens of death may be mentioned high
spirits, which have been supposed to presage impending
death. Thus, in “Romeo and Juliet” (v. 3), Romeo exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“How oft, when men are at the point of death,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have they been merry! which their keepers call<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A lightning before death.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This idea is noticed by Ray, who inserts it as a proverb,
“It’s a lightening before death;” and adds this note: “This
is generally observed of sick persons, that a little before they
die their pains leave them, and their understanding and
memory return to them—as a candle just before it goes out
gives a great blaze.” It was also a superstitious notion that
unusual mirth was a forerunner of adversity. Thus, in the
last act of “Romeo and Juliet” (sc. 1) Romeo comes on,
saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My dreams presage some joyful news at hand:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My bosom’s lord sits lightly in his throne;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Immediately, however, a messenger enters to announce
Juliet’s death.</p>

<p>In “Richard III.” (iii. 2), Hastings is represented as rising
in the morning in unusually high spirits. Stanley says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The lords at Pomfret, when they rode from London,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were jocund, and suppos’d their state was sure,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And they, indeed, had no cause to mistrust;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But yet, you see, how soon the day o’ercast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This idea, it may be noted, runs throughout the whole scene.
Before dinner-time, Hastings was beheaded.</p>

<p>Once more, in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 2), the same notion is
alluded to in the following dialogue:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Westmoreland.</i> Health to my lord and gentle cousin, Mowbray.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mowbray.</i> You wish me health in very happy season;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For I am, on the sudden, something ill.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Archbishop.</i> Against ill chances men are ever merry;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But heaviness foreruns the good event.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Westmoreland.</i> Therefore be merry, coz; since sudden sorrow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Serves to say thus, ‘Some good thing comes to-morrow.’<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Archbishop.</i> Believe me, I am passing light in spirit.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mowbray.</i> So much the worse, if your own rule be true.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Tytler, in his “History of Scotland,” thus speaks of the
death of King James I.: “On this fatal evening (Feb. 20,
1437), the revels of the court were kept up to a late hour.
The prince himself appears to have been in unusually gay
and cheerful spirits. He even jested, if we may believe the
contemporary manuscript, about a prophecy which had
declared that a king that year should be slain.” Shelley
strongly entertained this superstition: “During all the time
he spent in Leghorn, he was in brilliant spirits, to him a sure
prognostic of coming evil.”</p>

<p>Again, it is a very common opinion that death announces
its approach by certain mysterious noises, a notion, indeed,
which may be traced up to the time of the Romans, who
believed that the genius of death announced his approach
by some supernatural warning. In “Troilus and Cressida”
(iv. 4), Troilus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hark! you are call’d: some say, the Genius so<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cries ‘Come!’ to him that instantly must die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This superstition was frequently made use of by writers of
bygone times, and often served to embellish, with touching
pathos, their poetic sentiment. Thus Flatman, in some
pretty lines, has embodied this thought:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My soul, just now about to take her flight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into the regions of eternal night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Methinks I hear some gentle spirit say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be not fearful, come away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Pope speaks in the same strain:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hark! they whisper, angels say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sister spirit, come away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare, too, further alludes to this idea in “Macbeth”
(ii. 3), where, it may be remembered, Lennox graphically
describes how, on the awful night in which Duncan is so
basely murdered:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And prophesying, with accents terrible,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of dire combustion, and confus’d events,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">New hatch’d to the woful time.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>As in Shakespeare’s day, so, too, at the present time, there
is perhaps no superstition so deeply rooted in the minds of
many people as the belief in what are popularly termed
“death-warnings.” Modern folk-lore holds either that a
knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of a death
about to happen, or that dying persons themselves announce
their dissolution to their friends in such strange sounds.<a name="FNanchor_728_728" id="FNanchor_728_728"></a><a href="#Footnote_728_728" class="fnanchor">[728]</a>
Many families are supposed to have particular warnings,
such as the appearance of a bird, the figure of a tall woman,
etc. Such, moreover, are not confined to our own country,
but in a variety of forms are found on the Continent. According
to another belief, it was generally supposed that
when a man was on his death-bed the devil or his agents
tried to seize his soul, if it should happen that he died without
receiving the sacrament of the Eucharist, or without
confessing his sins. Hence, in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 3), the
king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, beat away the busy meddling fiend<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That lays strong siege unto this wretch’s soul,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from his bosom purge this black despair.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the old Office books of the Church, these “busy meddling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span>
fiends” are often represented with great anxiety besieging
the dying man; but on the approach of the priest
and his attendants, they are shown to display symptoms
of despair at their impending discomfiture. Douce<a name="FNanchor_729_729" id="FNanchor_729_729"></a><a href="#Footnote_729_729" class="fnanchor">[729]</a> quotes
from an ancient manuscript book of devotion, written in the
reign of Henry VI., the following prayer to St. George:
“Judge for me whan the moste hedyous and damnable
dragons of helle shall be redy to take my poore soule and
engloute it in to theyr infernall belyes.”</p>

<p>Some think that the “passing-bell,” which was formerly
tolled for a person who was dying, was intended to drive
away the evil spirit that might be hovering about to seize
the soul of the deceased. Its object, however, was probably
to bespeak the prayers of the faithful, and to serve as a solemn
warning to the living. Shakespeare has given several
touching allusions to it. Thus, in Sonnet lxxi. he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No longer mourn for me when I am dead,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Give warning to the world that I am fled<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From this vile world.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 1), Northumberland speaks in the same
strain:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath but a losing office: and his tongue<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Remember’d knolling a departing friend.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may quote a further allusion in “Venus and Adonis”
(l. 701):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And now his grief may be compared well<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In a statute passed during the reign of Henry VIII., it is
ordered “that clarks are to ring no more than the passing
bell for poare people, nor less for an honest householder,
and he be a citizen; nor for children, maydes, journeymen,
apprentices, day-labourers, or any other poare person.” In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span>
1662, the Bishop of Worcester<a name="FNanchor_730_730" id="FNanchor_730_730"></a><a href="#Footnote_730_730" class="fnanchor">[730]</a> asks, in his visitation charge:
“Doth the parish clerk or sexton take care to admonish the
living, by tolling of a passing-bell, of any that are dying,
thereby to meditate of their own deaths, and to commend
the other’s weak condition to the mercy of God?” It was,
also, called the “soul-bell,” upon which Bishop Hall remarks:
“We call it the soul-bell because it signifies the departure
of the soul, not because it helps the passage of the soul.”
Ray, in his “Collection of Proverbs,” has the following
couplet:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When thou dost hear a toll or knell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then think upon thy passing-bell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was formerly customary to draw away the pillow from
under the heads of dying persons, so as to accelerate their
departure—an allusion to which we find in “Timon of
Athens” (iv. 3), where Timon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This, no doubt, originated in the notion that a person cannot
die happily on a bed made of pigeons’ feathers. Grose
says: “It is impossible for a person to die whilst resting on
a pillow stuffed with the feathers of a dove; but that he
will struggle with death in the most exquisite torture. The
pillows of dying persons are therefore frequently taken away
when they appear in great agonies, lest they may have pigeon’s
feathers in them.” Indeed, in Lancashire, this practice
is carried to such an extent that some will not allow
dying persons to lie on a feather bed, because they hold that
it very much increases their pain and suffering, and actually
retards their departure.<a name="FNanchor_731_731" id="FNanchor_731_731"></a><a href="#Footnote_731_731" class="fnanchor">[731]</a></p>

<p>The departure of the human soul from this world, and its
journey to its untried future, have become interwoven with
an extensive network of superstitions, varying more or less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span>
in every country and tribe. Shakespeare has alluded to the
numerous destinations of the disembodied spirit, enumerating
the many ideas prevalent in his time on the subject. In
“Measure for Measure” (iii. 1), Claudio thus speaks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This sensible warm motion to become<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And blown with restless violence round about<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The pendent world.”<a name="FNanchor_732_732" id="FNanchor_732_732"></a><a href="#Footnote_732_732" class="fnanchor">[732]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare also the powerful language of Othello
(v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even like thy chastity.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the possession of this heavenly sight!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Douce<a name="FNanchor_733_733" id="FNanchor_733_733"></a><a href="#Footnote_733_733" class="fnanchor">[733]</a> says that in the former passage it is difficult to
decide whether Shakespeare is alluding to the pains of hell
or purgatory. Both passages are obscure, and have given
rise to much criticism. It seems probable, however, that
while partly referring to the notions of the time, relating to
departed souls, Shakespeare has in a great measure incorporated
the ideas of what he had read in books of Catholic
divinity. The passages quoted above remind us of the legend
of St. Patrick’s purgatory, where mention is made of a
lake of ice and snow into which persons were plunged up to
their necks; and of the description of hell given in the
“Shepherd’s Calendar:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“a great froste in a water rounes<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And after a bytter wynde comes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which gothe through the soules with eyre;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fends with pokes pulle theyr flesshe ysondre,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They fight and curse, and eche on other wonder.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We cannot here enter, however, into the mass of mystic
details respecting “the soul’s dread journey<a name="FNanchor_734_734" id="FNanchor_734_734"></a><a href="#Footnote_734_734" class="fnanchor">[734]</a> by caverns
and rocky paths and weary plains, over steep and slippery
mountains, by frail bank or giddy bridge, across gulfs or
rushing rivers, abiding the fierce onset of the soul-destroyer
or the doom of the stern guardian of the other world.” Few
subjects, indeed, have afforded greater scope for the imagination
than the hereafter of the human soul, and hence, as
might be expected, numerous myths have been invented in
most countries to account for its mysterious departure in
the hour of death, from the world of living men to its unseen,
unknown home in the distant land of spirits.</p>

<p>Shakespeare several times uses the word “limbo” in a
general signification for hell, as in “Titus Andronicus”
(iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As far from help as limbo is from bliss.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), Parolles says:
“for, indeed, he was mad for her, and talked of Satan, and
of limbo, and of furies, and I know not what.” In “Henry
VIII.” (v. 4), “in Limbo Patrum” is jocularly put for a
prison; and, again, in “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 2), “he’s in
Tartar limbo.” “According to the schoolmen, <i>Limbus Patrum</i>
was the place, bordering on hell, where the souls of
the patriarchs and saints of the Old Testament remained
till the death of Christ, who, descending into hell, set them
free.”<a name="FNanchor_735_735" id="FNanchor_735_735"></a><a href="#Footnote_735_735" class="fnanchor">[735]</a></p>

<p>One of the punishments invented of old for the covetous
and avaricious, in hell, was to have melted gold poured
down their throats, to which allusion is made by Flaminius,
in “Timon of Athens” (iii. 1), who, denouncing Lucullus
for his mean insincerity towards his friend Timon, exclaims,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span>
on rejecting the bribe offered him to tell his master that he
had not seen him:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“May these add to the number that may scald thee!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let molten coin be thy damnation.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” Lazarus declares himself
to have seen covetous men and women in hell dipped in
caldrons of molten lead. Malone quotes the following from
an old black-letter ballad of “The Dead Man’s Song:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ladles full of melted gold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were poured down their throats.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Crassus was so punished by the Parthians.<a name="FNanchor_736_736" id="FNanchor_736_736"></a><a href="#Footnote_736_736" class="fnanchor">[736]</a></p>

<p>There is possibly a further allusion to this imaginary punishment
in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 5), where Cleopatra
says to the messenger:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But, sirrah, mark, we use<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To say, the dead are well: bring it to that,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The gold I give thee will I melt, and pour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Down thy ill-uttering throat.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to a well-known superstition among sailors, it
is considered highly unlucky to keep a corpse on board, in
case of a death at sea. Thus, in “Pericles” (iii. 1), this piece
of folk-lore is alluded to:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>1 Sailor.</i> Sir, your queen must overboard; the sea works high, the
wind is loud, and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead.</p>

<p><i>Pericles.</i> That’s your superstition.</p>

<p><i>1 Sailor.</i> Pardon us, sir; with us at sea it hath been still observed;
and we are strong in custom. Therefore briefly yield her; for she
must overboard straight.”</p></div>

<p>It was also a popular opinion that death is delayed until
the ebb of the tide—a superstition to which Mrs. Quickly
refers in “Henry V.” (ii. 3); speaking of Falstaff’s death,
she says: “’A made a finer end, and went away, an it had
been any christom child; ’a parted even just between twelve<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span>
and one, even at the turning o’ the tide.” Hence, in cases
of sickness, many pretended that they could foretell the
hour of the soul’s departure. It may be remembered how
Mr. Peggotty explained to David Copperfield, by poor Barkis’s
bedside, that “people can’t die along the coast except
when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born unless
it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born till flood. He’s a-going
out with the tide—he’s a-going out with the tide. It’s
ebb at half arter three, slack-water half an hour. If he lives
till it turns he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out
with the next tide.” Mr. Henderson<a name="FNanchor_737_737" id="FNanchor_737_737"></a><a href="#Footnote_737_737" class="fnanchor">[737]</a> quotes from the parish
register of Heslidon, near Hartlepool, the subjoined extracts
of old date, in which the state of the tide at the time
of death is mentioned:</p>

<p>“The xi<sup>th</sup> daye of Maye, <small>A.D.</small> 1595, at vi. of ye clocke in
the morninge, being full water, Mr. Henrye Mitford, of Hoolam,
died at Newcastel, and was buried the xvi<sup>th</sup> daie, being
Sondaie, at evening prayer, the hired preacher maid ye sermon.”</p>

<p>“The xvii<sup>th</sup> daie of Maie, at xii. of ye clock at noon, being
lowe water, Mrs. Barbara Mitford died, and was buried the
xviii<sup>th</sup> daie of Maie, at ix. of the clocke. Mr. Holsworth
maid ye sermon.”</p>

<p>According to Mr. Henderson, this belief is common along
the east coast of England, from Northumberland to Kent.
It has been suggested that there may be “some slight foundation
for this belief in the change of temperature which undoubtedly
takes place on the change of tide, and which may
act on the flickering spark of life, extinguishing it as the
ebbing sea recedes.”</p>

<p>We may compare, too, the following passage in “2 Henry
IV.” (iv. 4), where Clarence, speaking of the approaching
death of the king, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The river hath thrice flow’d, no ebb between;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the old folk, time’s doting chronicles,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Say it did so a little time before<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span>
<span class="i0">That our great grandsire, Edward, sick’d and died.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This was an historical fact, having happened on October 12,
1411.</p>

<p>The prayers of the Church, which are used for the recovery
of the sick, were, in the olden time, also supposed to have a
morbific influence, to which Gloster attributes the death of
the king in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The church! where is it? Had not churchmen pray’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His thread of life had not so soon decay’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, the custom of closing the eyes at the moment
of death is touchingly referred to in “Antony and Cleopatra”
(v. 2), where Charmian may be supposed to close Cleopatra’s
eyes:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Downy windows, close;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And golden Phœbus never be beheld<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of eyes again so royal.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Passing on from that solemn moment in human life when
the soul takes its flight from the fragile tenement of clay
that contained it during its earthly existence, we find that,
even among the lowest savages, there has generally been a
certain respect paid to the dead body; and, consequently,
various superstitious rites have, from time to time, been
associated with its burial, which has been so appropriately
termed “the last act.” While occasionally speaking of
death, Shakespeare has not only pictured its solemnity in
the most powerful and glowing language, but, as opportunity
allowed, given us a slight insight into those customs
that formerly prevailed in connection with the committal
of the body to its final resting-place in the grave. At the
present day, when there is an ever-growing tendency to discard
and forget, as irrational and foolish, the customs of bygone
years, it is interesting to find chronicled, for all future
time, in the immortal pages of our illustrious poet, those
superstitious rites and social usages which may be said to
have been most intimately identified with the age to which
they belonged. One custom, perhaps, that will always retain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span>
its old hold among us—so long as we continue to bury
the remains of our departed ones—is the scattering of flowers
on their graves; a practice, indeed, which may be traced
up to pagan times. It is frequently mentioned by Shakespeare
in some of his superb passages; as, for instance, in
“Cymbeline” (iv. 2), where Arviragus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“With fairest flowers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The azur’d hare-bell, like thy veins; no, nor<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">Yea, and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To winter-ground thy corse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Hamlet” (iv. 5), the poor, bewildered Ophelia sings:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“Larded with sweet flowers;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which bewept to the grave did go<br /></span>
<span class="i1">With true-love showers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Then, further on (v. 1), there is the affecting flower-strewing
scene, where the Queen, standing over the grave of Ophelia,
bids her a long farewell:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sweets to the sweet: farewell!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I hop’d thou should’st have been my Hamlet’s wife;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not have strew’d thy grave.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on (v. 3) the Page says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He came with flowers to strew his lady’s grave.”<a name="FNanchor_738_738" id="FNanchor_738_738"></a><a href="#Footnote_738_738" class="fnanchor">[738]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Once more, in “Pericles” (iv. 1), Marina is introduced, entering
with a basket of flowers, uttering these sad words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No, I will rob Tellus of her weed,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span>
<span class="i0">To strew thy green with flowers; the yellows, blues,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The purple violets, and marigolds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall, as a carpet, hang upon thy grave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While summer days do last.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Flowers, which so soon droop and wither, are, indeed,
sweet emblems of that brief life which is the portion of
mankind in this world, while, at the same time, their exquisite
beauty is a further type of the glory that awaits the
redeemed hereafter, when, like fair flowers, they shall burst
forth in unspeakable grandeur on the resurrection morn.
There is a pretty custom observed in South Wales on Palm
Sunday, of spreading fresh flowers upon the graves of
friends and relatives, the day being called Flowering Sunday.</p>

<p>The practice of decorating the corpse is mentioned by
many old writers. In “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Friar
Laurence says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On this fair corse; and, as the custom is,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In all her best array bear her to church.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Queen Katharine, in “Henry VIII.” (iv. 2), directs:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“When I am dead, good wench,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let me be us’d with honour: strew me over<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With maiden flowers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was formerly customary, in various parts of England, to
have a garland of flowers and sweet herbs carried before a
maiden’s coffin, and afterwards to suspend it in the church.
In allusion to this practice, the Priest, in “Hamlet” (v. 1),
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Yet here she is allow’d her virgin crants,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of bell and burial.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—crants<a name="FNanchor_739_739" id="FNanchor_739_739"></a><a href="#Footnote_739_739" class="fnanchor">[739]</a> meaning garlands. It may be noted that no other
instance has been found of this word in English. These<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span>
garlands are thus described by Gay:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To her sweet mem’ry flow’ry garlands strung,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On her now empty seat aloft were hung.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Nichols, in his “History of Lancashire” (vol. ii. pt. i.
p. 382), speaking of Waltham, in Framland Hundred, says:
“In this church, under every arch, a garland is suspended,
one of which is customarily placed there whenever any
young unmarried woman dies.” Brand<a name="FNanchor_740_740" id="FNanchor_740_740"></a><a href="#Footnote_740_740" class="fnanchor">[740]</a> tells us he saw in
the churches of Wolsingham and Stanhope, in the county
of Durham, specimens of these garlands; the form of a
woman’s glove, cut in white paper, being hung in the centre
of each of them.</p>

<p>The funerals of knights and persons of rank were, in
Shakespeare’s day, performed with great ceremony and
ostentation. Sir John Hawkins observes that “the sword,
the helmet, the gauntlets, spurs, and tabard are still hung
over the grave of every knight.” In “Hamlet” (iv. 5), Laertes
speaks of this custom:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His means of death, his obscure burial,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No trophy, sword, nor hatchment, o’er his bones,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No noble rite, nor formal ostentation,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cry to be heard, as ’twere from heaven to earth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That I must call’t in question.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10), Iden says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Is’t Cade that I have slain, that monstrous traitor?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And hang thee o’er my tomb when I am dead.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The custom of bearing the dead body in its ordinary habiliments,
and with the face uncovered—a practice referred
to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 1)—appears to have been
peculiar to Italy:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Then, as the manner of our country is,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In thy best robes uncover’d on the bier,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Coryat’s “Crudities” (1776, vol. ii. p. 27) the practice
is thus described: “The burials are so strange, both in Venice
and all other cities, towns, and parishes of Italy, that
they differ not only from England, but from all other nations
whatever in Christendom. For they carry the corse
to church with the face, hands, and feet all naked, and wearing
the same apparel that the person wore lately before he
died, or that which he craved to be buried in; which apparel
is interred together with the body.”<a name="FNanchor_741_741" id="FNanchor_741_741"></a><a href="#Footnote_741_741" class="fnanchor">[741]</a> Singer<a name="FNanchor_742_742" id="FNanchor_742_742"></a><a href="#Footnote_742_742" class="fnanchor">[742]</a> says that
Shakespeare no doubt had seen this custom particularly described
in the “Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Another use there is, that, whosoever dies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Borne to the church, with open face, upon the bier he lies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In wonted weed attir’d, not wrapt in winding sheet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">He alludes to it again in Ophelia’s song, in “Hamlet”
(iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“They bore him barefac’d on the bier.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was, in bygone times, customary to bury the Danish
kings in their armor; hence the remark of Hamlet (i. 4),
when addressing the Ghost:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“What may this mean,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thou, dead corse, again, in complete steel,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Making night hideous?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Shakespeare was probably guilty of an anachronism in
“Coriolanus” (v. 6) when he makes one of the lords say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Bear from hence his body,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And mourn you for him: let him be regarded<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As the most noble corse that ever herald<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did follow to his urn,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the allusion being to the public funeral of English princes,
at the conclusion of which a herald proclaimed the style of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span>
the deceased.</p>

<p>We may compare what Queen Katharine says in “Henry
VIII.” (iv. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“After my death I wish no other herald,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No other speaker of my living actions,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To keep my honour from corruption,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It seems to have been the fashion, as far back as the thirteenth
century, to ornament the tombs of eminent persons
with figures and inscriptions on plates of brass; hence, in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (i. 1), the King says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Live register’d upon our brazen tombs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (v. 1), Leonato, speaking
of his daughter’s death, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hang her an epitaph upon her tomb,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sing it to her bones: sing it to-night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And also in a previous scene (iv. 1) this graceful custom is
noticed:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Maintain a mourning ostentation,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And on your family’s old monument<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hang mournful epitaphs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It was also the custom, in years gone by, on the death of an
eminent person, for his friends to compose short laudatory
verses, epitaphs, etc., and to affix them to the hearse or
grave with pins, wax, paste, etc. Thus, in “Henry V.” (i. 2),
King Henry declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Either our history shall with full mouth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not worshipp’d with a waxen epitaph,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">meaning, says Gifford, “I will either have my full history
recorded with glory, or lie in an undisturbed grave; not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span>
merely without an inscription sculptured in stone, but unworshipped,
unhonoured, even by a waxen epitaph.”<a name="FNanchor_743_743" id="FNanchor_743_743"></a><a href="#Footnote_743_743" class="fnanchor">[743]</a></p>

<p>We may also compare what Lucius says in “Titus Andronicus”
(i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There lie thy bones, sweet Mutius, with thy friends,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till we with trophies do adorn thy tomb!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The custom was still general when Shakespeare lived; many
fine and interesting examples existing in the old Cathedral
of St. Paul’s, and other churches of London, down to the
time of the great fire, in the form of pensil-tables of wood
and metal, painted or engraved with poetical memorials,
suspended against the columns and walls.</p>

<p>“Feasts of the Dead,” which have prevailed in this and
other countries from the earliest times, are, according to some
antiquarians, supposed to have been borrowed from the <i>cæna
feralis</i> of the Romans—an offering, consisting of milk, honey,
wine, olives, and strewed flowers, to the ghost of the deceased.
In a variety of forms this custom has prevailed among most
nations—the idea being that the spirits of the dead feed on
the viands set before them; hence the rite in question embraced
the notion of a sacrifice. In Christian times, however,
these funeral offerings have passed into commemorative
banquets, under which form they still exist among us.
In allusion to these feasts, Hamlet (i. 2), speaking of his
mother’s marriage, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“The funeral bak’d meats<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet narrates
how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“All things that we ordained festival,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turn from their office to black funeral:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our instruments, to melancholy bells;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Tylor,<a name="FNanchor_744_744" id="FNanchor_744_744"></a><a href="#Footnote_744_744" class="fnanchor">[744]</a> in discussing the origin of funeral feasts, and
in tracing their origin back to the savage and barbaric times<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span>
of the institution of feast of departed souls, says we may find
a lingering survival of this old rite in the doles of bread and
drink given to the poor at funerals, and “soul-mass cakes,”
which peasant girls beg for at farmhouses, with the traditional
formula,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Soul, soul, for a soul cake,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pray you, mistress, a soul cake.”<a name="FNanchor_745_745" id="FNanchor_745_745"></a><a href="#Footnote_745_745" class="fnanchor">[745]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the North of England the funeral feast is called an
“arval,” and the loaves that are sometimes distributed
among the poor are termed “arval bread.”</p>

<p>Among other funeral customs mentioned by Shakespeare,
may be mentioned his allusion to the burial service. Originally,
before the reign of Edward VI., it was the practice for
the priest to throw earth on the body in the form of a cross,
and then to sprinkle it with holy water. Thus, in the
“Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), the Shepherd says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some hangman must put on my shroud, and lay me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where no priest shovels in dust,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">implying, “I must be buried as a common malefactor, out
of the pale of consecrated ground, and without the usual
rites of the dead”—a whimsical anachronism, as Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_746_746" id="FNanchor_746_746"></a><a href="#Footnote_746_746" class="fnanchor">[746]</a>
points out, when it is considered that the old Shepherd was
a pagan, a worshipper of Jupiter and Apollo.</p>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 3), we find an allusion to
the lachrymatory vials filled with tears which the Romans
were in the habit of placing in the tomb of a departed friend.
Cleopatra sorrowfully exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“O most false love!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where be the sacred vials thou shouldst fill<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With sorrowful water? Now I see, I see,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In Fulvia’s death, how mine receiv’d shall be.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This is another interesting instance of Shakespeare’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a></span>
knowledge of the manners of distant ages, showing how
varied and extensive his knowledge was, and his skill in applying
it whenever occasion required.</p>

<p>The winding or shrouding sheet, in which the body was
wrapped previous to its burial, is alluded to in “Hamlet”
(v. 1), in the song of the clown:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A pick-axe, and a spade, a spade,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">For and a shrouding sheet:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O, a pit of clay for to be made<br /></span>
<span class="i1">For such a guest is meet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Puck
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“the screech-owl, screeching loud,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Puts the wretch that lies in woe<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In remembrance of a shroud.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Ophelia speaks of the shroud as white as the mountain
snow (“Hamlet,” iv. 5). The following song, too, in “Twelfth
Night” (ii. 4), mentions the custom of sticking yew in the
shroud:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come away, come away, death,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And in sad cypress let me be laid;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Fly away, fly away, breath:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">I am slain by a fair cruel maid.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">O prepare it!<br /></span>
<span class="i1">My part of death, no one so true<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Did share it!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>To quote two further illustrations. Desdemona (“Othello,”
iv. 2) says to Emilia: “Lay on my bed my wedding-sheets,”
and when in the following scene Emilia answers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I have laid those sheets you bade me on the bed,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Desdemona adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If I do die before thee, pr’thee, shroud me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In one of those same sheets”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—a wish, indeed, which her cruel fate so speedily caused to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span>
be realized. And in “3 Henry VI.” (i. 1) we have King
Henry’s powerful words:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Think’st thou, that I will leave my kingly throne,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wherein my grandsire and my father sat?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No: first shall war unpeople this my realm;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ay, and their colours,—often borne in France,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And now in England, to our heart’s great sorrow,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall be my winding-sheet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The custom, still prevalent, of carrying the dead to the
grave with music—a practice which existed in the primitive
church—to denote that they have ended their spiritual warfare,
and are become conquerors, formerly existed very generally
in this country.<a name="FNanchor_747_747" id="FNanchor_747_747"></a><a href="#Footnote_747_747" class="fnanchor">[747]</a> In “Cymbeline” (iv. 2), Arviragus
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And let us, Polydore, though now our voices<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have got the mannish crack, sing him to the ground,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As once our mother; use like note and words,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Save that Euriphile must be Fidele.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The tolling of bells at funerals is referred to in “Hamlet”
(v. 1), where the priest says of Ophelia:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“she is allow’d her virgin crants,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of bell and burial.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been a current opinion for centuries that places of
burial are haunted with spectres and apparitions—a notion,
indeed, that prevailed as far back as the times of heathenism.
Ovid speaks of ghosts coming out of their sepulchres and
wandering about: and Vergil, quoting the popular opinion
of his time, tells us how Moeris could call the ghosts out of
their sepulchres (“Bucol.” viii. 98):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Moerim, sæpe animas imis excire sepulchris,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Atque satas alio vidi traducere messis.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Indeed, the idea of the ghost remaining near the corpse is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a></span>
of world-wide prevalence; and as Mr. Tylor<a name="FNanchor_748_748" id="FNanchor_748_748"></a><a href="#Footnote_748_748" class="fnanchor">[748]</a> points out,
“through all the changes of religious thought from first to
last, in the course of human history, the hovering ghosts of
the dead make the midnight burial-ground a place where
men’s flesh creeps with terror.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (v. 1), Puck declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now it is the time of night,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">That the graves, all gaping wide,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Every one lets forth his sprite,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">In the church-way paths to glide.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the same play, too (iii. 2), Puck, speaking of “Aurora’s
harbinger,” says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That in cross-ways and floods have burial,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Already to their wormy beds are gone;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For fear lest day should look their shames upon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In this passage two curious superstitions are described; the
ghosts of self-murderers, who are buried in cross-roads, and
of those who have been drowned at sea, being said to wander
for a hundred years, owing to the rites of sepulture having
never been properly bestowed on their bodies.</p>

<p>We may further compare Hamlet’s words (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis now the very witching time of night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Contagion to this world.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>From the earliest period much importance has been attached
to the position of the grave, the popular direction
being from east to west, that from north to south being
regarded as not only dishonorable, but unlucky. Thus, in
“Cymbeline” (iv. 2), Guiderius, when arranging about the
apparently dead body of Imogen, disguised in man’s apparel,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his head to the east;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My father had a reason for’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Indeed, the famous antiquary Hearne had such precise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span>
views in this matter that he left orders for his grave to be
made straight by a compass, due east and west. This custom
was practised by the ancient Greeks, and thus, as Mr.
Tylor points out,<a name="FNanchor_749_749" id="FNanchor_749_749"></a><a href="#Footnote_749_749" class="fnanchor">[749]</a> it is not to late and isolated fancy, but to
the carrying on of ancient and widespread solar ideas, that
we trace the well-known legend that the body of Christ was
laid with the head towards the west, thus looking eastward,
and the Christian usage of digging graves east and west,
which prevailed through mediæval times, and is not yet forgotten.
The rule of laying the head to the west, and its
meaning that the dead shall rise looking towards the east,
are perfectly stated in the following passage from an ecclesiastical
treatise of the 16th century:<a name="FNanchor_750_750" id="FNanchor_750_750"></a><a href="#Footnote_750_750" class="fnanchor">[750]</a> “Debet autem quis
sic sepeliri ut capite ad occidentem posito, pedes dirigat ad
Orientem, in quo quasi ipsa positione orat: et innuit quod
promptus est, ut de occasu festinet ad ortum: de mundo ad
seculum.”<a name="FNanchor_751_751" id="FNanchor_751_751"></a><a href="#Footnote_751_751" class="fnanchor">[751]</a></p>

<p>Within old monuments and receptacles for the dead perpetual
lamps were supposed to be lighted up, an allusion to
which is made by Pericles (iii. 1), who, deploring the untimely
death of Thaisa at sea, and the superstitious demand
made by the sailors that her corpse should be thrown overboard,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Nor have I time<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Must cast thee, scarcely coffin’d, in the ooze;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where, for a monument upon thy bones,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lying with simple shells.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (iii. 2), we find a further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span>
reference in the words of Troilus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, that I thought it could be in a woman,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To feed for aye her lamp and flames of love.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Pope, too, in his “Eloisa to Abelard,” has a similar allusion
(l. 261, 262):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ah, hopeless lasting flames, like those that burn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To light the dead, and warm th’ unfruitful urn!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>D’Israeli, in his “Curiosities of Literature,” thus explains
this superstition: “It has happened frequently that inquisitive
men, examining with a flambeau ancient sepulchres
which have just been opened, the fat and gross vapors engendered
by the corruption of dead bodies kindled as the
flambeau approached them, to the great astonishment of the
spectators, who frequently cried out ‘A miracle!’ This sudden
inflammation, although very natural, has given room to
believe that these flames proceeded from <i>perpetual lamps</i>,
which some have thought were placed in the tombs of the
ancients, and which, they said, were extinguished at the
moment that these tombs opened, and were penetrated by
the exterior air.” Mr. Dennis, however, in his “Cities and
Cemeteries of Etruria” (1878, vol. ii. p. 404), says that the
use of sepulchral lamps by the ancients is well known, and
gave rise to the above superstition. Sometimes lamps were
kept burning in sepulchres long after the interment, as in
the case of the Ephesian widow described by Petronius
(“Satyr,” c. 13), who replaced the lamp placed in her husband’s
tomb.</p>

<p>A common expression formerly applied to the dead occurs
in the “Winter’s Tale” (v. 1), where Dion asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“What were more holy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than to rejoice the former queen is well?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 5):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Messenger.</i> First, madam, he is well.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Cleopatra.</i>                Why, there’s more gold.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, sirrah, mark, we use<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To say, the dead are well.”<a name="FNanchor_752_752" id="FNanchor_752_752"></a><a href="#Footnote_752_752" class="fnanchor">[752]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Lastly, commentators have differed as to the meaning of
the words of Julia in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”
(i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I see you have a month’s mind to them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Douce says she refers to the mind or remembrance days of
our popish ancestors; persons in their wills having often
directed that in a month, or at some other specific time, some
solemn office, as a mass or a dirge, should be performed for
the repose of their souls. Thus Ray quotes a proverb: “To
have a month’s mind to a thing,” and mentions the above
custom. For a further and not improbable solution of this
difficulty, the reader may consult Dyce’s “Glossary” (p. 277).</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_728_728" id="Footnote_728_728"></a><a href="#FNanchor_728_728"><span class="label">[728]</span></a> Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” 1873, vol. i. p. 145.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_729_729" id="Footnote_729_729"></a><a href="#FNanchor_729_729"><span class="label">[729]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1829, pp. 324-326.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_730_730" id="Footnote_730_730"></a><a href="#FNanchor_730_730"><span class="label">[730]</span></a> “Annals of Worcester,” 1845.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_731_731" id="Footnote_731_731"></a><a href="#FNanchor_731_731"><span class="label">[731]</span></a> Harland and Wilkinson’s “Lancashire Folk-Lore,” 1869, p. 268; see
“English Folk-Lore,” 1878, pp. 99, 100; also “Notes and Queries,” 1st
series, vol. iv. p. 133.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_732_732" id="Footnote_732_732"></a><a href="#FNanchor_732_732"><span class="label">[732]</span></a> Cf. Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” v. 595-683.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_733_733" id="Footnote_733_733"></a><a href="#FNanchor_733_733"><span class="label">[733]</span></a> See “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 82, 83.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_734_734" id="Footnote_734_734"></a><a href="#FNanchor_734_734"><span class="label">[734]</span></a> Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” vol. ii. p. 46.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_735_735" id="Footnote_735_735"></a><a href="#FNanchor_735_735"><span class="label">[735]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 246.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_736_736" id="Footnote_736_736"></a><a href="#FNanchor_736_736"><span class="label">[736]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. viii. p. 291.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_737_737" id="Footnote_737_737"></a><a href="#FNanchor_737_737"><span class="label">[737]</span></a> “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1880, p. 58.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_738_738" id="Footnote_738_738"></a><a href="#FNanchor_738_738"><span class="label">[738]</span></a> Cf. “Winter’s Tale,” iv. 4.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_739_739" id="Footnote_739_739"></a><a href="#FNanchor_739_739"><span class="label">[739]</span></a> The word in German is <i>kranz</i>, in other Teutonic dialects <i>krants</i>,
<i>krans</i>, and <i>crance</i>—the latter being Lowland Scotch—and having
<i>cransies</i> for plural. Clark and Wright’s “Hamlet,” 1876, p. 216.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_740_740" id="Footnote_740_740"></a><a href="#FNanchor_740_740"><span class="label">[740]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.” vol. ii. p. 303.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_741_741" id="Footnote_741_741"></a><a href="#FNanchor_741_741"><span class="label">[741]</span></a> See Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol. i. p. 305.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_742_742" id="Footnote_742_742"></a><a href="#FNanchor_742_742"><span class="label">[742]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” 1875, vol. ix. pp. 209, 210.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_743_743" id="Footnote_743_743"></a><a href="#FNanchor_743_743"><span class="label">[743]</span></a> Notes on “Jonson’s Works,” vol. ix. p. 58.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_744_744" id="Footnote_744_744"></a><a href="#FNanchor_744_744"><span class="label">[744]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” vol. ii. p. 43.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_745_745" id="Footnote_745_745"></a><a href="#FNanchor_745_745"><span class="label">[745]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” p. 404; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. ii. pp. 237, 246; Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839,
p. 439.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_746_746" id="Footnote_746_746"></a><a href="#FNanchor_746_746"><span class="label">[746]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, p. 222.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_747_747" id="Footnote_747_747"></a><a href="#FNanchor_747_747"><span class="label">[747]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol ii. pp. 267-270.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_748_748" id="Footnote_748_748"></a><a href="#FNanchor_748_748"><span class="label">[748]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” vol. ii. p. 30.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_749_749" id="Footnote_749_749"></a><a href="#FNanchor_749_749"><span class="label">[749]</span></a> “Primitive Culture,” 1873, vol. ii. p. 423.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_750_750" id="Footnote_750_750"></a><a href="#FNanchor_750_750"><span class="label">[750]</span></a> Durandus, “De Officio Mortuorum,” lib. vii. chap. 35-39.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_751_751" id="Footnote_751_751"></a><a href="#FNanchor_751_751"><span class="label">[751]</span></a> Dr. Johnson thought the words of the clown in “Hamlet” (v. 1),
“make her grave straight,” meant, “make her grave from east to west,
in a direct line parallel to the church.” This interpretation seems
improbable, as the word straight in the sense of immediately occurs
frequently in Shakespeare’s plays.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_752_752" id="Footnote_752_752"></a><a href="#FNanchor_752_752"><span class="label">[752]</span></a> See Malone’s note, Variorum edition, xiv. 400.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span></h2>

<h3>RINGS AND PRECIOUS STONES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">From</span> a very early period, rings and precious stones have
held a prominent place in the traditionary lore, customs,
and superstitions of most nations. Thus, rings have been
supposed “to protect from evil fascinations of every kind,
against the evil eye, the influence of demons, and dangers
of every possible character: though it was not simply in
the rings themselves that the supposed virtues existed, but
in the materials of which they were composed—in some
particular precious stones that were set in them as charms
or talismans, in some device or inscription on the stone, or
some magical letters engraved on the circumference of the
ring.”<a name="FNanchor_753_753" id="FNanchor_753_753"></a><a href="#Footnote_753_753" class="fnanchor">[753]</a> Rings, too, in days gone by, had a symbolical importance.
Thus, it was anciently the custom for every
monarch to have a ring, the temporary possession of which
invested the holder with the same authority as the owner
himself could exercise. Thus, in “Henry VIII.” (v. 1), we
have the king’s ring given to Cranmer, and presented by him
(sc. 2), as a security against the machinations of Gardiner
and others of the council, who were plotting to destroy
him. Thus the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“If entreaties<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will render you no remedy, this ring<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Deliver them, and your appeal to us<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There make before them.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This custom, too, was not confined to royalty, for in
“Richard II.” (ii. 2), the Duke of York gives this order
to his servant:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sirrah, get thee to Plashy, to my sister Gloster;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Bid her send me presently a thousand pound:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hold, take my ring.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There is an interesting relic of the same custom still kept
up at Winchester College.<a name="FNanchor_754_754" id="FNanchor_754_754"></a><a href="#Footnote_754_754" class="fnanchor">[754]</a> When the captain of the school
petitions the head-master for a holiday, and obtains it, he
receives from him a ring, in token of the indulgence granted,
which he wears during the holiday, and returns to the head-master
when it is over. The inscription upon the ring was,
formerly, “Potentiam fero, geroque.” It is now “Commendat
rarior usus” (Juvenal, “Sat.” xi. 208).</p>

<p><i>Token Rings</i> date from very early times. Edward I., in
1297, presented Margaret, his fourth daughter, with a golden
pyx, in which he deposited a ring, as a token of his unfailing
love.</p>

<p>In “Richard III.” (i. 2) when Gloster brings his hasty
wooing to a conclusion, he gives the Lady Anne a ring,
saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Look, how my ring encompasseth thy finger,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Cymbeline” (i. 1) Imogen gives Posthumus a ring
when they part, and he presents her with a bracelet in exchange:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Look here, love;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This diamond was my mother’s; take it, heart;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But keep it till you woo another wife,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When Imogen is dead.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Posthumus.</i> How! how! another?—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You gentle gods, give me but this I have,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sear up my embracements from a next<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With bonds of death! Remain, remain thou here,<br /></span>
<span class="i12">(<i>Putting on the ring</i>)<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While sense can keep it on.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Yet he afterwards gives it up to Iachimo (ii. 4)—upon a
false representation—to test his wife’s honor:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Here, take this too;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[388]</a></span>
<span class="i0">It is a basilisk unto mine eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Kills me to look on’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The exchange of rings, a solemn mode of private contract
between lovers, we have already referred to in the chapter on
Marriage, a practice alluded to in the “Two Gentlemen of
Verona” (ii. 2), where Julia gives Proteus a ring, saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Keep this remembrance for thy Julia’s sake;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and he replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, then we’ll make exchange: here, take you this.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Death’s-head rings.</i> Rings engraved with skulls and skeletons
were not necessarily mourning rings, but were also
worn by persons who affected gravity; and, curious to say,
by the procuresses of Elizabeth’s time. Biron, in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), refers to “a death’s face in a ring;”
and we may quote Falstaff’s words in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4):
“Peace, good Doll! do not speak like a death’s head; do not
bid me remember mine end.” We may compare the following
from “The Chances” (i. 5), by Beaumont and Fletcher:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As they keep deaths’ heads in rings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To cry ‘memento’ to me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to Mr. Fairholt, “the skull and skeleton decorations
for rings first came into favor and fashion at the obsequious
court of France, when Diana of Poictiers became
the mistress of Henry II. At that time she was a widow,
and in mourning, so black and white became fashionable
colors; jewels were formed like funeral memorials; golden
ornaments, shaped like coffins, holding enamelled skeletons,
hung from the neck; watches, made to fit in little silver
skulls, were attached to the waists of the denizens of a
court that alternately indulged in profanity or piety, but who
mourned for show.”<a name="FNanchor_755_755" id="FNanchor_755_755"></a><a href="#Footnote_755_755" class="fnanchor">[755]</a></p>

<p><i>Posy-rings</i> were formerly much used, it having been customary
to inscribe a motto or “posy” within the hoop of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[389]</a></span>
the betrothal ring. Thus, in the “Merchant of Venice”
(v. 1), Gratiano, when asked by Portia the reason of his
quarrel with Nerissa, answers:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That she did give me; whose posy was<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For all the world like cutlers’ poetry<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon a knife, ‘Love me, and leave me not.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “As You Like It“ (iii. 2), Jaques tells Orlando, “You
are full of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted
with goldsmiths’ wives, and conned them out of rings?”</p>

<p>Again, “Hamlet” (iii. 2) asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Many of our old writers allude to the posy-rings. Thus Herrick,
in his “Hesperides,” says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What posies for our wedding rings,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What gloves we’ll give, and ribbonings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Henry VIII. gave Anne of Cleves a ring with the following
posy: “God send me well to kepe;” a most unpropitious
alliance, as the king expressed his dislike to her soon after
the marriage.</p>

<p><i>Thumb-rings.</i> These were generally broad gold rings
worn on the thumb by important personages. Thus Falstaff
(“1 Henry IV.” ii. 4) bragged that, in his earlier years,
he had been so slender in figure as to “creep into an alderman’s
thumb-ring;” and a ring thus worn—probably as
more conspicuous—appears to have been considered as appropriate
to the customary attire of a civic dignitary at a
much later period. A character in the Lord Mayor’s Show,
in 1664, is described as “habited like a grave citizen—gold
girdle, and gloves hung thereon, rings on his fingers, and a
seal ring on his thumb.”<a name="FNanchor_756_756" id="FNanchor_756_756"></a><a href="#Footnote_756_756" class="fnanchor">[756]</a> Chaucer, in his “Squire’s Tale,”
says of the rider of the brazen horse who advanced into the
hall, Cambuscan, that “upon his thumb he had of gold a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[390]</a></span>
ring.” In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), Mercutio speaks of the</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“agate stone<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the forefinger of an alderman.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It has been suggested that Shakespeare, in the following
passage, alludes to the annual celebration, at Venice, of the
wedding of the Doge with the Adriatic, when he makes
Othello say (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But that I love the gentle Desdemona,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I would not my unhoused free condition<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Put into circumscription and confine<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For the sea’s worth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This custom, it is said, was instituted by Pope Alexander
III., who gave the Doge a gold ring from his own finger, in
token of the victory by the Venetian fleet, at Istria, over
Frederick Barbarossa, in defence of the Pope’s quarrel.
When his holiness gave the ring, he desired the Doge to
throw a similar ring into the sea every year on Ascension
Day, in commemoration of the event.</p>

<p><i>Agate.</i> This stone was frequently cut to represent the
human form, and was occasionally worn in the hat by gallants.
In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) Falstaff says: “I was never
manned with an agate till now”—meaning, according to
Johnson, “had an agate for my man,” was waited on by
an agate.</p>

<p><i>Carbuncle.</i> The supernatural lustre of this gem<a name="FNanchor_757_757" id="FNanchor_757_757"></a><a href="#Footnote_757_757" class="fnanchor">[757]</a> is supposed
to be described in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 3), where,
speaking of the ring on the finger of Bassianus, Martius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Upon his bloody finger he doth wear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A precious ring, that lightens all the hole,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, like a taper in some monument,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And shows the ragged entrails of the pit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Drayton’s “Muses’ Elysium” (“Nymphal.” ix.) it is
thus eulogized:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That admired mighty stone,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[391]</a></span>
<span class="i1">The carbuncle that’s named,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which from it such a flaming light<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And radiancy ejecteth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That in the very darkest night<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The eye to it directeth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Milton, speaking of the cobra, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“His head<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Crested aloof, and carbuncle his eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>John Norton,<a name="FNanchor_758_758" id="FNanchor_758_758"></a><a href="#Footnote_758_758" class="fnanchor">[758]</a> an alchemist in the reign of Edward IV.,
wrote a poem entitled the “Ordinal,” or a manual of the
chemical art. One of his projects, we are told, was a bridge
of gold over the Thames, crowned with pinnacles of gold,
which, being studded with carbuncles, would diffuse a blaze
of light in the dark. Among the other references to it given
by Shakespeare may be mentioned one in “Henry VIII.”
(ii. 3), where the Princess Elizabeth is spoken of as</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“a gem<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To lighten all this isle.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Hamlet (ii. 2) uses the phrase, “With eyes like carbuncles.”</p>

<p><i>Chrysolite.</i> This stone was supposed to possess peculiar
virtues, and, according to Simon Maiolus, in his “Dierum
Caniculares” (1615-19), Thetel the Jew, who wrote a book,
“De Sculpturiis,” mentions one naturally in the form of a
woman, which was potent against fascination of all kinds.
“Othello” (v. 2) thus alludes to this stone in reference to his
wife:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Nay, had she been true,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If heaven would make me such another world<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’d not have sold her for it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Pearls.</i> The Eastern custom of powdering sovereigns at
their coronation with gold-dust and seed-pearl is alluded to
in “Antony and Cleopatra”<a name="FNanchor_759_759" id="FNanchor_759_759"></a><a href="#Footnote_759_759" class="fnanchor">[759]</a> (ii. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll set thee in a shower of gold, and hail<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[392]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Rich pearls upon thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So Milton (“Paradise Lost,” ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The gorgeous East, with liberal hand,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, to swallow a pearl in a draught seems to have
been common to royal and mercantile prodigality. In
“Hamlet” (v. 2) the King says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in the cup an union<a name="FNanchor_760_760" id="FNanchor_760_760"></a><a href="#Footnote_760_760" class="fnanchor">[760]</a> shall he throw.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Further on Hamlet himself asks, tauntingly:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Malone, as an illustration of this custom, quotes from the
second part of Heywood’s “If You Know Not Me You
Know Nobody:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Here sixteen thousand pound at one clap goes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Instead of sugar. Gresham drinks this pearl<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unto the queen, his mistress.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In former times powdered pearls were considered invaluable
for stomach complaints; and Rondeletius tells us that
they were supposed to possess an exhilarating quality:
“Uniones quæ a conchis, et valde cordiales sunt.”</p>

<p>Much mystery was, in bygone days, thought to hang over
the origin of pearls, and, according to the poetic Orientals,<a name="FNanchor_761_761" id="FNanchor_761_761"></a><a href="#Footnote_761_761" class="fnanchor">[761]</a>
“Every year, on the sixteenth day of the month Nisan, the
pearl oysters rise to the sea and open their shells, in order
to receive the rain which falls at that time, and the drops
thus caught become pearls.” Thus, in “Richard III.” (iv. 4)
the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The liquid drops of tears that you have shed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall come again, transform’d to orient pearl,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Advantaging their loan with interest<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[393]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Of ten times double gain of happiness.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Moore, in one of his Melodies, notices this pretty notion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And precious the tear as that rain from the sky<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which turns into pearls as it falls in the sea.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Turquoise.</i> This stone was probably more esteemed for
its secret virtues than from any commercial value, the turquoise,
turkise, or turkey-stone, having from a remote period
been supposed to possess talismanic properties. Thus, in
the “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 1), Shylock says: “It was
my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I
would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” Mr.
Dyce<a name="FNanchor_762_762" id="FNanchor_762_762"></a><a href="#Footnote_762_762" class="fnanchor">[762]</a> says that Shylock valued his turquoise, “not only as
being the gift of Leah, but on account of the imaginary
virtues ascribed to it: which was supposed to become pale
or to brighten according as the health of the wearer was bad
or good.” Thus, Ben Jonson, in “Sejanus” (i. 1), alludes to
its wonderful properties:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And true as turkoise in the dear lord’s ring,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Look well or ill with him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Fenton, in his “Certain Secret Wonders of Nature” (1569),
thus describes it: “The turkeys doth move when there is any
evil prepared to him that weareth it.” There were numerous
other magical properties ascribed to the turquoise. Thus,
it was supposed to lose its color entirely at the death of its
owner, but to recover it when placed upon the finger of a
new and healthy possessor. It was also said that whoever
wore a turquoise, so that either it or its setting touched the
skin, might fall from any height, the stone attracting to
itself the whole force of the blow. With the Germans, the
turquoise is still the gem appropriated to the ring, the
“gage d’amour,” presented by the lover on the acceptance
of his suit, the permanence of its color being believed to
depend upon the constancy of his affection.<a name="FNanchor_763_763" id="FNanchor_763_763"></a><a href="#Footnote_763_763" class="fnanchor">[763]</a></p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_753_753" id="Footnote_753_753"></a><a href="#FNanchor_753_753"><span class="label">[753]</span></a> Jones’s “Finger-Ring Lore,” 1877, p. 91.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_754_754" id="Footnote_754_754"></a><a href="#FNanchor_754_754"><span class="label">[754]</span></a> Wordsworth’s “Shakespeare and the Bible,” 1880, p. 283.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_755_755" id="Footnote_755_755"></a><a href="#FNanchor_755_755"><span class="label">[755]</span></a> See Jones’s “Finger-Ring Lore,” 1877, p. 372.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_756_756" id="Footnote_756_756"></a><a href="#FNanchor_756_756"><span class="label">[756]</span></a> See Jones’s “Finger-Ring Lore,” 1877, p. 88.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_757_757" id="Footnote_757_757"></a><a href="#FNanchor_757_757"><span class="label">[757]</span></a> See Sir Thomas Browne’s “Vulgar Errors.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_758_758" id="Footnote_758_758"></a><a href="#FNanchor_758_758"><span class="label">[758]</span></a> Jones’s “Precious Stones,” 1880, p. 62.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_759_759" id="Footnote_759_759"></a><a href="#FNanchor_759_759"><span class="label">[759]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. x. p. 213.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_760_760" id="Footnote_760_760"></a><a href="#FNanchor_760_760"><span class="label">[760]</span></a> A union is a precious pearl, remarkable for its size.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_761_761" id="Footnote_761_761"></a><a href="#FNanchor_761_761"><span class="label">[761]</span></a> See Jones’s “History and Mystery of Precious Stones,” p. 116.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_762_762" id="Footnote_762_762"></a><a href="#FNanchor_762_762"><span class="label">[762]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 465.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_763_763" id="Footnote_763_763"></a><a href="#FNanchor_763_763"><span class="label">[763]</span></a> See C.&nbsp;W. King on “Precious Stones,” 1867, p. 267.</p></div>
</div>



<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[394]</a></span></h2>

<h3>SPORTS AND PASTIMES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Very</span> many of the old sports and pastimes in popular use
in Shakespeare’s day have long ago not only been laid aside,
but, in the course of years, have become entirely forgotten.
This is to be regretted, as a great number of these capital
diversions were admirably suited both for in and out of
doors, the simplicity which marked them being one of their
distinguishing charms. That Shakespeare, too, took an interest
in these good old sources of recreation, may be gathered
from the frequent reference which he has made to
them; his mention of some childish game even serving occasionally
as an illustration in a passage characterized by its
force and vigor.</p>

<p><i>Archery.</i> In Shakespeare’s day this was a very popular
diversion, and the “Knights of Prince Arthur’s Round Table”
was a society of archers instituted by Henry VIII.,
and encouraged in the reign of Elizabeth.<a name="FNanchor_764_764" id="FNanchor_764_764"></a><a href="#Footnote_764_764" class="fnanchor">[764]</a> Fitzstephen,
who wrote in the reign of Henry II., notices it among the
summer pastimes of the London youth; and the repeated
statutes, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, enforcing
the use of the bow, generally ordered the leisure time
upon holidays to be passed in its exercise.<a name="FNanchor_765_765" id="FNanchor_765_765"></a><a href="#Footnote_765_765" class="fnanchor">[765]</a> Shakespeare
seems to have been intimately acquainted with the numerous
terms connected with archery, many of which we find
scattered throughout his plays. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (iv. 1), Maria uses the expression, “Wide o’ the bow
hand,” a term which signified a good deal to the left of the
mark.</p>

<p>The “clout” was the nail or pin of the target, and “from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[395]</a></span>
the passages,” says Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_766_766" id="FNanchor_766_766"></a><a href="#Footnote_766_766" class="fnanchor">[766]</a> “which I happen to recollect in
our early writers, I should say that the clout, or pin, stood
in the centre of the inner circle of the butts, which circle,
being painted white, was called the white; that, to ‘hit the
white’ was a considerable feat, but that to ‘hit or cleave the
clout or pin’ was a much greater one, though, no doubt, the
expressions were occasionally used to signify the same thing,
viz., to hit the mark.” In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 1),
Costard says of Boyet:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Indeed, a’ must shoot nearer, or he’ll ne’er hit the clout;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and, in “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2), Shallow says of old Double:
“He would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve score”—that
is, he would have hit the clout at twelve-score yards. And
“King Lear” (iv. 6) employs the phrase “i’ the clout, i’ the
clout: hewgh!”</p>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), where Mercutio relates
how Romeo is “shot thorough the ear with a love-song; the
very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft,”
the metaphor, of course, is from archery.</p>

<p>The term “loose” was the technical one for the discharging
of an arrow, and occurs in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2).</p>

<p>According to Capell,<a name="FNanchor_767_767" id="FNanchor_767_767"></a><a href="#Footnote_767_767" class="fnanchor">[767]</a> the words of Bottom, in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (i. 2), “hold, or cut bow-strings,”
were a proverbial phrase, and alluded to archery. “When a
party was made at butts, assurance of meeting was given in
the words of that phrase, the sense of the person using them
being that he would ‘hold’ or keep promise, or they might
‘cut his bow-strings,’ demolish him for an archer.” Whether,
adds Dyce, “this be the true explanation of the phrase, I
am unable to determine.”</p>

<p><i>All hid, all hid.</i> Biron, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3),
no doubt means the game well-known as hide-and-seek,
“All hid, all hid; an old infant play.” The following note,
however, in Cotgrave’s “French and English Dictionary,”
has been adduced to show that he may possibly mean blind-man’s-buff:
“Clignemasset. The childish play called Hodman-blind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[396]</a></span>
[<i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, blind-man’s-buff], Harrie-racket, or Are you
all hid.”</p>

<p><i>Backgammon.</i> The old name for this game was “Tables,”
as in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That, when he plays at tables, chides the dice.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">An interesting history of this game will be found in Strutt’s
“Sports and Pastimes” (1876, pp. 419-421).</p>

<p><i>Barley-break.</i> This game, called also the “Last Couple in
Hell,” which is alluded to in the “Two Noble Kinsmen,”
(iv. 3), was played by six people, three of each sex, who were
coupled by lot.<a name="FNanchor_768_768" id="FNanchor_768_768"></a><a href="#Footnote_768_768" class="fnanchor">[768]</a> A piece of ground was then chosen, and
divided into three compartments, of which the middle one
was called hell. It was the object of the couple condemned
to this division to catch the others, who advanced from the
two extremities; in which case a change of situation took
place, and hell was filled by the couple who were excluded
by preoccupation from the other places. This catching,
however, was not so easy, as, by the rules of the game, the
middle couple were not to separate before they had succeeded,
while the others might break hands whenever they
found themselves hard pressed. When all had been taken
in turn, the last couple were said “to be in hell,” and the
game ended.</p>

<p>The game was frequently mentioned by old writers, and
appears to have been very popular. From Herrick’s Poems,
it is seen that the couples in their confinement occasionally
solaced themselves by kisses:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“<i>Barley-break; or, Last in Hell.</i><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We two are last in hell; what may we fear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be tormented, or kept pris’ners here?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Alas, if kissing be of plagues the worst,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We’ll wish in hell we had been last and first.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Scotland it was called barla-breikis, and was, says
Jamieson, “generally played by young people in a corn-yard,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[397]</a></span>
hence its name, barla-bracks, about the stacks.”<a name="FNanchor_769_769" id="FNanchor_769_769"></a><a href="#Footnote_769_769" class="fnanchor">[769]</a> The
term “hell,” says Nares,<a name="FNanchor_770_770" id="FNanchor_770_770"></a><a href="#Footnote_770_770" class="fnanchor">[770]</a> “was indiscreet, and must have
produced many profane allusions, besides familiarizing what
ought always to preserve its due effect of awe upon the
mind.” Both its names are alluded to in the following
passage in Shirley’s “Bird in a Cage:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“Shall’s to barlibreak?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I was in hell last; ’tis little less to be in a petticoat sometimes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Base.</i> This was a rustic game, known also as “Prison
base” or “Prison bars.” It is mentioned in “Cymbeline”
(v. 3) by Posthumus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Lads more like to run<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The country base, than to commit such slaughter.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 2) by Lucetta:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Indeed, I bid the base for Proteus.”<a name="FNanchor_771_771" id="FNanchor_771_771"></a><a href="#Footnote_771_771" class="fnanchor">[771]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The success of this pastime depended upon the agility of
the candidates, and their skill in running. Early in the
reign of Edward III. it is spoken of as a childish amusement,
and was prohibited to be played in the avenues of the
palace at Westminster during the session of Parliament,
because of the interruption it occasioned to the members
and others in passing to and fro as their business required.
It was also played by men, and especially in Cheshire and
other adjoining counties, where it seems to have been in
high repute among all classes. Strutt thus describes the
game:<a name="FNanchor_772_772" id="FNanchor_772_772"></a><a href="#Footnote_772_772" class="fnanchor">[772]</a> “The performance of this pastime requires two
parties of equal number, each of them having a base or
home to themselves, at the distance of about twenty or
thirty yards. The players then on either side, taking hold
of hands, extend themselves in length, and opposite to each
other, as far as they conveniently can, always remembering
that one of them must touch the base. When any one of
them quits the hand of his fellow and runs into the field,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[398]</a></span>
which is called giving the chase, he is immediately followed
by one of his opponents. He is again followed by a second
from the former side, and he by a second opponent, and so
on alternately until as many are out as choose to run, every
one pursuing the man he first followed, and no other; and
if he overtake him near enough to touch him, his party
claims one towards their game, and both return home.
They then run forth again and again in like manner until
the number is completed that decides the victory. This
number is optional, and rarely exceeds twenty.”</p>

<p>The phrase to “bid the base,” means to run fast, challenging
another to pursue. It occurs again in “Venus and
Adonis:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To bid the wind a base he now prepares.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Spenser’s “Fairy Queen” (bk. v. canto 8), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So ran they all as they had been at base,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They being chased that did others chase.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bat-fowling.</i> This sport, which is noticed in “The Tempest”
(ii. 1) by Sebastian, was common in days gone by. It
is minutely described in Markham’s “Hunger’s Prevention”
(1600), which is quoted by Dyce.<a name="FNanchor_773_773" id="FNanchor_773_773"></a><a href="#Footnote_773_773" class="fnanchor">[773]</a> The term “bat-fowling,”
however, had another signification, says Mr. Harting,<a name="FNanchor_774_774" id="FNanchor_774_774"></a><a href="#Footnote_774_774" class="fnanchor">[774]</a> in
Shakespeare’s day, and it may have been in this secondary
sense that it is used in “The Tempest,” being a slang word
for a particular mode of cheating. Bat-fowling was practised
about dusk, when the rogue pretended to have
dropped a ring or a jewel at the door of some well-furnished
shop, and, going in, asked the apprentice of the house<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[399]</a></span>
to light his candle to look for it. After some peering about
the bat-fowler would drop the candle as if by accident.
“Now, I pray you, good young man,” he would say, “do
so much as light the candle again.” While the boy was
away the rogue plundered the shop, and having stolen everything
he could find stole himself away.</p>

<p><i>Billiards.</i> Shakespeare is guilty of an anachronism in
“Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 5), where he makes Cleopatra
say: “Let’s to billiards”—the game being unknown to the
ancients. The modern manner of playing at billiards differs
from that formerly in use. At the commencement of the
last century,<a name="FNanchor_775_775" id="FNanchor_775_775"></a><a href="#Footnote_775_775" class="fnanchor">[775]</a> the billiard-table was square, having only three
pockets for the balls to run in, situated on one of the sides—that
is, at each corner, and the third between them. About
the middle of the table a small arch of iron was placed, and
at a little distance from it an upright cone called a king. At
certain periods of the game it was necessary for the balls to
be driven through the one and round the other, without
knocking either of them down, which was not easily effected,
because they were not fastened to the table.</p>

<p><i>Bone-ace.</i> This old game, popularly called “One-and-Thirty,”
is alluded to by Grumio in “Taming of the Shrew”
(i. 2): “Well, was it fit for a servant to use his master so;
being, perhaps, for aught I see, two-and-thirty—a pip out.”<a name="FNanchor_776_776" id="FNanchor_776_776"></a><a href="#Footnote_776_776" class="fnanchor">[776]</a>
It was very like the French game of “Vingt-un,” only a
longer reckoning. Strutt<a name="FNanchor_777_777" id="FNanchor_777_777"></a><a href="#Footnote_777_777" class="fnanchor">[777]</a> says that “perhaps Bone-ace is
the same as the game called Ace of Hearts, prohibited with
all lotteries by cards and dice, An. 12 Geor. II., Cap. 38,
sect. 2.” It is mentioned in Massinger’s “Fatal Dowry”
(ii. 2): “You think, because you served my lady’s mother,
[you] are thirty-two years old, which is a pip out, you know.”</p>

<p>The phrase “to be two-and-thirty,” a pip out, was an old
cant term applied to a person who was intoxicated.</p>

<p><i>Bo-peep.</i> This nursery amusement, which consisted in
peeping from behind something, and crying “Bo!” is referred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[400]</a></span>
to by the Fool in “King Lear” (i. 4): “That such a
king should play bo-peep.” In Sherwood’s Dictionary it
is defined, “Jeu d’enfant; ou (plustost) des nourrices aux
petits enfans; se cachans le visage et puis se monstrant.”
Minsheu’s derivation of bo-peep, from the noise which chickens
make when they come out of the shell, is, says Douce,<a name="FNanchor_778_778" id="FNanchor_778_778"></a><a href="#Footnote_778_778" class="fnanchor">[778]</a>
more whimsical than just.</p>

<p><i>Bowls.</i> Frequent allusions occur to this game, which
seems to have been a popular pastime in olden times. The
small ball, now called the jack, at which the players aim, was
sometimes termed the “mistress.” In “Troilus and Cressida”
(iii. 2), Pandarus says: “So, so; rub<a name="FNanchor_779_779" id="FNanchor_779_779"></a><a href="#Footnote_779_779" class="fnanchor">[779]</a> on, and kiss the
mistress.” A bowl that kisses the jack, or mistress, is in the
most advantageous position; hence “to kiss the jack” served
to denote a state of great advantage. Thus, in “Cymbeline”
(ii. 1), Cloten exclaims, “Was there ever man had such luck!
when I kissed the jack, upon an up-cast to be hit away! I
had a hundred pound on’t.” There is another allusion to
this game, according to Staunton, in “King John” (ii. 1):
“on the outward eye of fickle France”—the aperture on
one side which contains the bias or weight that inclines the
bowl in running from a direct course, being sometimes called
the eye.</p>

<p>A further reference to this game occurs in the following
dialogue in “Richard II.” (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Queen.</i> What sport shall we devise here in this garden,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To drive away the heavy thought of care?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>1 Lady.</i> Madam, we’ll play at bowls.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Queen.</i>’Twill make me think the world is full of rubs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And that my fortune runs against the bias”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the <i>bias</i>, as stated above, being a weight inserted in one
side of a bowl, in order to give it a particular inclination in
bowling. “To run against the bias,” therefore, became a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[401]</a></span>
proverb. Thus, to quote another instance, in the “Taming
of the Shrew” (iv. 5) Petruchio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Well, forward, forward! thus the bowl should run,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not unluckily against the bias.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And in “Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 5), the term “bias-cheek”
is used to denote a cheek swelling out like the bias
of a bowl.<a name="FNanchor_780_780" id="FNanchor_780_780"></a><a href="#Footnote_780_780" class="fnanchor">[780]</a></p>

<p><i>Cards.</i> Some of the old terms connected with card-playing
are curious, a few of which are alluded to by Shakespeare.
Thus, in “King Lear” (v. 1), Edmund says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And hardly shall I carry out my side,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">alluding to the card table, where to carry out a side meant
to carry out the game with your partner successfully. So,
“to set up a side” was to become partners in the game;
“to pull or pluck down a side” was to lose it.<a name="FNanchor_781_781" id="FNanchor_781_781"></a><a href="#Footnote_781_781" class="fnanchor">[781]</a></p>

<p>A lurch at cards denoted an easy victory. So, in “Coriolanus”
(ii. 2), Cominius says: “he lurch’d all swords of the
garland,” meaning, as Malone says, that Coriolanus gained
from all other warriors the wreath of victory, with ease, and
incontestable superiority.</p>

<p>A pack of cards was formerly termed “a deck of cards,”
as in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king was slily finger’d from the deck.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, “to vie” was also a term at cards, and meant particularly
to increase the stakes, and generally to challenge
any one to a contention, bet, wager, etc. So, Cleopatra
(v. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“nature wants stuff<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To vie strange forms with fancy.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cherry-pit.</i> This consisted in throwing cherry stones into
a little hole—a game, says Nares, still practised with dumps
or money.<a name="FNanchor_782_782" id="FNanchor_782_782"></a><a href="#Footnote_782_782" class="fnanchor">[782]</a> In “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), Sir Toby alludes to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[402]</a></span>
it: “What, man! ’tis not for gravity to play at cherry-pit
with Satan.” Nash, in his “Pierce Pennilesse,” speaking of
the disfigurement of ladies’ faces by painting, says: “You
may play at cherry-pit in the dint of their cheeks.”</p>

<p><i>Chess.</i> As might be expected, several allusions occur in
Shakespeare’s plays to this popular game. In “The Tempest”
(v. 1), Ferdinand and Miranda are represented playing
at it; and in “King John” (ii. 1), Elinor says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That thou mayst be a queen, and check the world!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 1), Katharina asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I pray you, sir, is it your will<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make a stale<a name="FNanchor_783_783" id="FNanchor_783_783"></a><a href="#Footnote_783_783" class="fnanchor">[783]</a> of me amongst these mates?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">alluding, as Douce<a name="FNanchor_784_784" id="FNanchor_784_784"></a><a href="#Footnote_784_784" class="fnanchor">[784]</a> suggests, to the chess term of <i>stale-mate</i>,
which is used when the game is ended by the king being
alone and unchecked, and then forced into a situation from
which he is unable to move without going into check. This
is a dishonorable termination to the adversary, who thereby
loses the game. Thus, in Bacon’s Twelfth Essay: “They
stand still like a stale at chess, where it is no mate, but yet
the game cannot stir.”</p>

<p><i>Dice.</i> Among the notices of this game, may be quoted
that in “Henry V.” (iv. prologue):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The confident and over-lusty French<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do the low-rated English play at dice.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Edgar, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), says: “Wine loved I deeply,
dice dearly.” Pistol, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 3),
gives a double allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let vultures gripe thy guts!—for gourd and fullam holds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And high and low beguiles the rich and poor.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Gourds” were false dice, with a secret cavity scooped out
like a gourd. “Fullams” were also false dice, “loaded with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[403]</a></span>
metal on one side, so as better to produce high throws, or
to turn up low numbers, as was required, and were hence
named ‘high men’ or ‘low men,’ also ‘high fullams’ and ‘low
fullams.’”<a name="FNanchor_785_785" id="FNanchor_785_785"></a><a href="#Footnote_785_785" class="fnanchor">[785]</a> It has been suggested that dice were termed
<i>fullams</i> either because Fulham was the resort of sharpers,
or because they were principally manufactured there.</p>

<p><i>Dun is in the mire.</i> This is a Christmas sport, which
Gifford<a name="FNanchor_786_786" id="FNanchor_786_786"></a><a href="#Footnote_786_786" class="fnanchor">[786]</a> describes as follows: “A log of wood is brought
into the midst of the room: this is <i>Dun</i> (the cart-horse), and
a cry is raised that he is stuck in the mire. Two of the
company advance, either with or without ropes, to draw him
out. After repeated attempts, they find themselves unable
to do it, and call for more assistance. The game continues
till all the company take part in it, when Dun is extricated.
Much merriment is occasioned from the awkward efforts of
the rustics to lift the log, and from sundry arch contrivances
to let the ends of it fall on one another’s toes.” Thus, in
“Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), Mercutio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If thou art dun, we’ll draw thee from the mire.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Beaumont and Fletcher, also, in the “Woman Hater”
(iv. 3), allude to this game:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dun’s in the mire, get out again how he can.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Fast and Loose.</i> This was a cheating game, much practised
in Shakespeare’s day, whereby gypsies and other vagrants
beguiled the common people of their money: and
hence was very often to be seen at fairs. Its other name
was “pricking at the belt or girdle;” and it is thus described
by Sir J. Hawkins: “A leathern belt was made up into a
number of intricate folds, and placed edgewise upon a table.
One of the folds was made to resemble the middle of the
girdle, so that whoever could thrust a skewer into it would
think he held it fast to the table; whereas, when he has so
done, the person with whom he plays may take hold of both
ends, and draw it away.” In “Antony and Cleopatra”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[404]</a></span>
(iv. 12), Antony says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like a right gypsy, hath, at fast and loose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beguil’d me to the very heart of loss.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The drift of this game seems to have been to encourage
wagers whether the belt was fast or loose, which the juggler
could easily make it at his option. It is constantly alluded
to by old writers, and is thus described in Drayton’s “Moon-calf:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He like a gypsy oftentimes would go,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All kinds of gibberish he hath learn’d to know,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And with a stick, a short string, and a noose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Would show the people tricks at fast and loose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Fencing.</i> In years gone by, there were three degrees in
fencing, a master’s, a provost’s, and a scholar’s.<a name="FNanchor_787_787" id="FNanchor_787_787"></a><a href="#Footnote_787_787" class="fnanchor">[787]</a> To each of
these a prize was played, with various weapons, in some open
place or square. In “Titus Andronicus” (i. 1), this practice
is alluded to by Saturninus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So, Bassianus, you have play’d your prize.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), Slender says: “I
bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and
dagger with a master of fence,” <i>i.&nbsp;e.</i>, with one who had taken
his master’s degree in the science.</p>

<p>Among the numerous allusions to fencing quoted by
Shakespeare may be mentioned the following: “Venue or
veney” was a fencing term, meaning an attack or hit. It is
used in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), by Slender,
who relates how he bruised his shin “with playing at sword
and dagger with a master of fence; three veneys for a dish
of stewed prunes.” It is used metaphorically in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (v. 1), for a brisk attack, by Armado: “A
sweet touch, a quick venue of wit! snip, snap, quick and
home!”<a name="FNanchor_788_788" id="FNanchor_788_788"></a><a href="#Footnote_788_788" class="fnanchor">[788]</a> The Italian term “Stoccado” or “Stoccata,” abbreviated
also into “Stock,” seems to have had a similar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[405]</a></span>
signification. In “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 1), Mercutio,
drawing his sword, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Alla stoccata carries it away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), it is used by Shallow:
“In these times you stand on distance, your passes,
stoccadoes, and I know not what.” Again, “Montant,” an
abbreviation of Montanto, denoted an upright blow or thrust,
and occurs also in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3),
where the Host tells Caius that he, with the others, has come
—“to see thee pass thy punto, thy stock, thy reverse, thy distance,
thy montant.” Hence, in “Much Ado About Nothing”
(i. 1), Beatrice jocularly calls Benedick “Signior Montanto,”
meaning to imply that he was a great fencer. Of
the other old fencing terms quoted in the passage above, it
appears that “passado” implied a pass or motion forwards.
It occurs in “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), where Mercutio
speaks of the “immortal passado! the punto reverso!”
Again, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (i. 2), Armado says of
Cupid that “The passado he respects not, the duello he regards
not.” The “punto reverso” was a backhanded thrust
or stroke, and the term “distance” was the space between
the antagonists.</p>

<p>Shakespeare has also alluded to other fencing terms, such
as the “foin,” a thrust, which is used by the Host in the
“Merry Wives of Windsor” (iii. 2), and in “Much Ado About
Nothing” (v. 1), where Antonio says, in his heated conversation
with Leonato:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sir boy, I’ll whip you from your foining fence;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nay, as I am a gentleman, I will.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The term “traverse” denoted a posture of opposition, and
is used by the Host in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3).
A “bout,” too, is another fencing term, to which the King
refers in “Hamlet” (iv. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When in your motion you are hot and dry—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As make your bouts more violent to that end.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Filliping the Toad.</i> This is a common and cruel diversion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[406]</a></span>
of boys. They lay a board, two or three feet long, at right
angles over a transverse piece two or three inches thick,
then, placing the toad at one end of the board, the other end
is struck by a bat or large stick, which throws the poor toad
forty or fifty feet perpendicularly from the earth; and the
fall generally kills it. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff says:
“If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle.”<a name="FNanchor_789_789" id="FNanchor_789_789"></a><a href="#Footnote_789_789" class="fnanchor">[789]</a></p>

<p><i>Flap-dragon.</i><a name="FNanchor_790_790" id="FNanchor_790_790"></a><a href="#Footnote_790_790" class="fnanchor">[790]</a> This pastime was much in use in days
gone by. A small combustible body was set on fire, and
put afloat in a glass of liquor. The courage of the toper
was tried in the attempt to toss off the glass in such a manner
as to prevent the flap-dragon doing mischief—raisins in
hot brandy being the usual flap-dragons. Shakespeare several
times mentions this custom, as in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (v. 1) where Costard says: “Thou art easier swallowed
than a flap-dragon.” And in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4),
he makes Falstaff say: “and drinks off candles’ ends for
flap-dragons.”<a name="FNanchor_791_791" id="FNanchor_791_791"></a><a href="#Footnote_791_791" class="fnanchor">[791]</a></p>

<p>It appears that formerly gallants used to vie with each
other in drinking off flap-dragons to the health of their mistresses—which
were sometimes even candles’ ends, swimming
in brandy or other strong spirits, whence, when on fire, they
were snatched by the mouth and swallowed;<a name="FNanchor_792_792" id="FNanchor_792_792"></a><a href="#Footnote_792_792" class="fnanchor">[792]</a> an allusion
to which occurs in the passage above. As candles’ ends
made the most formidable flap-dragon, the greatest merit
was ascribed to the heroism of swallowing them. Ben Jonson,
in “The Masque of the Moon” (1838, p. 616, ed. Gifford),
says: “But none that will hang themselves for love, or eat
candles’ ends, etc., as the sublunary lovers do.”</p>

<p><i>Football.</i> An allusion to this once highly popular game<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[407]</a></span>
occurs in “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 1). Dromio of Ephesus
asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Am I so round with you as you with me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That like a football you do spurn me thus?<br /></span>

<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “King Lear” (i. 4), Kent calls Oswald “a base football
player.”</p>

<p>According to Strutt,<a name="FNanchor_793_793" id="FNanchor_793_793"></a><a href="#Footnote_793_793" class="fnanchor">[793]</a> it does not appear among the popular
exercises before the reign of Edward III.; and then,
in 1349, it was prohibited by a public edict because it impeded
the progress of archery. The danger, however, attending
this pastime occasioned James I. to say: “From
this Court I debarre all rough and violent exercises, as the
football, meeter for laming than making able the users
thereof.”</p>

<p>Occasionally the rustic boys made use of a blown bladder,
without the covering of leather, by way of a football, putting
beans and horse-beans inside, which made a rattling noise as
it was kicked about. Barclay, in his “Ship of Fools” (1508)
thus graphically describes it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Howe in the winter, when men kill the fat swine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They get the bladder and blow it great and thin,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With many beans or peason put within:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It ratleth, soundeth, and shineth clere and fayre,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While it is thrown and caste up in the ayre,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Eche one contendeth and hath a great delite<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With foote and with hande the bladder for to smite;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If it fall to grounde, they lifte it up agayne,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This wise to labour they count it for no payne.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shrovetide was the great season for football matches;<a name="FNanchor_794_794" id="FNanchor_794_794"></a><a href="#Footnote_794_794" class="fnanchor">[794]</a> and
at a comparatively recent period it was played in Derby,
Nottingham, Kingston-upon-Thames, etc.</p>

<p><i>Gleek.</i> According to Drake,<a name="FNanchor_795_795" id="FNanchor_795_795"></a><a href="#Footnote_795_795" class="fnanchor">[795]</a> this game is alluded to twice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[408]</a></span>
by Shakespeare—in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>1 Musician.</i> What will you give us?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Peter.</i> No money, on my faith, but the gleek.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Douce, however, considers that the word <i>gleek</i> was simply
used to express a stronger sort of joke, a scoffing; and that
the phrase “to give the gleek” merely denoted to pass a
jest upon, or to make a person appear ridiculous.</p>

<p><i>Handy-dandy.</i> A very old game among children. A
child hides something in his hand, and makes his playfellow
guess in which hand it is. If the latter guess rightly, he
wins the article, if wrongly, he loses an equivalent.<a name="FNanchor_796_796" id="FNanchor_796_796"></a><a href="#Footnote_796_796" class="fnanchor">[796]</a> Sometimes,
says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, “the game is played by a
sort of sleight-of-hand, changing the article rapidly from one
hand into the other, so that the looker-on is often deceived,
and induced to name the hand into which it is apparently
thrown.” This is what Shakespeare alludes to by “change
places” in “King Lear” (iv. 6): “see how yond justice rails
upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places;
and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?”<a name="FNanchor_797_797" id="FNanchor_797_797"></a><a href="#Footnote_797_797" class="fnanchor">[797]</a></p>

<p><i>Hide-fox and all after.</i> A children’s game, considered by
many to be identical with hide-and-seek. It is mentioned
by Hamlet (iv. 2). Some commentators think that the term
“kid-fox,” in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 3), may have
been a technical term in the game of “hide-fox.” Some
editions have printed it “hid-fox.” Claudio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, very well, my lord: the music ended,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We’ll fit the kid-fox with a pennyworth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hoodman-blind.</i> The childish sport now called blindman’s
buff was known by various names, such as hood-wink,
blind-hob, etc. It was termed “hoodman-blind,” because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[409]</a></span>
the players formerly were blinded with their hoods,<a name="FNanchor_798_798" id="FNanchor_798_798"></a><a href="#Footnote_798_798" class="fnanchor">[798]</a> and
under this designation it is mentioned by Hamlet (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“What devil was’t<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thus hath cozen’d you at hoodman-blind?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Scotland this game was called “belly-blind;” and Gay,
in his “Shepherd’s Week” (i. 96), says, concerning it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As once I play’d at blindman’s buff, it hapt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">About my eyes the towel thick was wrapt,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I miss’d the swains, and seiz’d on Blouzelind.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">True speaks that ancient proverb, ‘Love is blind.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The term “hoodman” occurs in “All’s Well that Ends
Well” (iv. 3). The First Lord says: “Hoodman comes!” and
no doubt there is an allusion to the game in the same play
(iii. 6), “we will bind and hoodwink him;” and in “Macbeth”
(iv. 3) Macduff says: “the time you may so hoodwink.”
There may also have been a reference to falconry—the
hawks being hooded in the intervals of sport. Thus, in
Latham’s “Falconry” (1615), “to hood” is the term used
for the blinding, “to unhood” for the unblinding.</p>

<p><i>Horse-racing.</i> That this diversion was in Shakespeare’s
day occasionally practised in the spirit of the modern turf is
evident from “Cymbeline” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I have heard of riding wagers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where horses have been nimbler than the sands<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That run i’ the clock’s behalf.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Burton,<a name="FNanchor_799_799" id="FNanchor_799_799"></a><a href="#Footnote_799_799" class="fnanchor">[799]</a> too, who wrote at the close of the Shakespearian
era, mentions the ruinous consequences of this recreation:
“Horse races are desports of great men, and good in themselves,
though many gentlemen by such means gallop quite
out of their fortunes.”</p>

<p><i>Leap-frog.</i> One boy stoops down with his hands upon
his knees, and others leap over him, every one of them running<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[410]</a></span>
forward and stooping in his turn. It is mentioned by
Shakespeare in “Henry V.” (v. 2), where he makes the king
say, “If I could win a lady at leap-frog, or by vaulting into
my saddle with my armour on my back, ... I should quickly
leap into a wife.” Ben Jonson, in his comedy of “Bartholomew
Fair,” speaks of “a leappe frogge chance note.”</p>

<p><i>Laugh-and-lie-down</i> (more properly laugh-and-lay-down)
was a game at cards, to which there is an allusion in the
“Two Noble Kinsmen” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Emilia.</i><span style="padding-left: 6em">I could laugh now.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Waiting-woman.</i> I could lie down, I’m sure.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Loggat.</i> The game so called resembles bowls, but with
notable differences.<a name="FNanchor_800_800" id="FNanchor_800_800"></a><a href="#Footnote_800_800" class="fnanchor">[800]</a> First, it is played, not on a green, but
on a floor strewed with ashes. The jack is a wheel of <i>lignum
vitæ</i>, or other hard wood, nine inches in diameter, and
three or four inches thick. The loggat, made of apple-wood,
is a truncated cone, twenty-six or twenty-seven
inches in length, tapering from a girth of eight and a half
to nine inches at one end to three and a half or four inches
at the other. Each player has three loggats, which he
throws, holding lightly the thin end. The object is to lie
as near the jack as possible. Hamlet speaks of this game
(v. 1): “Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to
play at loggats with ’em?” comparing, perhaps, the skull to
the jack at which the bones were thrown. In Ben Jonson’s
“Tale of a Tub” (iv. 5) we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Now are they tossing of his legs and arms,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like loggats at a pear-tree.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Sir Thomas Hanmer makes the game the same as nine-pins
or skittles. He says: “It is one of the unlawful games
enumerated in the Thirty-third statute of Henry VIII.;<a name="FNanchor_801_801" id="FNanchor_801_801"></a><a href="#Footnote_801_801" class="fnanchor">[801]</a> it
is the same which is now called kittle-pins, in which the boys
often make use of bones instead of wooden pins, throwing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[411]</a></span>
at them with another bone instead of bowling.”</p>

<p><i>Marbles.</i> It has been suggested that there is an allusion
to this pastime in “Measure for Measure” (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Believe not that the dribbling dart of love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Can pierce a complete bosom.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—dribbling being a term used in the game of marbles for
shooting slowly along the ground, in contradistinction to
<i>plumping</i>, which is elevating the hand so that the marble
does not touch the ground till it reaches the object of its
aim.<a name="FNanchor_802_802" id="FNanchor_802_802"></a><a href="#Footnote_802_802" class="fnanchor">[802]</a> According to others, a dribbler was a term in archery
expressive of contempt.<a name="FNanchor_803_803" id="FNanchor_803_803"></a><a href="#Footnote_803_803" class="fnanchor">[803]</a></p>

<p><i>Muss.</i> This was a phrase for a scramble, when any
small objects were thrown down, to be taken by those who
could seize them. In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 13), Antony
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The word is used by Dryden, in the Prologue to the “Widow
Ranter:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bauble and cap no sooner are thrown down<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But there’s a muss of more than half the town.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Nine-Men’s-Morris.</i> This rustic game, which is still extant
in some parts of England, was sometimes called “the
nine men’s merrils,” from <i>merelles</i>, or <i>mereaux</i>, an ancient
French word for the jettons or counters with which it was
played.<a name="FNanchor_804_804" id="FNanchor_804_804"></a><a href="#Footnote_804_804" class="fnanchor">[804]</a> The other term, <i>morris</i>, is probably a corruption
suggested by the sort of dance which, in the progress of the
game, the counters performed. Some consider<a name="FNanchor_805_805" id="FNanchor_805_805"></a><a href="#Footnote_805_805" class="fnanchor">[805]</a> that it was
identical with the game known as “Nine-holes,”<a name="FNanchor_806_806" id="FNanchor_806_806"></a><a href="#Footnote_806_806" class="fnanchor">[806]</a> mentioned
by Herrick in his “Hesperides:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Raspe playes at nine-holes, and ’tis known he gets<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[412]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Many a tester by his game, and bets.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Cotgrave speaks of “Le jeu des merelles,” the boyish
game called “merills,” or “five pennie morris,” played here
most commonly with stones, but in France with pawns or
men made on purpose, and termed “merelles.” It was also
called “peg morris,” as is evidenced by Clare, who, in his
“Rural Muse,” speaking of the shepherd boy, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Oft we may track his haunts, where he hath been<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To spend the leisure which his toils bestow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By nine-peg morris nicked upon the green.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The game is fully described by James, in the “Variorum
Shakespeare,” as follows: “In that part of Warwickshire
where Shakespeare was educated, and the neighbouring
parts of Northamptonshire, the shepherds and other boys
dig up the turf with their knives to represent a sort of imperfect
chessboard. It consists of a square, sometimes only
a foot diameter, sometimes three or four yards. Within
this is another square, every side of which is parallel to the
external square; and these squares are joined by lines drawn
from each corner of both squares, and the middle of each
line. One party or player has wooden pegs, the other stones,
which they move in such a manner as to take up each other’s
men, as they are called, and the area of the inner square
is called the pound, in which the men taken up are impounded.
These figures are, by the country people, called <i>nine-men’s-morris</i>,
or <i>merrils</i>; and are so called because each party
has nine men. These figures are always cut upon the green
turf or leys, as they are called, or upon the grass at the end of
ploughed lands, and in rainy seasons never fail to be choked
up with mud.” This verifies the allusion made by Shakespeare
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For lack of tread are undistinguishable.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This game was also transferred to a board, and continues a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[413]</a></span>
fireside recreation of the agricultural laborer. It is often
called by the name of “Mill,” or “Shepherd’s Mill.”<a name="FNanchor_807_807" id="FNanchor_807_807"></a><a href="#Footnote_807_807" class="fnanchor">[807]</a></p>

<p><i>Noddy.</i> Some doubt exists as to what game at cards was
signified by this term. It has been suggested that cribbage
is meant. Mr. Singer thinks it bore some resemblance to
the more recent game of “Beat the Knave out of Doors,”
which is mentioned together with “Ruff and new coat” in
Heywood’s play of “A Woman Killed with Kindness.”
The game is probably alluded to in “Troilus and Cressida”
(i. 2), in the following dialogue:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Pandarus.</i> When comes Troilus?—I’ll show you Troilus anon:
if he see me, you shall see him nod at me.</p>

<p><i>Cressida.</i> Will he give you the nod?</p>

<p><i>Pandarus.</i> You shall see.</p>

<p><i>Cressida.</i> If he do, the rich shall have more.”<a name="FNanchor_808_808" id="FNanchor_808_808"></a><a href="#Footnote_808_808" class="fnanchor">[808]</a></p></div>

<p class="ni">The term “noddy” was also applied to a fool, because, says
Minsheu, he nods when he should speak. In this sense it
occurs in “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Speed.</i> You mistook, sir: I say, she did nod; and you ask me, if
she did nod; and I say, ‘Ay.’</p>

<p><i>Proteus.</i> And that set together is noddy.”</p></div>

<p><i>Novem Quinque.</i> A game of dice, so called from its principal
throws being five and nine. It is alluded to in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (v. 2) by Biron, who speaks of it simply as
“novem.”</p>

<p><i>Parish-top.</i> Formerly a top was kept for public exercise
in a parish—a custom to which the old writers often refer.
Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), Sir Toby Belch says: “He’s
a coward, and a coystril, that will not drink to my niece till
his brains turn o’ the toe like a parish-top.” On which passage
Mr. Steevens says: “A large top was kept in every
village, to be whipped in frosty weather, that the peasants
might be kept warm by exercise, and out of mischief while
they could not work.” Beaumont and Fletcher, in “Thierry
and Theodoret” (ii. 3), speak of the practice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“I’ll hazard<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[414]</a></span>
<span class="i0">My life upon it, that a body of twelve<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should scourge him hither like a parish top,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And make him dance before you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in their “Night Walker” (i. 3) they mention the
“town-top.” Evelyn, enumerating the uses of willow-wood,
speaks of “great town-topps.” Mr. Knight<a name="FNanchor_809_809" id="FNanchor_809_809"></a><a href="#Footnote_809_809" class="fnanchor">[809]</a> remarks that
the custom which existed in the time of Elizabeth, and
probably long before, of a large top being provided for the
amusement of the peasants in frosty weather, presents a
curious illustration of the mitigating influences of social
kindness in an age of penal legislation.</p>

<p><i>Primero.</i> In Shakespeare’s time this was a very fashionable
game at cards, and hence is frequently alluded to by
him. It was known under the various designations of <i>Primero</i>,
<i>Prime</i>, and <i>Primavista</i>; and, according to Strutt,<a name="FNanchor_810_810" id="FNanchor_810_810"></a><a href="#Footnote_810_810" class="fnanchor">[810]</a> has
been reckoned among the most ancient games of cards
known to have been played in England. Shakespeare
speaks of Henry VIII. (v. 1) playing at primero with the
Duke of Suffolk, and makes Falstaff exclaim, in “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iv. 5), “I never prospered since I forswore
myself at primero.” That it was the court game is
shown in a very curious picture described by Mr. Barrington,
in the “Archæologia” (vol. viii. p. 132), which represents
Lord Burleigh playing at this pastime with three other noblemen.
Primero continued to be the most fashionable
game throughout the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI.,
Mary, Elizabeth, and James I.<a name="FNanchor_811_811" id="FNanchor_811_811"></a><a href="#Footnote_811_811" class="fnanchor">[811]</a> In the Earl of Northumberland’s
letters about the Gunpowder-plot we find that
Josceline Percy was playing at primero on Sunday, when
his uncle, the conspirator, called on him at Essex House;
and in the Sydney Papers there is an account of a quarrel
between Lord Southampton and one Ambrose Willoughby,
on account of the former persisting to play at primero in
the presence-chamber after the queen had retired to rest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[415]</a></span>
The manner of playing was thus: Each player had four
cards dealt to him one by one; the seven was the highest
card in point of number that he could avail himself of, which
counted for twenty-one; the six counted for sixteen, the
five for fifteen, and the ace for the same; but the two, the
three, and the four for their respective points only.</p>

<p>There may be further allusions to this game in “Taming
of the Shrew” (ii. 1), where Tranio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A vengeance on your crafty, wither’d hide!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet I have faced it with a card of ten”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the phrase “to face it with a card of ten” being derived,
as some suggest, possibly from primero, wherein the standing
boldly on a ten was often successful. “To face” meant,
as it still does, to attack by impudence of face. In “1 Henry VI.”
(v. 3) Suffolk speaks of a “cooling card,” which Nares
considers is borrowed from primero—a card so decisive as
to cool the courage of the adversary. Gifford objects to this
explanation, and says a “cooling-card” is, literally, a <i>bolus</i>.
There can be no doubt, however, that, metaphorically, the
term was used to denote something which damped or overwhelmed
the hopes of an expectant. Thus, in Fletcher’s
“Island Princess” (i. 3), Piniero says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“These hot youths<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I fear will find a cooling-card.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Push-pin</i> was a foolish sport, consisting in nothing more
than pushing one pin across another. Biron, in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3), speaks of Nestor playing “at push-pin
with the boys.”</p>

<p><i>Quintain.</i> This was a figure set up for tilters to run at,
in mock resemblance of a tournament, and is alluded to in
“As You Like It” (i. 2) by Orlando, who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“My better parts<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It cannot be better or more minutely described than in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[416]</a></span>
words of Mr. Strutt:<a name="FNanchor_812_812" id="FNanchor_812_812"></a><a href="#Footnote_812_812" class="fnanchor">[812]</a> “Tilting or combating at the quintain
is a military exercise of high antiquity, and antecedent,
I doubt not, to the jousts and tournaments. The quintain
originally was nothing more than the trunk of a tree or post
set up for the practice of the tyros in chivalry. Afterwards
a staff or spear was fixed in the earth, and a shield being
hung upon it, was the mark to strike at. The dexterity of
the performer consisted in smiting the shield in such a manner
as to break the ligatures and bear it to the ground. In
process of time this diversion was improved, and instead of
a staff and the shield, the resemblance of a human figure
carved in wood was introduced. To render the appearance
of this figure more formidable, it was generally made in the
likeness of a Turk or a Saracen, armed at all points, bearing
a shield upon his left arm, and brandishing a club or a sabre
with his right. The quintain thus fashioned was placed
upon a pivot, and so contrived as to move round with facility.
In running at this figure, it was necessary for the horseman
to direct his lance with great adroitness, and make his
stroke upon the forehead between the eyes, or upon the
nose; for if he struck wide of those parts, especially upon
the shield, the quintain turned about with much velocity,
and, in case he was not exceedingly careful, would give him
a severe blow upon the back with the wooden sabre held in
the right hand, which was considered as highly disgraceful
to the performer, while it excited the laughter and ridicule
of the spectators.”<a name="FNanchor_813_813" id="FNanchor_813_813"></a><a href="#Footnote_813_813" class="fnanchor">[813]</a> In Ben Jonson’s “Underwoods” it is
thus humorously mentioned:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Go, Captain Stub, lead on, and show<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What horse you come on, by the blow<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You give Sir Quintain, and the cuff<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You ’scape o’ the sandbags counterbuff.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Quoits.</i> This game derived its origin, according to Strutt,<a name="FNanchor_814_814" id="FNanchor_814_814"></a><a href="#Footnote_814_814" class="fnanchor">[814]</a>
from the ancient discus, and with us, at the present day, it
is a circular plate of iron perforated in the middle, not always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[417]</a></span>
of one size, but larger or smaller, to suit the strength
or conveniency of the several candidates. It is referred to
in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), by Falstaff, who assigns as one of
the reasons why Prince Henry loves Poins: “Because their
legs are both of a bigness, and ’a plays at quoits well.”</p>

<p>Formerly, in the country, the rustics, not having the round
perforated quoits to play with, used horse-shoes; and in
many places the quoit itself, to this day, is called a shoe.</p>

<p><i>Running for the ring.</i> This, according to Staunton, was
the name of a sport, a ring having been one of the prizes
formerly given in wrestling and running matches. Thus, in
the “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 1), Hortensio says: “He
that runs fastest gets the ring.”</p>

<p><i>Running the figure of eight.</i> Steevens says that this game
is alluded to by Shakespeare in “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (ii. 1), where Titania speaks of the “quaint mazes
in the wanton green.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in referring
to this passage, says: “Several mazes of the kind here alluded
to are still preserved, having been kept up from time
immemorial. On the top of Catherine Hill, Winchester,
the usual play-place of the school, was a very perplexed
and winding path, running in a very small space over a great
deal of ground, called a “miz-maze.” The senior boys obliged
the juniors to tread it, to prevent the figure from being lost,
and I believe it is still retained.”<a name="FNanchor_815_815" id="FNanchor_815_815"></a><a href="#Footnote_815_815" class="fnanchor">[815]</a></p>

<p><i>See-Saw.</i> Another name for this childish sport is that
given by Falstaff in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where he calls it
“riding the wild mare.” Gay thus describes this well-known
game:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Across the fallen oak the plank I laid,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And myself pois’d against the tott’ring maid;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">High leap’d the plank, adown Buxonia fell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Shove-Groat.</i> The object of this game was to shake or
push pieces of money on a board to reach certain marks.
It is alluded to in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), where Falstaff says:
“Quoit him down, Bardolph, like a shove-groat shilling;”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[418]</a></span>
or, in other words, Bardolph was to quoit Pistol down-stairs
as quickly as the smooth shilling—the shove-groat—flies
along the board. In a statute of 33 Henry VIII., shove-groat
is called a new game, and was probably originally
played with the silver groat. The broad shilling of Edward
VI. came afterwards to be used in this game, which was, no
doubt, the same as shovel-board, with the exception that the
latter was on a larger scale. Master Slender, in the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (i. 1), had his pocket picked of “two
Edward shovel-boards, that cost me two shilling and two
pence a-piece.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in describing the
game in his “Archaic Dictionary,” says that “a shilling or
other smooth coin was placed on the extreme edge of the
shovel-board, and propelled towards a mark by a smart
stroke with the palm of the hand.” It is mentioned under
various names, according to the coin employed, as shove-groat,<a name="FNanchor_816_816" id="FNanchor_816_816"></a><a href="#Footnote_816_816" class="fnanchor">[816]</a>
etc. The game of shove-halfpenny is mentioned in
the <i>Times</i> of April 25, 1845, as then played by the lower
orders. According to Strutt, it “was analogous to the modern
pastime called Justice Jervis, or Jarvis, which is confined
to common pot-houses.”</p>

<p><i>Snowballs.</i> These are alluded to in “Pericles” (iv. 6),
and in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iii. 5).</p>

<p><i>Span-counter.</i> In this boyish game one throws a counter,
or piece of money, which the other wins, if he can throw another
so as to hit it, or lie within a span of it. In “2 Henry VI.”
(iv. 2), Cade says: “Tell the king from me, that, for his
father’s sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to
span-counter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign.”
It is called in France “tapper;” and in Swift’s time was
played with farthings, as he calls it “span-farthing.”<a name="FNanchor_817_817" id="FNanchor_817_817"></a><a href="#Footnote_817_817" class="fnanchor">[817]</a></p>

<p><i>Stool-ball.</i> This game, alluded to in the “Two Noble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[419]</a></span>
Kinsmen” (v. 2), was formerly popular among young women,
and occasionally was played by persons of both sexes indiscriminately,
as the following lines, from a song written by
Durfey for his play of “Don Quixote,” acted at Dorset Gardens,
in 1694, show:<a name="FNanchor_818_818" id="FNanchor_818_818"></a><a href="#Footnote_818_818" class="fnanchor">[818]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Down in a vale on a summer’s day,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">All the lads and lasses met to be merry;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">A match for kisses at stool-ball to play,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And for cakes, and ale, and sider, and perry.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Chorus</i>—Come all, great, small, short, tall, away to stool-ball.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Strutt informs us that this game, as played in the north,
“consists in simply setting a stool upon the ground, and one
of the players takes his place before it, while his antagonist,
standing at a distance, tosses a ball with the intention of
striking the stool; and this is the business of the former to
prevent by beating it away with the hand, reckoning one to
the game for every stroke of the ball; if, on the contrary, it
should be missed by the hand and touch the stool, the players
change places. The conqueror is he who strikes the ball
most times before it touches the stool.”</p>

<p><i>Tennis.</i> According to a story told by the old annalists,
one of the most interesting historical events in connection
with this game happened when Henry V. was meditating
war against France. “The Dolphin,” says Hall in his
“Chronicle,” “thynkyng King Henry to be given still to such
plaies and lyght folies as he exercised and used before the
tyme that he was exalted to the Croune, sent to hym a tunne
of tennis balles to plaie with, as who saied that he had better
skill of tennis than of warre.” On the foundation of this
incident, as told by Holinshed, Shakespeare has constructed
his fine scene of the French Ambassadors’ audience in
“Henry V.” (i. 2). As soon as the first Ambassador has
given the Dauphin’s message and insulting gift, the English
king speaks thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[420]</a></span>
<span class="i0">His present and your pains we thank you for:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When we have match’d our rackets to these balls,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tell him, he hath made a match with such a wrangler<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That all the courts of France will be disturb’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With chases.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Hamlet” (ii. 1), Polonius speaks of this pastime, and
alludes to “falling out at tennis.” In the sixteenth century
tennis-courts were common in England, and the establishment
of such places was countenanced by the example of
royalty. It is evident that Henry VII. was a tennis-player.
In a MS. register of his expenditures, made in the thirteenth
year of his reign, this entry occurs: “Item, for the king’s
loss at tennis, twelvepence; for the loss of balls, threepence.”
Stow, in his “Survey of London,” tells us that among the
additions that King Henry VIII. made to Whitehall, were
“divers fair tennis-courts, bowling-allies, and a cock-pit.”
Charles II. frequently diverted himself with playing at
tennis, and had a particular kind of dress made for that
purpose. Pericles, when he is shipwrecked and cast upon
the coast of Pentapolis, addresses himself and the three fishermen
whom he chances to meet thus (“Pericles,” ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A man whom both the waters and the wind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For them to play upon, entreats you pity him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), Claudio, referring
to Benedick, says: “the old ornament of his cheek hath
already stuffed tennis-balls;”<a name="FNanchor_819_819" id="FNanchor_819_819"></a><a href="#Footnote_819_819" class="fnanchor">[819]</a> and in “Henry V.” (iii. 7),
the Dauphin says his horse “bounds from the earth as if
his entrails were hairs.” Again, “bandy” was originally a
term at tennis, to which Juliet refers in “Romeo and Juliet”
(ii. 5), when speaking of her Nurse:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[421]</a></span>
<span class="i0">She’d be as swift in motion as a ball;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My words would bandy her to my sweet love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And his to me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Also, King Lear (i. 4) says to Oswald: “Do you bandy
looks with me, you rascal?”</p>

<p><i>Tick-tack.</i> This was a sort of backgammon, and is alluded
to by Lucio in “Measure for Measure” (i. 2) who, referring
to Claudio’s unpleasant predicament, says: “I would
be sorry should be thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.”
In Weaver’s “Lusty Juventus,” Hipocrisye, seeing Lusty
Juventus kiss Abhominable Lyuing, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What a hurly burly is here!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Smicke smacke, and all thys gere!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You well [will] to <i>tycke take</i>, I fere,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If thou had tyme.”<a name="FNanchor_820_820" id="FNanchor_820_820"></a><a href="#Footnote_820_820" class="fnanchor">[820]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“Jouer au tric-trac” is used, too, in France in a wanton sense.</p>

<p><i>Tray-trip.</i> This was probably a game at cards, played
with dice as well as with cards, the success in which chiefly
depended upon the throwing of treys. Thus, in a satire
called “Machivell’s Dog” (1617):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But, leaving cardes, lets go to dice a while,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To passage, treitrippe, hazarde, or mumchance.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 5). Sir Toby Belch asks: “Shall I
play my freedom at tray-trip, and become thy bond-slave?”
It may be remembered, too, that in “The Scornful Lady”
of Beaumont and Fletcher (ii. 1), the Chaplain complains
that the Butler had broken his head, and being asked the
reason, says, for</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Reproving him at tra-trip, sir, for swearing.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Some are of opinion that it resembled the game of hopscotch,
or Scotch-hop; but this, says Nares,<a name="FNanchor_821_821" id="FNanchor_821_821"></a><a href="#Footnote_821_821" class="fnanchor">[821]</a> “seems to rest
merely upon unauthorized conjecture.”</p>

<p><i>Troll-my-dame.</i> The game of Troll-madam, still familiar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[422]</a></span>
as Bagatelle, was borrowed from the French (<i>Trou-madame</i>).
One of its names was Pigeon-holes, because played on a
board, at one end of which were a number of arches, like
pigeon-holes, into which small balls had to be bowled. In
“Winter’s Tale” (iv. 2), it is mentioned by Autolycus, who,
in answer to the Clown, says that the manner of fellow that
robbed him was one that he had “known to go about with
troll-my-dames.” Cotgrave declares it as “the game called
Trunkes, or the Hole.”</p>

<p><i>Trump.</i> This was probably the <i>triumfo</i> of the Italians,
and the <i>triomphe</i> of the French—being perhaps of equal
antiquity in England with <i>primero</i>. At the latter end of
the sixteenth century it was very common among the inferior
classes. There is, no doubt, a particular allusion to
this game in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 14), where Antony
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“the queen—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, whilst it was mine, had annex’d unto’t<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A million more, now lost—she, Eros, has<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pack’d cards with Cæsar, and false-play’d my glory<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unto an enemy’s triumph.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The poet meant to say, that Cleopatra, by collusion, played
the great game they were engaged in falsely, so as to sacrifice
Antony’s fame to that of his enemy. There is an equivoque
between <i>trump</i> and <i>triumph</i>. The game in question
bore a very strong resemblance to our modern whist—the
only points of dissimilarity being that more or less than four
persons might play at trump; that all the cards were not
dealt out; and that the dealer had the privilege of discarding
some, and taking others in from the stock. In Eliot’s
“Fruits for the French,” 1593, it is called “a very common
ale-house game in England.”</p>

<p><i>Wrestling.</i> Of the many allusions that are given by
Shakespeare to this pastime, we may quote the phrase “to
catch on the hip,” made use of by Shylock in the “Merchant
of Venice” (i. 3), who, speaking of Antonio, says,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[423]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If I can catch him once upon the hip,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the meaning being, “to have at an entire advantage.”<a name="FNanchor_822_822" id="FNanchor_822_822"></a><a href="#Footnote_822_822" class="fnanchor">[822]</a>
The expression occurs again in “Othello” (ii. 1), where Iago
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Nares,<a name="FNanchor_823_823" id="FNanchor_823_823"></a><a href="#Footnote_823_823" class="fnanchor">[823]</a> however, considers the phrase was derived from
hunting; because, “when the animal pursued is seized upon
the hip, it is finally disabled from flight.”</p>

<p>In “As You Like It” (ii. 3), where Adam speaks of the
“bonny priser of the humorous duke,” Singer considers that
a <i>priser</i> was the phrase for a wrestler, a <i>prise</i> being a term
in that sport for a grappling or hold taken.</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_764_764" id="Footnote_764_764"></a><a href="#FNanchor_764_764"><span class="label">[764]</span></a> See Drake’s “Shakespeare and His Times,” vol. ii. pp. 178-181.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_765_765" id="Footnote_765_765"></a><a href="#FNanchor_765_765"><span class="label">[765]</span></a> Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1870, vol. ii. p. 290.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_766_766" id="Footnote_766_766"></a><a href="#FNanchor_766_766"><span class="label">[766]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 84.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_767_767" id="Footnote_767_767"></a><a href="#FNanchor_767_767"><span class="label">[767]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 210.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_768_768" id="Footnote_768_768"></a><a href="#FNanchor_768_768"><span class="label">[768]</span></a> From Gifford’s Note on Massinger’s Works, 1813, vol. i. p. 104.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_769_769" id="Footnote_769_769"></a><a href="#FNanchor_769_769"><span class="label">[769]</span></a> See Jamieson’s “Scottish Dictionary,” 1879, vol. i. p. 122.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_770_770" id="Footnote_770_770"></a><a href="#FNanchor_770_770"><span class="label">[770]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 57.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_771_771" id="Footnote_771_771"></a><a href="#FNanchor_771_771"><span class="label">[771]</span></a> Ibid. vol. i. p. 58.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_772_772" id="Footnote_772_772"></a><a href="#FNanchor_772_772"><span class="label">[772]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 143.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_773_773" id="Footnote_773_773"></a><a href="#FNanchor_773_773"><span class="label">[773]</span></a> “Glossary,” pp. 29, 30.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_774_774" id="Footnote_774_774"></a><a href="#FNanchor_774_774"><span class="label">[774]</span></a> See Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 156; Strutt’s
“Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 98. A simple mode of bat-fowling,
by means of a large clap-net and a lantern, and called bird-batting, is
alluded to in Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” (bk. ii. chap. x.). Drake
thinks that it is to a stratagem of this kind Shakespeare alludes when
he paints Buckingham exclaiming (“Henry VIII.” i. 1):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The net has fall’n upon me; I shall perish<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Under device and practice.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_775_775" id="Footnote_775_775"></a><a href="#FNanchor_775_775"><span class="label">[775]</span></a> Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 396.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_776_776" id="Footnote_776_776"></a><a href="#FNanchor_776_776"><span class="label">[776]</span></a> A pip is a spot upon a card.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_777_777" id="Footnote_777_777"></a><a href="#FNanchor_777_777"><span class="label">[777]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 436.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_778_778" id="Footnote_778_778"></a><a href="#FNanchor_778_778"><span class="label">[778]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 405.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_779_779" id="Footnote_779_779"></a><a href="#FNanchor_779_779"><span class="label">[779]</span></a> Rub is still a term at the game, expressive of the movement of the
balls. Cf. “King Lear” (ii. 2), and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 1),
where Boyet, speaking of the game, says: “I fear too much rubbing.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_780_780" id="Footnote_780_780"></a><a href="#FNanchor_780_780"><span class="label">[780]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’ “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 43.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_781_781" id="Footnote_781_781"></a><a href="#FNanchor_781_781"><span class="label">[781]</span></a> Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” vol. iii. p. 592.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_782_782" id="Footnote_782_782"></a><a href="#FNanchor_782_782"><span class="label">[782]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 409.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_783_783" id="Footnote_783_783"></a><a href="#FNanchor_783_783"><span class="label">[783]</span></a> She means, “Do you intend to make a mockery of me among
these companions?”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_784_784" id="Footnote_784_784"></a><a href="#FNanchor_784_784"><span class="label">[784]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakspeare,” p. 20.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_785_785" id="Footnote_785_785"></a><a href="#FNanchor_785_785"><span class="label">[785]</span></a> Gifford’s note on Jonson’s Works, vol. ii. p. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_786_786" id="Footnote_786_786"></a><a href="#FNanchor_786_786"><span class="label">[786]</span></a> Ibid., vol. vii. p. 283.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_787_787" id="Footnote_787_787"></a><a href="#FNanchor_787_787"><span class="label">[787]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 35.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_788_788" id="Footnote_788_788"></a><a href="#FNanchor_788_788"><span class="label">[788]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 919.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_789_789" id="Footnote_789_789"></a><a href="#FNanchor_789_789"><span class="label">[789]</span></a> A three-man beetle is a heavy implement, with three handles, used
in driving piles, etc., which required three men to lift it.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_790_790" id="Footnote_790_790"></a><a href="#FNanchor_790_790"><span class="label">[790]</span></a> A correspondent of “Notes and Queries,” 2d series, vol. vii. p. 277,
suggests as a derivation the German <i>schnapps</i>, spirit, and <i>drache</i>, dragon,
and that it is equivalent to spirit-fire.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_791_791" id="Footnote_791_791"></a><a href="#FNanchor_791_791"><span class="label">[791]</span></a> Cf. “Winter’s Tale” (iii. 3): “But to make an end of the ship,—to
see how the sea flap-dragoned it.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_792_792" id="Footnote_792_792"></a><a href="#FNanchor_792_792"><span class="label">[792]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 131.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_793_793" id="Footnote_793_793"></a><a href="#FNanchor_793_793"><span class="label">[793]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” pp. 168, 169.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_794_794" id="Footnote_794_794"></a><a href="#FNanchor_794_794"><span class="label">[794]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” 1876, pp. 78, 83, 87, 401.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_795_795" id="Footnote_795_795"></a><a href="#FNanchor_795_795"><span class="label">[795]</span></a> “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. ii. p. 170; see Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakspeare,” pp. 118, 435.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_796_796" id="Footnote_796_796"></a><a href="#FNanchor_796_796"><span class="label">[796]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 199.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_797_797" id="Footnote_797_797"></a><a href="#FNanchor_797_797"><span class="label">[797]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. p. 420.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_798_798" id="Footnote_798_798"></a><a href="#FNanchor_798_798"><span class="label">[798]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” pp. 499, 500; Brand’s “Pop.
Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 397, 398.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_799_799" id="Footnote_799_799"></a><a href="#FNanchor_799_799"><span class="label">[799]</span></a> “Anatomy of Melancholy;” Drake’s “Shakespeare and His Times,”
vol. ii. p. 298.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_800_800" id="Footnote_800_800"></a><a href="#FNanchor_800_800"><span class="label">[800]</span></a> Clark and Wright’s “Notes to Hamlet,” 1876, pp. 212, 213.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_801_801" id="Footnote_801_801"></a><a href="#FNanchor_801_801"><span class="label">[801]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” p. 365; Nares’s “Glossary,”
vol. ii. p. 522.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_802_802" id="Footnote_802_802"></a><a href="#FNanchor_802_802"><span class="label">[802]</span></a> Baker’s “Northamptonshire Glossary,” 1854, vol. i. p. 198.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_803_803" id="Footnote_803_803"></a><a href="#FNanchor_803_803"><span class="label">[803]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 134.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_804_804" id="Footnote_804_804"></a><a href="#FNanchor_804_804"><span class="label">[804]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 144.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_805_805" id="Footnote_805_805"></a><a href="#FNanchor_805_805"><span class="label">[805]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 605.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_806_806" id="Footnote_806_806"></a><a href="#FNanchor_806_806"><span class="label">[806]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 368, 369.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_807_807" id="Footnote_807_807"></a><a href="#FNanchor_807_807"><span class="label">[807]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii. pp. 429, 432.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_808_808" id="Footnote_808_808"></a><a href="#FNanchor_808_808"><span class="label">[808]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 606.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_809_809" id="Footnote_809_809"></a><a href="#FNanchor_809_809"><span class="label">[809]</span></a> “Pictorial Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 145.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_810_810" id="Footnote_810_810"></a><a href="#FNanchor_810_810"><span class="label">[810]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_811_811" id="Footnote_811_811"></a><a href="#FNanchor_811_811"><span class="label">[811]</span></a> Smith’s “Festivals, Games, and Amusements,” 1831, p. 320.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_812_812" id="Footnote_812_812"></a><a href="#FNanchor_812_812"><span class="label">[812]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 182.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_813_813" id="Footnote_813_813"></a><a href="#FNanchor_813_813"><span class="label">[813]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 713.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_814_814" id="Footnote_814_814"></a><a href="#FNanchor_814_814"><span class="label">[814]</span></a> “Sports and Pastimes,” p. 141.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_815_815" id="Footnote_815_815"></a><a href="#FNanchor_815_815"><span class="label">[815]</span></a> See Milner’s “History of Winchester,” vol. ii. p. 155.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_816_816" id="Footnote_816_816"></a><a href="#FNanchor_816_816"><span class="label">[816]</span></a> According to Douce, “Illustrations of Shakespeare” (1839, p. 280),
it was known as “slide-groat,” “slide-board,” “slide-thrift,” and “slip-thrift.”
See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 16, 394, 398;
Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 791; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. ii.
p. 441.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_817_817" id="Footnote_817_817"></a><a href="#FNanchor_817_817"><span class="label">[817]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 491.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_818_818" id="Footnote_818_818"></a><a href="#FNanchor_818_818"><span class="label">[818]</span></a> Quoted by Strutt, “Sports and Pastimes,” p. 166.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_819_819" id="Footnote_819_819"></a><a href="#FNanchor_819_819"><span class="label">[819]</span></a> In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the Princess speaks of “a set of
wit well play’d;” upon which Mr. Singer (“Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 263)
adds that “a set is a term at tennis for a game.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_820_820" id="Footnote_820_820"></a><a href="#FNanchor_820_820"><span class="label">[820]</span></a> Quoted by Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 449; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,”
1849, vol. ii. p. 445.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_821_821" id="Footnote_821_821"></a><a href="#FNanchor_821_821"><span class="label">[821]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 896.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_822_822" id="Footnote_822_822"></a><a href="#FNanchor_822_822"><span class="label">[822]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 208.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_823_823" id="Footnote_823_823"></a><a href="#FNanchor_823_823"><span class="label">[823]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 421.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[424]</a></span></h2>

<h3>DANCES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">We</span> are indebted to Shakespeare for having bequeathed
to us many interesting allusions to some of the old dances
in use in his day, but which have long ago passed into oblivion.
As will be seen, these were of a very diverse character,
but, as has been remarked, were well suited to the
merry doings of our forefathers; and although in some cases
they justly merited censure for their extravagant nature, yet
the greater part of these sources of diversion were harmless.
Indeed, no more pleasing picture can be imagined than that
of a rustic sheep-shearing gathering in the olden times, when,
the work over, the peasantry joined together in some simple
dance, each one vieing with his neighbor to perform his part
with as much grace as possible.</p>

<p><i>Antic.</i> This was a grotesque dance. In “Macbeth”
(iv. 1), the witch, perceiving how Macbeth is affected by the
horrible apparitions which he has seen, says to her sisters:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And show the best of our delights.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll charm the air to give a sound,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While you perform your antic round.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>To quote another instance, Armado, in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (v. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We will have, if this fadge not, an antique.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bergomask Dance.</i> According to Sir Thomas Hanmer, this
was a dance after the manner of the peasants of Bergomasco,
a county in Italy belonging to the Venetians. All the buffoons
in Italy affected to imitate the ridiculous jargon of
that people, and from thence it became customary to mimic
also their manner of dancing. In “A Midsummer-Night’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[425]</a></span>
Dream” (v. 1), Bottom asks Theseus whether he would like
“to hear a Bergomask dance,” between two of their company.</p>

<p><i>Brawl.</i> This was a kind of dance. It appears that several
persons united hands in a circle, and gave one another
continual shakes, the steps changing with the tune. With
this dance balls were usually opened.<a name="FNanchor_824_824" id="FNanchor_824_824"></a><a href="#Footnote_824_824" class="fnanchor">[824]</a> Kissing was occasionally
introduced. In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iii. 1),
Moth asks his master: “Will you win your love with a
French brawl.”</p>

<p><i>Canary.</i> This was the name of a sprightly dance, the
music to which consisted of two strains with eight bars in
each; an allusion to which is made by Moth in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (iii. 1), who speaks of jigging off a tune at
the tongue’s end, and canarying to it with the feet. And in
“All’s Well that End’s Well” (ii. 1), Lafeu tells the king
that he has seen a medicine</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“that’s able to breathe life into a stone,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With spritely fire and motion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This dance is said to have originated in the Canary Islands,
an opinion, however, which has, says Dyce, been disputed.<a name="FNanchor_825_825" id="FNanchor_825_825"></a><a href="#Footnote_825_825" class="fnanchor">[825]</a></p>

<p><i>Cinque-pace.</i> This was so named from its steps being
regulated by the number five:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Five was the number of the music’s feet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which still the dance did with five paces meet.”<a name="FNanchor_826_826" id="FNanchor_826_826"></a><a href="#Footnote_826_826" class="fnanchor">[826]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), Shakespeare makes
Beatrice make a quibble upon the term; for after comparing
wooing, wedding, and repenting to a Scotch jig, a measure,
and a cinque-pace, she says: “then comes repentance, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[426]</a></span>
with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster,
till he sink into his grave.” A further reference occurs in
“Twelfth Night” (i. 3), by Sir Toby Belch, who calls it a
“sink-a-pace.”</p>

<p><i>Coranto.</i> An allusion to this dance, which appears to have
been of a very lively and rapid character, is made in “Henry
V.” (iii. 5), where the Duke of Bourbon describes it as the
“swift coranto;” and in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 3)
Lafeu refers to it. A further notice of it occurs in “Twelfth
Night” (i. 3), in the passage where Sir Toby Belch speaks
of “coming home in a coranto.”</p>

<p><i>Fading.</i> Malone quotes a passage from “Sportive Wit,”
1666, which implies that this was a rustic dance:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The courtiers scorn us country clowns,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">We country clowns do scorn the court;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">We can be as merry upon the downs<br /></span>
<span class="i1">As you at midnight with all your sport,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With a <i>fading</i>, with a <i>fading</i>.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It would appear, also, from a letter appended to Boswell’s
edition of Malone, that it was an Irish dance, and that it
was practised, upon rejoicing occasions, as recently as 1803,
the date of the letter:</p>

<p>“This dance is still practised on rejoicing occasions in many
parts of Ireland; a king and queen are chosen from amongst
the young persons who are the best dancers; the queen carries
a garland composed of two hoops placed at right angles,
and fastened to a handle; the hoops are covered with flowers
and ribbons; you have seen it, I dare say, with the May-maids.
Frequently in the course of the dance the king and
queen lift up their joined hands as high as they can, she still
holding the garland in the other. The most remote couple
from the king and queen first pass under; all the rest of the
line linked together follow in succession. When the last has
passed, the king and queen suddenly face about and front
their companions; this is often repeated during the dance,
and the various undulations are pretty enough, resembling
the movements of a serpent. The dancers on the first of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[427]</a></span>
May visit such newly wedded pairs of a certain rank as have
been married since last May-day in the neighborhood, who
commonly bestow on them a stuffed ball richly decked with
gold and silver lace, and accompanied with a present in
money, to regale themselves after the dance. This dance is
practised when the bonfires are lighted up, the queen hailing
the return of summer in a popular Irish song beginning:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘We lead on summer—see! she follows in our train.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), Shakespeare seems to
allude to this dance where he makes the servant, speaking
of the pedler, say: “he has the prettiest love songs for
maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate
burdens of ‘dildos’ and ‘fadings.’” Some commentators,<a name="FNanchor_827_827" id="FNanchor_827_827"></a><a href="#Footnote_827_827" class="fnanchor">[827]</a>
however, consider that only the song is meant.</p>

<p><i>Hay.</i> Douce<a name="FNanchor_828_828" id="FNanchor_828_828"></a><a href="#Footnote_828_828" class="fnanchor">[828]</a> says this dance was borrowed by us from
the French, and is classed among the “brawls” in Thoinot
Arbeau’s “Orchesographie” (1588). In “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (v. 1), Dull says: “I will play on tabor to the Worthies,
and let them dance their hay.”</p>

<p><i>Jig.</i> Besides meaning a merry, sprightly dance, a jig also
implied a coarse sort of comic entertainment, in which sense
it is probably used by Hamlet (ii. 2): “He’s for a jig or a
tale of bawdry.” “It seems,” says Mr. Collier,<a name="FNanchor_829_829" id="FNanchor_829_829"></a><a href="#Footnote_829_829" class="fnanchor">[829]</a> “to have
been a ludicrous composition in rhyme, sung, or said, by the
clown, and accompanied by dancing and playing upon the
pipe and tabor.”<a name="FNanchor_830_830" id="FNanchor_830_830"></a><a href="#Footnote_830_830" class="fnanchor">[830]</a> an instance of which perhaps occurs in the
Clown’s song at the close of “Twelfth Night:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When that I was and a little tiny boy.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Fletcher, in the Prologue to the “Fair Maid of the Inn,”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[428]</a></span>
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A jig should be clapt at, and every rhyme<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Praised and applauded by a clamorous chime.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Among the allusions to this dance we may quote one in
“Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), where Beatrice compares
wooing to a Scotch jig; and another in “Twelfth
Night” (i. 3), where Sir Toby Belch says, his “very walk
should be a jig.”</p>

<p><i>Lavolta.</i> According to Florio, the lavolta is a kind of
turning French dance, in which the man turns the woman
round several times, and then assists her in making a high
spring or <i>cabriole</i>. It is thus described by Sir John Davies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Yet is there one the most delightful kind.<br /></span>
<span class="i1">A loftie jumping, or a leaping round,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where arme in arme two dauncers are entwined,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And whirle themselves, with strict embracements bound;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And still their feet an anapest do sound,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">An anapest is all their musicks song,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose first two feet are short, and third is long.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Douce,<a name="FNanchor_831_831" id="FNanchor_831_831"></a><a href="#Footnote_831_831" class="fnanchor">[831]</a> however, considers it to be of Italian origin, and
says, “It passed from Italy into Provence and the rest of
France, and thence into England.” Scot, too, in his “Discovery
of Witchcraft,” thus speaks of it: “He saith, that
these night-walking, or rather night-dancing, witches, brought
out of Italie into France that dance which is called <i>la Volta</i>.”
Shakespeare, in his “Henry V.” (iii. 5), makes the Duke of
Bourbon allude to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“They bid us to the English dancing-schools,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And teach lavoltas high, and swift corantos.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 4), Troilus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I cannot sing,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor heel the high lavolt.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Light o’ Love.</i> This was an old dance tune, and was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[429]</a></span>
proverbial expression for levity, especially in love matters.<a name="FNanchor_832_832" id="FNanchor_832_832"></a><a href="#Footnote_832_832" class="fnanchor">[832]</a>
In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 4), Margaret says:
“Clap’s into ‘Light o’ love;’ that goes without a burden;
do you sing it, and I’ll dance it;” to which Beatrice answers:
“Yea, light o’ love, with your heels.”</p>

<p>In “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 2), it is alluded to:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Julia.</i> Best sing it to the tune of ‘Light o’ love.’<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Lucetta.</i> It is too heavy for so light a tune.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 2), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He’ll dance the morris twenty mile an hour.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And gallops to the tune of ‘Light o’ love.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Chances” (i. 3), Frederic
says: “Sure he has encounter’d some light-o’-love or other.”</p>

<p><i>Pavan.</i> This was a grave and majestic dance, in which
the gentlemen wore their caps, swords, and mantles, and the
ladies their long robes and trains. The dancers stepped
round the room and then crossed in the middle, trailing
their garments on the ground, “the motion whereof,” says
Sir J. Hawkins, “resembled that of a peacock’s tail.” It is
alluded to in “Twelfth Night” (v. 1) by Sir Toby: “A passy-measures
pavin,” although the reading of this passage is
uncertain, the editors of the “Globe” edition substituting
<i>panyn</i>.</p>

<p>It has been conjectured that the “passy-measure galliard,”
and the “passy-measure pavan” were only two different
measures of the same dance, from the Italian <i>passamezzo</i>.<a name="FNanchor_833_833" id="FNanchor_833_833"></a><a href="#Footnote_833_833" class="fnanchor">[833]</a></p>

<p><i>Roundel.</i> This was also called the “round,” a dance of a
circular kind, and is probably referred to by Titania in “A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 2), where she says to her
train:<a name="FNanchor_834_834" id="FNanchor_834_834"></a><a href="#Footnote_834_834" class="fnanchor">[834]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come now, a roundel and a fairy song.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Ben Jonson, in the “Tale of a Tub,”<a name="FNanchor_835_835" id="FNanchor_835_835"></a><a href="#Footnote_835_835" class="fnanchor">[835]</a> seems to call the rings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[430]</a></span>
which such fairy dances are supposed to make, <i>roundels</i>.</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll have no roundels, I, in the queen’s paths.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Satyrs’ Dance.</i> A dance of satyrs was a not uncommon
entertainment in Shakespeare’s day, or even at an earlier
period.<a name="FNanchor_836_836" id="FNanchor_836_836"></a><a href="#Footnote_836_836" class="fnanchor">[836]</a> It was not confined to England, and has been
rendered memorable by the fearful accident with which it
was accompanied at the Court of France in 1392, a graphic
description of which has been recorded by Froissart. In
the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), the satyrs’ dance is alluded to
by the Servant, who says: “Master, there is three carters,
three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swine-herds, that
have made themselves all men of hair; they call themselves
Saltiers: and they have a dance which the wenches say is a
gallimaufry of gambols, because they are not in’t.” In a
book of songs composed by Thomas Ravenscroft and others,
in the time of Shakespeare, we find one<a name="FNanchor_837_837" id="FNanchor_837_837"></a><a href="#Footnote_837_837" class="fnanchor">[837]</a> called the
“Satyres’ daunce.” It is for four voices, and is as follows:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Round a round, a rounda, keepe your ring<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the glorious sunne we sing.<br /></span>
<span class="i11">Hoe, hoe!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">He that weares the flaming rayes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the imperiall crowne of bayes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Him with shoutes and songs we praise.<br /></span>
<span class="i11">Hoe, hoe!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">That in his bountee would vouchsafe to grace<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The humble sylvanes and their shaggy race.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sword-dance.</i> In olden times there were several kinds
of sword-dances, most of which afforded opportunities for
the display of skill. In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 11),
there seems to be an allusion to this custom, where Antony,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[431]</a></span>
speaking of Cæsar, says:<a name="FNanchor_838_838" id="FNanchor_838_838"></a><a href="#Footnote_838_838" class="fnanchor">[838]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“he, at Philippi, kept<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His sword e’en like a dancer.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 1), where Bertram,
lamenting that he is kept from the wars, adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But one to dance with.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), too, Demetrius says to
Chiron:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, boy, although our mother, unadvis’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gave you a dancing-rapier by your side.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Tread a Measure</i>, to which the King refers in “Love’s
Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), when he tells Boyet to tell Rosaline</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“we have measur’d many miles,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To tread a measure with her on this grass,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">was a grave solemn dance, with slow and measured steps,
like the minuet. As it was of so solemn a nature, it was
performed<a name="FNanchor_839_839" id="FNanchor_839_839"></a><a href="#Footnote_839_839" class="fnanchor">[839]</a> at public entertainments in the Inns of Court,
and it was “not unusual, nor thought inconsistent, for the
first characters in the law to bear a part in treading a
measure.”</p>

<p><i>Trip and Go</i> was the name of a favorite morris-dance, and
appears, says Mr. Chappell, in his “Popular Music of the
Olden Times,” etc. (2d edition, vol. i. p. 131), to have become
a proverbial expression. It is used in “Love’s Labour’s
Lost” (iv. 2).</p>

<p><i>Up-spring.</i> From the following passage, in Chapman’s
“Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany,” it would seem that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[432]</a></span>
this was a German dance:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We Germans have no changes in our dances;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An almain and an up-spring, that is all.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Karl Elze,<a name="FNanchor_840_840" id="FNanchor_840_840"></a><a href="#Footnote_840_840" class="fnanchor">[840]</a> who, a few years ago, reprinted Chapman’s
“Alphonsus” at Leipsic, says that the word “up-spring”
“is the ‘Hüpfauf,’ the last and wildest dance at the old
German merry-makings. No epithet could there be more
appropriate to this drunken dance than Shakespeare’s <i>swaggering</i>”
in “Hamlet” (i. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_824_824" id="Footnote_824_824"></a><a href="#FNanchor_824_824"><span class="label">[824]</span></a> Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 134.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_825_825" id="Footnote_825_825"></a><a href="#FNanchor_825_825"><span class="label">[825]</span></a> See Chappell’s “Popular Music of the Olden Time,” 2d edition,
vol. i. p. 368; Dyce’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 63.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_826_826" id="Footnote_826_826"></a><a href="#FNanchor_826_826"><span class="label">[826]</span></a> Quoted by Nares from Sir John Davies on “Dancing.” Mr. Dyce,
“Glossary,” p. 81, says that Nares wrongly confounded this with the
“gallard.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_827_827" id="Footnote_827_827"></a><a href="#FNanchor_827_827"><span class="label">[827]</span></a> See Knight’s “Pictorial Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 375; Dyce’s “Glossary,”
1836, p. 152; “British Popular Customs,” 1876, pp. 276, 277. See
also Chappell’s “Popular Music of the Olden Time,” 2d edition, vol. i.
p. 235; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 292.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_828_828" id="Footnote_828_828"></a><a href="#FNanchor_828_828"><span class="label">[828]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 146.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_829_829" id="Footnote_829_829"></a><a href="#FNanchor_829_829"><span class="label">[829]</span></a> “History of English Dramatic Poetry,” vol. iii. p. 380; see Dyce’s
“Glossary,” p. 229; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 450; Singer’s “Shakespeare,”
vol. ix. pp. 198, 219.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_830_830" id="Footnote_830_830"></a><a href="#FNanchor_830_830"><span class="label">[830]</span></a> “Hamlet:” iii. 2: “your only jig-maker.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_831_831" id="Footnote_831_831"></a><a href="#FNanchor_831_831"><span class="label">[831]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 301; see Nares’s “Glossary,” vol.
ii. p. 498.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_832_832" id="Footnote_832_832"></a><a href="#FNanchor_832_832"><span class="label">[832]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 510.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_833_833" id="Footnote_833_833"></a><a href="#FNanchor_833_833"><span class="label">[833]</span></a> See Dyce, vol. iii. p. 412, <i>note</i> 121.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_834_834" id="Footnote_834_834"></a><a href="#FNanchor_834_834"><span class="label">[834]</span></a> Roundel also meant a song. Mr. Dyce considers the dance is here
meant.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_835_835" id="Footnote_835_835"></a><a href="#FNanchor_835_835"><span class="label">[835]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 333.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_836_836" id="Footnote_836_836"></a><a href="#FNanchor_836_836"><span class="label">[836]</span></a> See Knight’s “Pictorial Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 384; Singer’s
“Shakespeare,” vol. iv. p. 85; Boswell’s “Shakespeare,” vol. xiv. p.
371.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_837_837" id="Footnote_837_837"></a><a href="#FNanchor_837_837"><span class="label">[837]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 222.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_838_838" id="Footnote_838_838"></a><a href="#FNanchor_838_838"><span class="label">[838]</span></a> See Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, pp. 300, 301; Douce’s “Illustrations
of Shakespeare,” p. 193.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_839_839" id="Footnote_839_839"></a><a href="#FNanchor_839_839"><span class="label">[839]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ii. p. 269; Sir Christopher Hatton
was famous for it.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_840_840" id="Footnote_840_840"></a><a href="#FNanchor_840_840"><span class="label">[840]</span></a> Quoted in Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 476.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[433]</a></span></h2>

<h3>PUNISHMENTS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Shakespeare</span> has not omitted to notice many of the
punishments which were in use in years gone by; the scattered
allusions to these being interesting in so far as they
serve to illustrate the domestic manners and customs of our
forefathers. Happily, however, these cruel tortures, which
darken the pages of history, have long ago passed into oblivion;
and at the present day it is difficult to believe that
such barbarous practices could ever have been tolerated in
any civilized country. The horrible punishment of “boiling
to death,” is mentioned in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 5), where
Fabian says: “If I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be
boiled to death with melancholy.” In “Winter’s Tale”
(iii. 2), Paulina inquires:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What wheels? racks? fires? What flaying? boiling<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In leads or oils? What old or newer torture<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Must I receive?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There seems to be an indirect allusion to this punishment
in “The Two Noble Kinsmen” (iv. 3), where the Gaoler’s
Daughter in her madness speaks of those who “are mad, or
hang, or drown themselves, being put into a caldron of lead
and usurer’s grease, and there boiling like a gammon of
bacon that will never be enough.”</p>

<p>The practice of holding burning basins before the eyes
of captives, to destroy their eyesight, is probably alluded to
by Macbeth (iv. 1), in the passage where the apparitions are
presented to him by the witches:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou art too like the spirit of Banquo; down!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy crown does sear mine eyeballs.”<a name="FNanchor_841_841" id="FNanchor_841_841"></a><a href="#Footnote_841_841" class="fnanchor">[841]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 4), soaking in brine as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[434]</a></span>
punishment is referred to by Cleopatra, who says to the
messenger:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire, and stew’d in brine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Smarting in lingering pickle.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Drowning by the tide, a method of punishing criminals, is
probably noticed in “The Tempest” (i. 1), by Antonio:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This wide-chapp’d rascal—would thou might’st lie drowning<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The washing of ten tides!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Baffle.</i> This was formerly a punishment of infamy inflicted
on recreant knights, one part of which consisted in hanging
them up by the heels, to which Falstaff probably refers
in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 2), where he says to the prince, “call
me villain, and baffle me.” And, further on (ii. 4): “if thou
dost it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and
matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker, or a
poulter’s hare.”<a name="FNanchor_842_842" id="FNanchor_842_842"></a><a href="#Footnote_842_842" class="fnanchor">[842]</a> In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), the Chief Justice
tells Falstaff that “to punish him by the heels would amend
the attention of his ears.” And in “All’s Well that Ends
Well” (iv. 3), where the lord relates how Parolles has “sat
in the stocks all night,” Bertram says: “his heels have deserved
it, in usurping his spurs so long.”</p>

<p>Spenser, in his “Fairy Queen” (vi. 7), thus describes this
mode of punishment:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And after all, for greater infamie<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He by the heels him hung upon a tree,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And baffl’d so, that all which passed by<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The picture of his punishment might see.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The appropriate term, too, for chopping off the spurs of a
knight when he was to be degraded, was “hack”—a custom
to which, it has been suggested, Mrs. Page alludes in the
“Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1):<a name="FNanchor_843_843" id="FNanchor_843_843"></a><a href="#Footnote_843_843" class="fnanchor">[843]</a> “What?—Sir Alice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[435]</a></span>
Ford! These knights will hack, and so thou shouldst not
alter the article of thy gentry.”<a name="FNanchor_844_844" id="FNanchor_844_844"></a><a href="#Footnote_844_844" class="fnanchor">[844]</a></p>

<p>Mr. Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_845_845" id="FNanchor_845_845"></a><a href="#Footnote_845_845" class="fnanchor">[845]</a> however, says the most probable meaning of
this obscure passage is, that there is an allusion to the extravagant
number of knights created by King James, and
that <i>hack</i> is equivalent to “become cheap or vulgar.”</p>

<p>It appears, too, that in days gone by the arms, etc., of
traitors and rebels might be defaced. Thus, in “Richard
II.” (ii. 3), Berkeley tells Bolingbroke:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mistake me not, my lord; ’tis not my meaning<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To raze one title of your honour out.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Upon which passage we may quote from Camden’s “Remains”
(1605, p. 186): “How the names of them, which for
capital crimes against majestie, were erased out of the public
records, tables, and registers, or forbidden to be borne by
their posteritie, when their memory was damned, I could
show at large.” In the following act (iii. 1) Bolingbroke
further relates how his enemies had:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Dispark’d my parks, and fell’d my forest woods,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From mine own windows torn my household coat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Raz’d out my impress, leaving me no sign.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bilboes.</i> These were a kind of stocks or fetters used at
sea to confine prisoners, of which Hamlet speaks to Horatio
(v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That would not let me sleep: methought I lay<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This punishment is thus described by Steevens: “The <i>bilboes</i>
is a bar of iron with fetters annexed to it, by which
mutinous or disorderly sailors were anciently linked together.
The word is derived from Bilboa, a place in Spain where
instruments of steel were fabricated in the utmost perfection.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[436]</a></span>
To understand Shakespeare’s allusion completely, it
should be known that, as these fetters connect the legs of
the offenders very close together, their attempts to rest must
be as fruitless as those of Hamlet, in whose mind ‘there
was a kind of fighting that would not let him sleep.’ Every
motion of one must disturb his partner in confinement.
The <i>bilboes</i> are still shown in the Tower of London, among
the other spoils of the Spanish Armada.”<a name="FNanchor_846_846" id="FNanchor_846_846"></a><a href="#Footnote_846_846" class="fnanchor">[846]</a></p>

<p><i>Brand.</i>—The branding of criminals is indirectly alluded
to in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 2), by Young Clifford, who calls the
Duke of Richmond a “foul stigmatick,” which properly
meant “a person who had been branded with a hot iron for
some crime, one notably defamed for naughtiness.” The
practice was abolished by law in the year 1822.</p>

<p>The practice, too, of making persons convicted of perjury
wear papers, while undergoing punishment, descriptive of
their offence, is spoken of in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 3),
where Biron says of Longaville:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, he comes in like a perjure, wearing papers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Holinshed relates how Wolsey “so punished a perjure
with open punishment and open paper-wearing that in his
time it was disused.”</p>

<p><i>Breech.</i> This old term to whip or punish as a school-boy
is noticed in the “Taming of the Shrew” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am no breeching scholar in the schools;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—breeching being equivalent to “liable to be whipped.”</p>

<p>In “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 1), Sir Hugh Evans
tells the boy page: “If you forget your ‘quies,’ your ‘quæs,’
and your ‘quods,’ you must be preeches” (breeched).</p>

<p><i>Crown.</i> A burning crown, as the punishment of regicides
or other criminals, is probably alluded to by Anne in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[437]</a></span>
“Richard III.” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, would to God that the inclusive verge<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of golden metal, that must round my brow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were red-hot steel, to sear me to the brain!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Singer,<a name="FNanchor_847_847" id="FNanchor_847_847"></a><a href="#Footnote_847_847" class="fnanchor">[847]</a> in a note on this passage, quotes from Chettle’s
“Tragedy of Hoffman” (1631), where this punishment
is introduced:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fix on thy master’s head my burning crown.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Was adjudg’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To have his head sear’d with a burning crown.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The Earl of Athol, who was executed for the murder of
James I. of Scotland, was, before his death, crowned with a
hot iron. In some of the monkish accounts of a place of
future torments, a burning crown is appropriated to those
who deprived any lawful monarch of his kingdom.</p>

<p><i>Pillory.</i> This old mode of punishment is referred to by
Launce in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iv. 4), where
he speaks of having “stood on the pillory.” In “Taming
of the Shrew” (ii. 1), Hortensio, when he tells Baptista how
he had been struck by Katharina because “I did but tell her
she mistook her frets,” adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“she struck me on the head,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And through the instrument my pate made way;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And there I stood amazed for a while,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As on a pillory, looking through the lute.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It has been suggested that there may be an allusion to
the pillory in “Measure for Measure” (v. 1), where Lucio
says to the duke, disguised in his friar’s hood: “you must
be hooded, must you? show your knave’s visage, with a
pox to you! show your sheep-biting face, and be hanged
an hour!” The alleged crime was not capital, and suspension
in the pillory for an hour was all that the speaker intended.<a name="FNanchor_848_848" id="FNanchor_848_848"></a><a href="#Footnote_848_848" class="fnanchor">[848]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[438]</a></span></p>

<p><i>Press.</i> Several allusions occur to this species of torture,
applied to contumacious felons. It was also, says Malone,
“formerly inflicted on those persons who, being indicted,
refused to plead. In consequence of their silence, they were
pressed to death by a heavy weight laid upon the stomach.”
In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1), Hero says of Beatrice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“she would laugh me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Out of myself, press me to death with wit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Richard II.” (iii. 4) the Queen exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, I am press’d to death, through want of speaking!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Measure for Measure” (v. 1), Lucio tells the Duke
that, “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death,
whipping, and hanging.”</p>

<p>In the “Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence”
(April 16th, 1651), we find it recorded: “Mond., April 14th.
This Session, at the Old Bailey, were four men pressed to
death that were all in one robbery, and, out of obstinacy
and contempt of the Court, stood mute, and refused to
plead.” This punishment was not abolished until by statute
12 George III. c. 20.</p>

<p><i>Rack.</i> According to Mr. Blackstone, this “was utterly
unknown to the law of England; though once, when the
Dukes of Exeter and Suffolk, and other ministers of Henry
VI., had laid a design to introduce the civil law into this
kingdom as a rule of government, for the beginning thereof
they erected a rack of torture, which was called, in derision,
the Duke of Exeter’s daughter; and still remains in the
Tower of London, where it was occasionally used as an engine
of state, not of law, more than once in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth. But when, upon the assassination of Villiers,
Duke of Buckingham, it was proposed, in the Privy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[439]</a></span>
Council, to put the assassin to the rack, in order to discover
his accomplices, the judges (being consulted) declared unanimously,
to their own honor and the honor of the English
law, that no such proceeding was allowable by the law of
England.” Mr. Hallam observes that, though the English
law never recognized the use of torture, yet there were
many instances of its employment in the reign of Elizabeth
and James; and, among others, in the case of the Gunpowder
Plot. He further adds, in the latter part of the reign
of Elizabeth “the rack seldom stood idle in the Tower.”
Of the many allusions to this torture may be mentioned Sebastian’s
word in “Twelfth Night” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Antonio! O my dear Antonio!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How have the hours rack’d and tortured me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since I have lost thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Measure for Measure” (v. 1), Escalus orders the “unreverend
and unhallow’d friar” (the Duke disguised) to be
taken to the rack:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Take him hence; to the rack with him!—We’ll touse you<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Joint by joint.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The engine, which sometimes meant the rack, is spoken
of in “King Lear” (i. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Which, like an engine, wrench’d my frame of nature<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From the fix’d place.”<a name="FNanchor_849_849" id="FNanchor_849_849"></a><a href="#Footnote_849_849" class="fnanchor">[849]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Night Walker” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Their souls shot through with adders, torn on engines.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Once more, in “Measure for Measure” (ii. 1), where Escalus
tells how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—a passage which Mr. Dyce would thus read:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[440]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some run from brakes of vice.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It has been suggested that there is an allusion to “engines
of torture,” although, owing to the many significations
of the word “brake,” its meaning here has been much
disputed.<a name="FNanchor_850_850" id="FNanchor_850_850"></a><a href="#Footnote_850_850" class="fnanchor">[850]</a></p>

<p><i>Stocks.</i> This old-fashioned mode of punishment is the
subject of frequent allusion by Shakespeare. Thus, Launce,
in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iv. 4), says: “I have sat
in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen.” In “All’s Well
that Ends Well” (iv. 3), Bertram says: “Come, bring forth
this counterfeit module, has deceived me, like a double-meaning
prophesier.” Whereupon one of the French lords
adds: “Bring him forth: has sat i’ the stocks all night,
poor gallant knave.” Volumnia says of Coriolanus (v. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“There’s no man in the world<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More bound to’s mother; yet here he lets me prate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like one i’ the stocks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 1), Luce speaks of
“a pair of stocks in the town,” and in “King Lear” (ii. 2),
Cornwall, referring to Kent, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Fetch forth the stocks!—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">You stubborn ancient knave.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It would seem that formerly, in great houses, as in some
colleges, there were movable stocks for the correction of
the servants. Putting a person in the stocks, too, was an
exhibition familiar to the ancient stage. In “Hick Scorner,”<a name="FNanchor_851_851" id="FNanchor_851_851"></a><a href="#Footnote_851_851" class="fnanchor">[851]</a>
printed in the reign of Henry VIII., Pity is placed in
the stocks, and left there until he is freed “by Perseverance
and Contemplacyon.”</p>

<p><i>Strappado.</i> This was a military punishment, by which
the unfortunate sufferer was cruelly tortured in the following
way: a rope being fastened under his arms, he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[441]</a></span>
drawn up by a pulley to the top of a high beam, and then
suddenly let down with a jerk. The result usually was a
dislocation of the shoulder-blade. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4),
it is referred to by Falstaff, who tells Poins: “were I at
the strappado, or all the racks in the world, I would not tell
you on compulsion.” At Paris, says Douce,<a name="FNanchor_852_852" id="FNanchor_852_852"></a><a href="#Footnote_852_852" class="fnanchor">[852]</a> “there was a
spot called <i>l’estrapade</i>, in the Faubourg St. Jacques, where
soldiers received this punishment. The machine, whence
the place took its name, remained fixed like a perpetual
gallows.” The term is probably derived from the Italian
<i>strappare</i>, to pull or draw with violence.</p>

<p><i>Toss in a Sieve.</i> This punishment, according to Cotgrave,
was inflicted “on such as committed gross absurdities.” In
“1 Henry VI.” (i. 3), Gloster says to the Bishop of Winchester:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll canvass thee in thy broad cardinal’s hat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If thou proceed in this thy insolence.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is alluded to in Davenant’s “Cruel Brother” (1630):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll sift and winow him in an old hat.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Wheel.</i> The punishment of the wheel was not known at
Rome, but we read of Mettius Tuffetius being torn asunder
by <i>quadrigæ</i> driven in opposite directions. As Shakespeare,
remarks Malone, “has coupled this species of punishment
with another that certainly was unknown to ancient Rome,
it is highly probable that he was not apprised of the story
of Mettius Tuffetius, and that in this, as in various other
instances, the practice of his own times was in his thoughts,
for in 1594 John Chastel had been thus executed in France
for attempting to assassinate Henry IV.”</p>

<p>Coriolanus (iii. 2) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let them pull all about mine ears, present me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Death on the wheel, or at wild horses’ heels.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Whipping.</i> Three centuries ago this mode of punishment
was carried to a cruel extent. By an act passed in the 2d year
of Henry VIII., vagrants were to be carried to some market-town,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[442]</a></span>
or other place, and there tied to the end of a cart,
naked, and beaten with whips throughout such market-town,
or other place, till the body should be bloody by reason
of such whipping. The punishment was afterwards
slightly mitigated, for, by a statute passed in 39th of Elizabeth’s
reign, vagrants “were only to be stripped naked from
the middle upwards, and whipped till the body should be
bloody.” The stocks were often so constructed as to serve
both for stocks and whipping-posts.<a name="FNanchor_853_853" id="FNanchor_853_853"></a><a href="#Footnote_853_853" class="fnanchor">[853]</a> Among the numerous
references to this punishment by Shakespeare, we may quote
“2 Henry IV.” (v. 4), where the beadle says of Hostess
Quickly: “The constables have delivered her over to me,
and she shall have whipping-cheer enough, I warrant her.”
In the “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 1), Gremio says, speaking
of Katharina, “I had as lief take her dowry with this condition,—to
be whipped at the high-cross every morning,” in
allusion to what Hortensio had just said: “why, man, there
be good fellows in the world, an a man could light on them,
would take her with all faults, and money enough.” In “2
Henry VI.” (ii. 1), Gloster orders Simpcox and his wife to</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“be whipped through every market-town,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Till they come to Berwick, from whence they came.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Wisp.</i> This was a punishment for a scold.<a name="FNanchor_854_854" id="FNanchor_854_854"></a><a href="#Footnote_854_854" class="fnanchor">[854]</a> It appears
that “a wisp, or small twist of straw or hay, was often applied
as a mark of opprobrium to an immodest woman, a
scold, or similar offender; even, therefore, the showing it
to a woman, was considered a grievous affront.” In “3
Henry VI.” (ii. 2) Edward says of Queen Margaret:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A wisp of straw were worth a thousand crowns,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make this shameless callat<a name="FNanchor_855_855" id="FNanchor_855_855"></a><a href="#Footnote_855_855" class="fnanchor">[855]</a> know herself.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A wisp, adds Nares, seems to have been the badge of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[443]</a></span>
scolding woman in the ceremony of Skimmington;<a name="FNanchor_856_856" id="FNanchor_856_856"></a><a href="#Footnote_856_856" class="fnanchor">[856]</a> an allusion
to which is given in a “Dialogue between John and
Jone, striving who shall wear the breeches,” in the “Pleasures
of Poetry,” cited by Malone:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good, gentle Jone, with-holde thy handes,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">This once let me entreat thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And make me promise never more,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">That thou shalt mind to beat me.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For fear thou wear the wispe, good wife,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And make our neighbours ride.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Nash’s “Pierce Pennilesse” (1593) there is also an amusing
allusion to it: “Why, thou errant butter-whore, thou
cotquean and scrattop of scolds, wilt thou never leave afflicting
a dead carcasse? continually read the rhetorick lecture
of Ramme-alley? a wispe, a wispe, you kitchen-stuffe wrangler.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_841_841" id="Footnote_841_841"></a><a href="#FNanchor_841_841"><span class="label">[841]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Index to Shakespeare,” p. 36.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_842_842" id="Footnote_842_842"></a><a href="#FNanchor_842_842"><span class="label">[842]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 46.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_843_843" id="Footnote_843_843"></a><a href="#FNanchor_843_843"><span class="label">[843]</span></a> Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Handbook Index to the Works of
Shakespeare” (1866, p. 231), suggests this meaning.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_844_844" id="Footnote_844_844"></a><a href="#FNanchor_844_844"><span class="label">[844]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 397.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_845_845" id="Footnote_845_845"></a><a href="#FNanchor_845_845"><span class="label">[845]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 197.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_846_846" id="Footnote_846_846"></a><a href="#FNanchor_846_846"><span class="label">[846]</span></a> Bilbo was also a rapier or sword; thus, in “Merry Wives of Windsor”
(iii. 5), Falstaff says to Ford: “I suffered the pangs of three several
deaths: first, an intolerable fright, to be detected ... next, to be
compassed, like a good bilbo ... hilt to point,” etc.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_847_847" id="Footnote_847_847"></a><a href="#FNanchor_847_847"><span class="label">[847]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” vol. vi. p. 485; see “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,”
vol. ii. p. 6.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_848_848" id="Footnote_848_848"></a><a href="#FNanchor_848_848"><span class="label">[848]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 661; see Douce’s “Illustrations of
Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 90, 91, 109; Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. iii.
p. 111.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_849_849" id="Footnote_849_849"></a><a href="#FNanchor_849_849"><span class="label">[849]</span></a> It also meant a warlike engine, as in “Coriolanus,” v. 4: “When
he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his
treading;” so, also, in “Troilus and Cressida,” ii. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_850_850" id="Footnote_850_850"></a><a href="#FNanchor_850_850"><span class="label">[850]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 49; Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook
Index to Shakespeare,” p. 56; Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 104.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_851_851" id="Footnote_851_851"></a><a href="#FNanchor_851_851"><span class="label">[851]</span></a> It is reprinted in Hawkins’s “English Drama,” 1773.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_852_852" id="Footnote_852_852"></a><a href="#FNanchor_852_852"><span class="label">[852]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 263. 264; see Dyce’s “Glossary,”
p. 423.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_853_853" id="Footnote_853_853"></a><a href="#FNanchor_853_853"><span class="label">[853]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” vol. i. pp. 598, 599.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_854_854" id="Footnote_854_854"></a><a href="#FNanchor_854_854"><span class="label">[854]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 965.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_855_855" id="Footnote_855_855"></a><a href="#FNanchor_855_855"><span class="label">[855]</span></a> “Callat,” an immodest woman, also applied to a scold. Cf. “Winter’s
Tale,” ii. 3:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i16">“A callat<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And now baits me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_856_856" id="Footnote_856_856"></a><a href="#FNanchor_856_856"><span class="label">[856]</span></a> Skimmington was a burlesque ceremony in ridicule of a man beaten
by his wife. See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. pp. 191, 192.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[444]</a></span></h2>

<h3>PROVERBS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the present chapter are collected together the chief
proverbs either quoted or alluded to by Shakespeare. Many
of these are familiar to most readers, but have gained an
additional interest by reason of their connection with the
poet’s writings. At the same time, it may be noted that
very many of Shakespeare’s pithy sayings have, since his
day, passed into proverbs, and have taken their place in this
class of literature. It is curious to notice, as Mrs. Cowden-Clarke
remarks,<a name="FNanchor_857_857" id="FNanchor_857_857"></a><a href="#Footnote_857_857" class="fnanchor">[857]</a> how “Shakespeare has paraphrased some
of our commonest proverbs in his own choice and elegant
diction.” Thus, “Make hay while the sun shines” becomes</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The sun shines hot; and if we use delay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cold biting winter mars our hoped-for hay,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">a statement which applies to numerous other proverbial
sayings.</p>

<p>“A black man is a jewel in a fair woman’s eyes.” In the
“Two Gentlemen of Verona” (v. 2), the following passage
is an amusing illustration of the above:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Thurio.</i> What says she to my face?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Proteus.</i> She says it is a fair one.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Thurio.</i> Nay then, the wanton lies; my face is black.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Proteus.</i> But pearls are fair; and the old saying is,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Titus Andronicus” (v. 1) there is a further allusion
to this proverb, where Lucius says of Aaron,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is the pearl that pleas’d your empress’ eye.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A beggar marries a wife and lice.” So in “King Lear”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[445]</a></span>
(iii. 2), Song:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The cod-piece that will house,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Before the head has any,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The head and he shall louse;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">So beggars marry many.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Thus it is also said: “A beggar payeth a benefit with a
louse.”</p>

<p>“A cunning knave needs no broker.” This old proverb
is quoted by Hume, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A crafty knave does need no broker.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A curst cur must be tied short.” With this proverb we
may compare what Sir Toby says in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 2),
to Sir Andrew: “Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst
and brief.”</p>

<p>“A drop hollows the stone,” or “many drops pierce the
stone.” We may compare “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), “much
rain wears the marble,” and also the messenger’s words
(ii. 1), when he relates how “the noble Duke of York was
slain:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Environed he was with many foes;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And stood against them, as the hope of Troy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Against the Greeks, that would have enter’d Troy.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But Hercules himself must yield to odds;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And many strokes, though with a little axe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hew down and fell the hardest-timber’d oak.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A finger in every pie.” So, in “Henry VIII.” (i. 1),
Buckingham says of Wolsey:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“no man’s pie is freed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From his ambitious finger.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>To the same purport is the following proverb:<a name="FNanchor_858_858" id="FNanchor_858_858"></a><a href="#Footnote_858_858" class="fnanchor">[858]</a> “He had
a finger in the pie when he burnt his nail off.”</p>

<p>“A fool’s bolt is soon shot.” Quoted by Duke of Orleans
in “Henry V.” (iii. 7). With this we may compare the
French: “De fol juge breve sentence.”<a name="FNanchor_859_859" id="FNanchor_859_859"></a><a href="#Footnote_859_859" class="fnanchor">[859]</a></p>

<p>“A friend at court is as good as a penny in the purse.”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[446]</a></span>
So, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 1), Shallow says: “a friend i’ the
court is better than a penny in purse.” The French equivalent
of this saying is: “Bon fait avoir ami en cour, car le
procès en est plus court.”</p>

<p>“A little pot’s soon hot.” Grumio, in “Taming of the
Shrew” (iv. 1), uses this familiar proverb: “were not I a
little pot, and soon hot, my very lips might freeze to my
teeth,” etc.</p>

<p>“A pox of the devil” (“Henry V.,” iii. 7).</p>

<p>“A smoky chimney and a scolding wife are two bad companions.”
There are various versions of this proverb. Ray
gives the following: “Smoke, raining into the house, and a
scolding wife, will make a man run out of doors.”</p>

<p>Hotspur, in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1), says of Glendower:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“O, he’s as tedious<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As a tired horse, a railing wife;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Worse than a smoky house.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A snake lies hidden in the grass.” This, as Mr. Green<a name="FNanchor_860_860" id="FNanchor_860_860"></a><a href="#Footnote_860_860" class="fnanchor">[860]</a>
remarks, is no unfrequent proverb, and the idea is often
made use of by Shakespeare. Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1),
Margaret declares to the attendant nobles:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Henry my lord is cold in great affairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Too full of foolish pity: and Gloster’s show<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With sorrow snares relenting passengers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or as the snake, roll’d in a flowering bank,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With shining checker’d slough, doth sting a child,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That for the beauty thinks it excellent.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Lady Macbeth (i. 5) tells her husband:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“look like the innocent flower,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But be the serpent under’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Juliet (“Romeo and Juliet,” iii. 2) speaks of:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Serpent heart, hid with a flowering face.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A staff is quickly found to beat a dog.” Other versions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[447]</a></span>
of this proverb are: “It is easy to find a stick to beat a
dog;” “It is easy to find a stone to throw at a dog.”<a name="FNanchor_861_861" id="FNanchor_861_861"></a><a href="#Footnote_861_861" class="fnanchor">[861]</a>
So, in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1), Gloster says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I shall not want false witness to condemn me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor store of treasons to augment my guilt;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The ancient proverb will be well effected,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A staff is quickly found to beat a dog.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A wise man may live anywhere.” In “Richard II.”
(i. 3), John of Gaunt says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“All places that the eye of heaven visits,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“A woman conceals what she does not know.” Hence
Hotspur says to his wife, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Constant you are,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But yet a woman: and for secrecy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No lady closer; for I well believe<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“All men are not alike” (“Much Ado About Nothing,”
iii. 5).<a name="FNanchor_862_862" id="FNanchor_862_862"></a><a href="#Footnote_862_862" class="fnanchor">[862]</a></p>

<p>“All’s Well that Ends Well.”</p>

<p>“As lean as a rake.” So in “Coriolanus” (i. 1), one of
the citizens says: “Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere
we become rakes.” So Spenser, in his “Fairy Queen” (bk.
ii. can. 11):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His body leane and meagre as a rake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This proverb is found in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
(i. 289):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Al so lene was his hors as is a rake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“As thin as a whipping-post” is another proverb of the
same kind.</p>

<p>“As mad as a March hare” (“The Two Noble Kinsmen,”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[448]</a></span>
iii. 5). We may compare the expression “hare-brained:”
“1 Henry IV.” (v. 2).</p>

<p>“As sound as a bell.” So in “Much Ado about Nothing”
(iii. 2), Don Pedro says of Benedick: “He hath a heart as
sound as a bell.”</p>

<p>“As the bell clinketh, so the fool thinketh.” This proverb
is indirectly alluded to in “Much Ado About Nothing”
(iii. 2), in the previous passage, where Don Pedro says of
Benedick that “He hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his
tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks, his tongue
speaks.”</p>

<p>Another form of the same proverb is: “As the fool
thinks, the bell tinks.”<a name="FNanchor_863_863" id="FNanchor_863_863"></a><a href="#Footnote_863_863" class="fnanchor">[863]</a></p>

<p>“As true as steel.” This popular adage is quoted in
“Troilus and Cressida” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“As true as steel, as plantage to the moon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may also compare the proverb: “As true as the dial
to the sun.”</p>

<p>“At hand, quoth pick-purse” (“1 Henry IV.,” ii. 1). This
proverbial saying arose, says Malone, from the pickpurse
always seizing the prey nearest him.</p>

<p>“Ay, tell me that and unyoke” (“Hamlet,” v. 1). This
was a common adage for giving over or ceasing to do a
thing; a metaphor derived from the unyoking of oxen at
the end of their labor.</p>

<p>“Baccare, quoth Mortimer to his sow.” With this Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps compares Gremio’s words in the “Taming
of the Shrew” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Saving your tale, Petruchio, I pray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let us, that are poor petitioners, speak too:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Baccare! you are marvellous forward.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Dyce (“Glossary,” p. 23) says the word signifies “go
back,” and cites one of John Heywood’s epigrams upon it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Backare, quoth Mortimer to his sow;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[449]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Went that sowe backe at that bidding, trow you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Barnes are blessings” (“All’s Well that Ends Well,”
i. 3).</p>

<p>“Base is the slave that pays” (“Henry V.,” ii. 1).<a name="FNanchor_864_864" id="FNanchor_864_864"></a><a href="#Footnote_864_864" class="fnanchor">[864]</a></p>

<p>“Bastards are born lucky.” This proverb is alluded to in
“King John” (i. 1), by the Bastard, who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Brother, adieu; good fortune come to thee!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For thou wast got i’ the way of honesty.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Philip wishes his brother good fortune, because Robert was
not a bastard.</p>

<p>“Beggars mounted run their horses to death.”<a name="FNanchor_865_865" id="FNanchor_865_865"></a><a href="#Footnote_865_865" class="fnanchor">[865]</a> Quoted
by York in “3 Henry VI.” (i. 4). We may also compare
the proverb: “Set a beggar on horseback, he’ll ride to the
devil.”</p>

<p>“Begone when the sport is at the best.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
quotes Benvolio’s words in “Romeo and Juliet”
(i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Away, be gone; the sport is at the best.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">To the same effect are Romeo’s words (i. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The game was ne’er so fair, and I am done.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Be off while your shoes are good.” This popular phrase,
still in use, seems alluded to by Katharina in “Taming of
the Shrew” (iii. 2), who says to Petruchio:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You may be jogging whiles your boots are green.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.” Quoted by the
clown in “Twelfth Night” (i. 5).</p>

<p>“Better fed than taught.” This old saying may be
alluded to in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 2) by the
clown, “I will show myself highly fed and lowly taught;”
and again (ii. 4) by Parolles:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A good knave, i’ faith, and well fed.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale.” Quoted by
Launce as a proverb in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[450]</a></span>
(iii. 1).</p>

<p>“Blush like a black dog.” This saying is referred to in
“Titus Andronicus” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>1 Goth.</i> What, canst thou say all this, and never blush?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Aaron.</i> Ay, like a black dog, as the saying is.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Bought and sold” (“Troilus and Cressida,” ii. 1). A
proverbial phrase applied to any one entrapped or made a
victim by treachery or mismanagement. It is found again
in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 1); in “King John” (v. 4);
and in “Richard III.” (v. 3).</p>

<p>“Bring your hand to the buttery-bar, and let it drink”
(“Twelfth Night,” i. 3). Mr. Dyce quotes the following explanation
of this passage, although he does not answer for
its correctness: “This is a proverbial phrase among forward
abigails, to ask at once for a kiss and a present. Sir Andrew’s
slowness of comprehension in this particular gave
her a just suspicion, at once, of his frigidity and avarice.”
The buttery-bar means the place in palaces and in great
houses whence provisions were dispensed; and it is still to
be seen in most of our colleges.</p>

<p>“Brag’s a good dog, but Hold-fast is a better.” This
proverb is alluded to in “Henry V.” (ii. 3), by Pistol:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hold-fast is the only dog, my duck.”<a name="FNanchor_866_866" id="FNanchor_866_866"></a><a href="#Footnote_866_866" class="fnanchor">[866]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Bush natural, more hair than wit.” Ray’s Proverbs.
So in “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1), it is said, “She
hath more hair than wit.”</p>

<p>“By chance but not by truth”<a name="FNanchor_867_867" id="FNanchor_867_867"></a><a href="#Footnote_867_867" class="fnanchor">[867]</a> (“King John,” i. 1).</p>

<p>“Care will kill a cat; yet there’s no living without it.”
So in “Much Ado About Nothing” (v. 1), Claudio says to
Don Pedro: “What though care killed a cat, thou hast
mettle enough in thee to kill care.”</p>

<p>“Come cut and long-tail” (“Merry Wives of Windsor,”
iii. 4). This proverb means, “Let any come that may, good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[451]</a></span>
or bad;” and was, no doubt, says Staunton, originally applied
to dogs or horses.</p>

<p>“Comparisons are odious.” So, in “Much Ado About
Nothing” (iii. 5), Dogberry tells Verges: “Comparisons are
odorous.”</p>

<p>“Confess and be hanged.” This well-known proverb is
probably alluded to in the “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Bassanio.</i> Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Portia.</i> Well then, confess, and live.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also refer to what Othello says (iv. 1): “To confess,
and be hanged for his labour; first, to be hanged, and
then to confess. I tremble at it.”</p>

<p>In “Timon of Athens” (i. 2), Apemantus says: “Ho, ho,
confess’d it! hang’d it, have you not?”</p>

<p>“Cry him, and have him.” So Rosalind says, in “As You
Like It” (i. 3), “If I could cry ‘hem’ and have him.”</p>

<p>“Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool” (“King
Lear,” iii. 6). It is given by Ray in his “Proverbs” (1768);
see also “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1).</p>

<p>“Cucullus non facit monachum.” So in “Henry VIII.”
(iii. 1), Queen Katherine says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“All hoods make not monks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Chaucer thus alludes to this proverb:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Habite ne maketh monk ne feere;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But a clean life and devotion<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Maketh gode men of religion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Dead as a door-nail.” So, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10),
Cade says to Iden: “I have eat no meat these five days;
yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you
all as dead as a door-nail, I pray God I may never eat grass
more.”</p>

<p>We may compare the term, “dead as a herring,” which
Caius uses in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3), “By
gar, de herring is no dead, so as I vill kill him.”</p>

<p>“Death will have his day” (“Richard II.,” iii. 2).<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[452]</a></span></p>

<p>“Delays are dangerous.” In “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2),
Reignier says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Diluculo surgere,” etc. (“Twelfth Night,” ii. 3).</p>

<p>“Dogs must eat.” This, with several other proverbs, is
quoted by Agrippa in “Coriolanus” (i. 1).</p>

<p>“Dun’s the mouse” (“Romeo and Juliet,” i. 4). This was
a proverbial saying, of which no satisfactory explanation has
yet been given. Nares thinks it was “frequently employed
with no other intent than that of quibbling on the word
<i>done</i>.” Ray has, “as dun as a mouse.” Mercutio says:
“Tut, dun’s the mouse, the constable’s own word.”</p>

<p>“Empty vessels give the greatest sound.” Quoted in
“Henry V.” (iv. 4).</p>

<p>“Every dog hath his day, and every man his hour.” This
old adage seems alluded to by Hamlet (v. 1):<a name="FNanchor_868_868" id="FNanchor_868_868"></a><a href="#Footnote_868_868" class="fnanchor">[868]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Every man at forty is either a fool or a physician.”<a name="FNanchor_869_869" id="FNanchor_869_869"></a><a href="#Footnote_869_869" class="fnanchor">[869]</a>
This popular proverb is probably referred to in “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iii. 4), by Mistress Quickly, who tells
Fenton how she had recommended him as a suitor for Mr.
Page’s daughter instead of Doctor Caius: “This is my doing,
now: ‘Nay,’ said I, ‘will you cast away your child on a fool,
and a physician? look on Master Fenton:’—this is my doing.”</p>

<p>“Familiarity breeds contempt.” So, in the “Merry Wives
of Windsor” (i. 1), Slender says: “I hope, upon familiarity
will grow more contempt.”</p>

<p>“Fast bind, fast find.” In “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5),
Shylock says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“Well, Jessica, go in:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Perhaps I will return immediately:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do as I bid you; shut doors after you;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[453]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Fast bind, fast find;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A proverb never stale in thrifty mind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Finis coronat opus.” A translation of this Latin proverb
is given by Helena in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Still the fine’s the crown.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “2 Henry VI.” (v. 2), also, Clifford’s expiring words are:
“La fin couronne les œuvres.” We still have the expression
<i>to crown</i>, in the sense of <i>to finish</i> or <i>make perfect</i>. Mr.
Douce<a name="FNanchor_870_870" id="FNanchor_870_870"></a><a href="#Footnote_870_870" class="fnanchor">[870]</a> remarks that “<i>coronidem imponere</i> is a metaphor well
known to the ancients, and supposed to have originated
from the practice of finishing buildings by placing a crown
at the top as an ornament; and for this reason the words
<i>crown</i>, <i>top</i>, and <i>head</i> are become synonymous in most languages.
There is reason for believing that the ancients
placed a crescent at the beginning, and a crown, or some
ornament that resembled it, at the end of their books.” In
“Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 5), Hector says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The fall of every Phrygian stone will cost<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A drop of Grecian blood: the end crowns all;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And that old common arbitrator, Time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will one day end it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Prince Henry (“2 Henry IV.,” ii. 2), in reply to Poins, gives
another turn to the proverb: “By this hand, thou think’st
me as far in the devil’s book as thou and Falstaff, for obduracy
and persistency: let the end try the man.”<a name="FNanchor_871_871" id="FNanchor_871_871"></a><a href="#Footnote_871_871" class="fnanchor">[871]</a></p>

<p>“Fly pride, says the peacock.” This is quoted by Dromio
of Syracuse, in “The Comedy of Errors” (iv. 3).<a name="FNanchor_872_872" id="FNanchor_872_872"></a><a href="#Footnote_872_872" class="fnanchor">[872]</a></p>

<p>“Friends may meet, but mountains never greet.” This
is ironically alluded to in “As You Like It” (iii. 2), by Celia:
“It is a hard matter for friends to meet; but mountains
may be removed with earthquakes, and so encounter.”</p>

<p>“Give the devil his due.” In “Henry V.” (iii. 7) it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[454]</a></span>
quoted by the Duke of Orleans.</p>

<p>“God sends fools fortune.” It is to this version of the
Latin adage, “Fortuna favet fatuis” (“Fortune favors
fools”), that Touchstone alludes in his reply to Jaques, in
“As You Like It” (ii. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“‘No, sir,’ quoth he,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Under different forms, the same proverb is found on the
Continent. The Spanish say, “The mother of God appears
to fools;” and the German one is this, “Fortune and women
are fond of fools.”<a name="FNanchor_873_873" id="FNanchor_873_873"></a><a href="#Footnote_873_873" class="fnanchor">[873]</a></p>

<p>“God sends not corn for the rich only.” This is quoted
by Marcius in “Coriolanus” (i. 1).</p>

<p>“Good goose, do not bite.” This proverb is used in
“Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Mercutio.</i> I will bite thee by the ear for that jest.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Romeo.</i> Nay, good goose, bite not.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Good liquor will make a cat speak.” So, in the “Tempest”
(ii. 2), Stephano says: “Come on your ways: open
your mouth; here is that which will give language to you,
cat; open your mouth.”</p>

<p>“Good wine needs no bush.” This old proverb, which is
quoted by Shakespeare in “As You Like It” (v. 4, “Epilogue”)—“If
it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis
true that a good play needs no epilogue”—refers to the
custom of hanging up a bunch of twigs, or a wisp of hay, at
a roadside inn, as a sign that drink may be had within.
This practice, “which still lingers in the cider-making counties
of the west of England, and prevails more generally in
France, is derived from the Romans, among whom a bunch
of ivy was used as the sign of a wine-shop.” They were
also in the habit of saying, “Vendible wine needs no ivy
hung up.” The Spanish have a proverb, “Good wine needs
no crier.”<a name="FNanchor_874_874" id="FNanchor_874_874"></a><a href="#Footnote_874_874" class="fnanchor">[874]</a></p>

<p>“Greatest clerks not the wisest men.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[455]</a></span>
in his “Handbook Index to Shakespeare” (p. 391),
quotes the following passage in “Twelfth Night” (iv. 2),
where Maria tells the clown to personate Sir Topas, the
curate: “I am not tall enough to become the function well,
nor lean enough to be thought a good student; but to be
said an honest man and a good housekeeper goes as fairly
as to say a careful man and a great scholar.”</p>

<p>“Happy man be his dole” (“Taming of the Shrew,” i.
1; “1 Henry IV.,” ii. 2). Ray has it, “Happy man, happy
dole;” or, “Happy man by his dole.”</p>

<p>“Happy the bride on whom the sun shines.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,
in his “Handbook Index to Shakespeare”
(p. 392), quotes, as an illustration of this popular proverb,
the following passage in “Twelfth Night” (iv. 3), where
Olivia and Sebastian, having made “a contract of eternal
bond of love,” the former says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“and heavens so shine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That they may fairly note this act of mine!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Happy the child whose father went to the devil.”<a name="FNanchor_875_875" id="FNanchor_875_875"></a><a href="#Footnote_875_875" class="fnanchor">[875]</a> So,
in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), King Henry asks, interrogatively:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And happy always was it for that son,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose father, for his hoarding, went to hell?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The Portuguese say, “Alas for the son whose father goes
to heaven.”</p>

<p>“Hares pull dead lions by the beard.” In “King John”
(ii. 1), the Bastard says to Austria:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Have is have, however men do catch.” Quoted by the
Bastard in “King John” (i. 1).</p>

<p>“Heaven’s above all.” In “Richard II.” (iii. 3) York tells
Bolingbroke:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Take not, good cousin, further than you should,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[456]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Lest you mistake: the heavens are o’er our heads.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, too, in “Othello” (ii. 3), Cassio says: “Heaven’s above
all.”<a name="FNanchor_876_876" id="FNanchor_876_876"></a><a href="#Footnote_876_876" class="fnanchor">[876]</a></p>

<p>“He is a poor cook who cannot lick his own fingers.”
Under a variety of forms, this proverb is found in different
countries. The Italians say, “He who manages other people’s
wealth does not go supperless to bed.” The Dutch,
too, say, “All officers are greasy,” that is, something sticks
to them.<a name="FNanchor_877_877" id="FNanchor_877_877"></a><a href="#Footnote_877_877" class="fnanchor">[877]</a> In “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 2) the saying is thus
alluded to:</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Capulet.</i> Sirrah, go hire me twenty cunning cooks.</p>

<p><i>2 Servant.</i> You shall have none ill, sir; for I’ll try if they can lick
their fingers.</p>

<p><i>Capulet.</i> How canst thou try them so?</p>

<p><i>2 Servant.</i> Marry, sir, ’tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers:
therefore he that cannot lick his fingers goes not with me.”</p></div>

<p>“He’s mad, that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s
health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath” (“King Lear,”
iii. 6).<a name="FNanchor_878_878" id="FNanchor_878_878"></a><a href="#Footnote_878_878" class="fnanchor">[878]</a></p>

<p>“Heroum filii noxæ.” It is a common notion that a father
above the common rate of men has usually a son below
it. Hence, in “The Tempest” (i. 2), Shakespeare probably
alludes to this Latin proverb:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“My trust,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like a good parent, did beget of him<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A falsehood, in its contrary as great<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As my trust was.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“He knows not a hawk from a handsaw.” Hamlet says
(ii. 2): “When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a
handsaw.”</p>

<p>“He may hang himself in his own garters.” So, Falstaff
(“1 Henry IV.” ii. 2) says: “Go, hang thyself in thine own
heir-apparent garters.”</p>

<p>“He that is born to be hanged will never be drowned.”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[457]</a></span>
In “The Tempest” (i. 1), Gonzalo says of the Boatswain:
“I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath
no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect
gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging! make the
rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage!
If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.”
The Italians say, “He that is to die by the gallows may
dance on the river.”</p>

<p>“He that dies pays all debts” (“The Tempest,” iii. 2).</p>

<p>“He who eats with the devil hath need of a long spoon.”
This is referred to by Stephano, in “The Tempest” (ii. 2):
“This is a devil, and no monster: I will leave him; I have
no long spoon.” Again, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iv. 3),
Dromio of Syracuse says: “He must have a long spoon that
must eat with the devil.”</p>

<p>The old adage, which tells how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“He that will not when he may,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When he will he shall have nay,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">is quoted in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 7) by Menas:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Who seeks, and will not take, when once ’tis offer’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall never find it more.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Hold hook and line” (“2 Henry IV.,” ii. 4). This,
says Dyce, is a sort of cant proverbial expression, which
sometimes occurs in our early writers (“Glossary,” p. 210).</p>

<p>“Hold, or cut bow-strings”<a name="FNanchor_879_879" id="FNanchor_879_879"></a><a href="#Footnote_879_879" class="fnanchor">[879]</a> (“A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” i. 2).</p>

<p>“Honest as the skin between his brows” (“Much Ado
About Nothing,” iii. 5).<a name="FNanchor_880_880" id="FNanchor_880_880"></a><a href="#Footnote_880_880" class="fnanchor">[880]</a></p>

<p>“Hunger will break through stone-walls.” This is quoted
by Marcius in “Coriolanus” (i. 1), who, in reply to Agrippa’s
question, “What says the other troop?” replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“They are dissolved: hang ’em!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They said they were an-hungry; sigh’d forth proverbs,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That hunger broke stone-walls,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to an old Suffolk proverb,<a name="FNanchor_881_881" id="FNanchor_881_881"></a><a href="#Footnote_881_881" class="fnanchor">[881]</a> “Hunger will break<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[458]</a></span>
through stone-walls, or anything, except Suffolk cheese.”</p>

<p>“I scorn that with my heels” (“Much Ado About Nothing,”
iii. 4). A not uncommon proverbial expression. It is
again referred to, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), by
Launcelot: “do not run; scorn running with thy heels.”
Dyce thinks it is alluded to in “Venus and Adonis:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Beating his kind embracements with her heels.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“If you are wise, keep yourself warm.” This proverb is
probably alluded to in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Petruchio.</i> Am I not wise?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Katharina</i>.<span style="padding-left: 7em">Yes; keep you warm.”</span><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “that if he have
wit enough to keep himself warm.”</p>

<p>“I fear no colours” (“Twelfth Night,” i. 5).</p>

<p>“Ill-gotten goods never prosper.” This proverb is referred
to by King Henry (“3 Henry VI.,” ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“Clifford, tell me, didst thou never hear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That things ill got had ever bad success?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Illotis manibus tractare sacra.” Falstaff, in “1 Henry
IV.” (iii. 3), says: “Rob me the exchequer the first thing
thou dost, and do it with unwashed hands too.”</p>

<p>“Ill will never said well.” This is quoted by Duke of
Orleans in “Henry V.” (iii. 7).</p>

<p>“In at the window, or else o’er the hatch” (“King John,”
i. 1). Applied to illegitimate children. Staunton has this
note: “Woe worth the time that ever a gave suck to a child
that came in at the window!” (“The Family of Love,” 1608).
So, also, in “The Witches of Lancashire,” by Heywood and
Broome, 1634: “It appears you came in at the window.”
“I would not have you think I scorn my grannam’s cat to
leap over the hatch.”</p>

<p>“It is a foul bird which defiles its own nest.” This seems
alluded to in “As You Like It” (iv. 1) where Celia says to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[459]</a></span>
Rosalind: “You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate:
we must have your doublet and hose plucked over
your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to
her own nest.”</p>

<p>“It is a poor dog that is not worth the whistling.” So
Goneril, in “King Lear” (iv. 2): “I have been worth the
whistle.”</p>

<p>“It is a wise child that knows its own father.” In the
“Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), Launcelot has the converse of
this: “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”</p>

<p>“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.” So, in “3
Henry VI.” (ii. 5), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3), when Falstaff asks Pistol
“What wind blew you hither?” the latter replies: “Not the
ill wind which blows no man to good.”</p>

<p>“It is easy to steal a shive from a cut loaf.” In “Titus
Andronicus” (ii. 1), Demetrius refers to this proverb. Ray
has, “’Tis safe taking a shive out of a cut loaf.”</p>

<p>“It’s a dear collop that’s cut out of my own flesh.” Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps thinks there may be possibly an allusion
to this proverb in “1 Henry VI.” (v. 4), where the Shepherd
says of La Pucelle:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“God knows, thou art a collop of my flesh.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“I will make a shaft or a bolt of it.” In the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (iii. 4) this proverb is used by Slender.<a name="FNanchor_882_882" id="FNanchor_882_882"></a><a href="#Footnote_882_882" class="fnanchor">[882]</a>
Ray gives “to make a bolt or a shaft of a thing.” This is
equivalent to, “I will either make a good or a bad thing of
it: I will take the risk.”</p>

<p>“It is like a barber’s chair” (“All’s Well that Ends Well,”
ii. 2).</p>

<p>The following passage, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[460]</a></span>
(iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“Jack shall have Jill;<br /></span>
<span class="i3">Nought shall go ill;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The man shall have his mare again,<br /></span>
<span class="i3">And all shall be well,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">refers to the popular proverb of olden times, says Staunton,
signifying “all ended happily.” So, too, Biron says, in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Our wooing doth not end like an old play;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Jack hath not Jill.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It occurs in Skelton’s poem “Magnyfycence” (Dyce, ed. i.
p. 234): “Jack shall have Gyl;” and in Heywood’s “Dialogue”
(Sig. F. 3, 1598):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, chat at hame, all is well, Jack shall have Gill.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Kindness will creep where it cannot go.” Thus, in the
“Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iv. 2), Proteus tells Thurio how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i12">“love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will creep in service where it cannot go.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There is a Scotch proverb, “Kindness will creep whar it
mauna gang.”</p>

<p>“Let the world slide” (“Taming of the Shrew,” Induction,
sc. i.).</p>

<p>“Let them laugh that win.” Othello says (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“So, so, so, so:—they laugh that win.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">On the other hand, the French say, “Marchand qui perd ne
peut rire.”</p>

<p>“Like will to like, as the devil said to the collier.” With
this we may compare the following passage in “Twelfth
Night” (iii. 4): “What, man! ’tis not for gravity to play at
cherry-pit with Satan: hang him, foul collier!”—collier
having been, in Shakespeare’s day, a term of the highest
reproach.</p>

<p>“Losers have leave to talk.” Titus Andronicus (iii. 1)
says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[461]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Then give me leave, for losers will have leave<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Maids say nay, and take.” So Julia, in the “Two Gentlemen
of Verona” (i. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Since maids, in modesty, say ‘No’ to that<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which they would have the profferer construe ‘Ay.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Passionate Pilgrim” we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Have you not heard it said full oft,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A woman’s nay doth stand for nought?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Make hay while the sun shines.” King Edward, in “3
Henry VI.” (iv. 8), alludes to this proverb:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The sun shines hot; and, if we use delay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cold, biting winter mars our hop’d-for hay.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The above proverb is peculiar to England, and, as Trench
remarks, could have its birth only under such variable skies
as ours.</p>

<p>“Many talk of Robin Hood that never shot in his bow.”
So, in “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2), Justice Shallow, says Falstaff,
“talks as familiarly of John o’ Gaunt as if he had been sworn
brother to him; and I’ll be sworn a’ never saw him but once
in the Tilt-yard,—and then he burst his head, for crowding
among the marshal’s men.”</p>

<p>“Marriage and hanging go by destiny.”<a name="FNanchor_883_883" id="FNanchor_883_883"></a><a href="#Footnote_883_883" class="fnanchor">[883]</a> This proverb is
the popular creed respecting marriage, and, under a variety
of forms, is found in different countries. Thus, in “Merchant
of Venice” (ii. 9), Nerissa says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The ancient saying is no heresy,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (i. 3) the Clown says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For I the ballad will repeat,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Which men full true shall find;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your marriage comes by destiny,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Your cuckoo sings by kind.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare the well-known proverb, “Marriages are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[462]</a></span>
made in heaven,” and the French version, “Les mariages
sont écrits dans le ciel.”</p>

<p>“Marriage as bad as hanging.” In “Twelfth Night” (i. 5),
the Clown says: “Many a good hanging prevents a bad
marriage.”</p>

<p>“Marry trap” (“Merry Wives of Windsor,” i. 1). This,
says Nares, “is apparently a kind of proverbial exclamation,
as much as to say, ‘By Mary, you are caught.’”</p>

<p>“Meat was made for mouths.” Quoted in “Coriolanus”
(i. 1).</p>

<p>“Misfortunes seldom come alone.” This proverb is beautifully
alluded to by the King in “Hamlet” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When sorrows come, they come not single spies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But in battalions.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The French say:<a name="FNanchor_884_884" id="FNanchor_884_884"></a><a href="#Footnote_884_884" class="fnanchor">[884]</a> “Malheur ne vient jamais seul.”</p>

<p>“More hair than wit” (“Two Gentlemen of Verona,”
iii. 2). A well-known old English proverb.</p>

<p>“Mortuo leoni et lepores insultant.” This proverb is alluded
to by the Bastard in “King John” (ii. 1), who says
to the Archduke of Austria:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Much water goes by the mill the miller knows not of.”
This adage is quoted in “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), by
Demetrius:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“more water glideth by the mill<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than wots the miller of.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“My cake is dough” (“Taming of the Shrew,” v. 1). An
obsolete proverb, repeated on the loss of hope or expectation:
the allusion being to the old-fashioned way of baking
cakes at the embers, when it may have been occasionally
the case for a cake to be burned on one side and dough
on the other. In a former scene (i. 1) Gremio says: “our
cake’s dough on both sides.” Staunton quotes from “The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[463]</a></span>
Case is Altered,” 1609:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Steward, your cake is dough, as well as mine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Murder will out.” So, in the “Merchant of Venice”
(ii. 2), Launcelot says: “Murder cannot be hid long,—a
man’s son may; but, in the end, truth will out.”</p>

<p>“Near or far off, well won is still well shot” (“King
John,” i. 1).</p>

<p>“Needs must when the devil drives.” In “All’s Well
that Ends Well” (i. 3), the Clown tells the Countess: “I am
driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go, that the devil
drives.”</p>

<p>“Neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.”<a name="FNanchor_885_885" id="FNanchor_885_885"></a><a href="#Footnote_885_885" class="fnanchor">[885]</a> Falstaff
says of the Hostess in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3): “Why, she’s
neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her.”</p>

<p>“One nail drives out another.” In “Romeo and Juliet”
(i. 2), Benvolio says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Tut, man, one fire burns out another’s burning,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">One desperate grief cures with another’s languish:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Take thou some new infection to thy eye,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the rank poison of the old will die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The allusion, of course, is to homœopathy. The Italians
say, “Poison quells poison.”</p>

<p>“Old men are twice children;” or, as they say in Scotland,
“Auld men are twice bairns.” We may compare the
Greek Δἱς παῖδες οἱ γεροντες. The proverb occurs in “Hamlet”
(ii. 2): “An old man is twice a child.”</p>

<p>“Out of God’s blessing into the warm sun.” So Kent
says in “King Lear” (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good king, that must approve the common saw,—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou out of heaven’s benediction com’st<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To the warm sun.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Patience perforce is a medicine for a mad dog.” This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[464]</a></span>
proverb is probably alluded to by Tybalt in “Romeo and
Juliet” (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Patience perforce with wilful choler meeting,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And again, in “Richard III.” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Gloster.</i> Meantime, have patience.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Clarence.</i><span style="padding-left: 10em">I must perforce: farewell.”</span><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Pitch and Pay” (“Henry V.,” ii. 3). This is a proverbial
expression equivalent to “Pay down at once.”<a name="FNanchor_886_886" id="FNanchor_886_886"></a><a href="#Footnote_886_886" class="fnanchor">[886]</a> It probably
originated from pitching goods in a market, and paying immediately
for their standing. Tusser, in his “Description
of Norwich,” calls it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“A city trim,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where strangers well may seem to dwell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That pitch and pay, or keep their day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Pitchers have ears.” Baptista quotes this proverb in
the “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pitchers have ears, and I have many servants.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to another old proverb: “Small pitchers have
great ears.”</p>

<p>“Poor and proud! fy, fy.” Olivia, in “Twelfth Night”
(iii. 1), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O world, how apt the poor are to be proud!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Praise in departing” (“The Tempest,” iii. 3). The meaning
is: “Do not praise your entertainment too soon, lest you
should have reason to retract your commendation.” Staunton
quotes from “The Paradise of Dainty Devises,” 1596:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A good beginning oft we see, but seldome standing at one stay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For few do like the meane degree, then praise at parting some men say.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Pray God, my girdle break”<a name="FNanchor_887_887" id="FNanchor_887_887"></a><a href="#Footnote_887_887" class="fnanchor">[887]</a> (“1 Henry IV.,” iii. 3).</p>

<p>“Put your finger in the fire and say it was your fortune.”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[465]</a></span>
An excellent illustration of this proverb is given by Edmund
in “King Lear” (i. 2): “This is the excellent foppery of
the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, we make guilty
of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we
were villains on necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion;
knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
thrusting on: an admirable evasion,” etc.</p>

<p>“Respice finem, respice furem.” It has been suggested
that Shakespeare (“Comedy of Errors,” iv. 4) may have met
with these words in a popular pamphlet of his time, by
George Buchanan, entitled “Chamæleon Redivivus; or, Nathaniel’s
Character Reversed”—a satire against the Laird
of Lidingstone, 1570, which concludes with the following
words, “Respice finem, respice furem.”</p>

<p>“Seldom comes the better.” In “Richard III.” (ii. 3),
one of the citizens says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ill news, by’r lady; seldom comes the better:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I fear, I fear, ’twill prove a troublous world”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—a proverbial saying of great antiquity. Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_888_888" id="FNanchor_888_888"></a><a href="#Footnote_888_888" class="fnanchor">[888]</a> cites
an account of its origin from a MS. collection of stories in
Latin, compiled about the time of Henry III.</p>

<p>“Service is no inheritance.” So, in “All’s Well that Ends
Well” (i. 3), the Clown says: “Service is no heritage.”</p>

<p>“Sit thee down, sorrow” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” i. 1).</p>

<p>“Sit at the stern.” A proverbial phrase meaning to have
the management of public affairs. So, in “1 Henry VI.”
(i. 1), Winchester says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king from Eltham I intend to steal,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And sit at chiefest stern of public weal.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“She has the mends in her own hands.” This proverbial
phrase is of frequent occurrence in our old writers, and probably
signifies, “It is her own fault;” or, “The remedy lies
with herself.” It is used by Pandarus in “Troilus and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[466]</a></span>
Cressida” (i. 1). Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,”
writes: “And if men will be jealous in such cases, the mends
is in their own hands, they must thank themselves.”</p>

<p>“Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace”
(“Richard III.,” ii. 4).</p>

<p>“So wise so young, do ne’er live long” (“Richard III.,”
iii. 1).<a name="FNanchor_889_889" id="FNanchor_889_889"></a><a href="#Footnote_889_889" class="fnanchor">[889]</a></p>

<p>“So like you, ’tis the worse.” This is quoted as an old
proverb by Paulina in the “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 3).</p>

<p>“Something about, a little from the right” (“King John,”
i. 1).</p>

<p>“Sowed cockle, reap no corn” (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,”
iv. 3).</p>

<p>“Speak by the card” (“Hamlet,” v. 1). A merchant’s
expression, equivalent to “be as precise as a map or book.”
The card is the document in writing containing the agreement
made between a merchant and the captain of a vessel.
Sometimes the owner binds himself, ship, tackle, and furniture,
for due performance, and the captain is bound to declare
the cargo committed to him in good condition. Hence,
“to speak by the card” is to speak according to the indentures
or written instructions.</p>

<p>“Still swine eat all the draff” (“Merry Wives of Windsor,”
iv. 2). Ray gives: “The still sow eats up all the
draught.”</p>

<p>“Still waters run deep.” So in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1),
Suffolk says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Strike sail.” A proverbial phrase to acknowledge one’s
self beaten. In “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 3), it occurs:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“now Margaret<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Must strike her sail and learn awhile to serve,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where kings command.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">When a ship, in fight, or on meeting another ship, lets down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[467]</a></span>
her topsails at least half-mast high, she is said to strike, that
is, to submit or pay respect to the other.<a name="FNanchor_890_890" id="FNanchor_890_890"></a><a href="#Footnote_890_890" class="fnanchor">[890]</a></p>

<p>“Strike while the iron is hot.” Poins probably alludes to
this proverb in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4): “My lord, he will
drive you out of your revenge, and turn all to a merriment,
if you take not the heat.”</p>

<p>Again, in “King Lear” (i. 1), Goneril adds: “We must do
something, and i’ the heat.”</p>

<p>“Take all, pay all” (“Merry Wives of Windsor,” ii. 2).
Ray gives another version of this proverb: “Take all, and
pay the baker.”</p>

<p>“Tell the truth and shame the devil.” In “1 Henry IV.”
(iii. 1), Hotspur tells Glendower:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By telling truth: tell truth, and shame the devil.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“That was laid on with a trowel.”<a name="FNanchor_891_891" id="FNanchor_891_891"></a><a href="#Footnote_891_891" class="fnanchor">[891]</a> This proverb, which
is quoted by Ray, is used by Celia in “As You Like It”
(i. 2). Thus we say, when any one bespatters another with
gross flattery, that he lays it on with a trowel.</p>

<p>“The cat loves fish, but she’s loath to wet her feet.” It is
to this proverb that Lady Macbeth alludes when she upbraids
her husband for his irresolution (“Macbeth,” i. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like the poor cat i’ the adage.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There are various forms of this proverb. Thus, according
to the rhyme:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fain would the cat fish eat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But she’s loath to wet her feet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The French version is “Le chat aime le poisson mais il
n’aime pas à mouiller la patte”—so that it would seem
Shakespeare borrowed from the French.</p>

<p>“The devil rides on a fiddlestick” (“1 Henry IV.,” ii. 4).<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[468]</a></span></p>

<p>“The galled jade will wince.” So Hamlet says (iii. 2),
“let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.”</p>

<p>“The grace o’ God is gear enough.” This is the Scotch
form of the proverb which Launcelot Gobbo speaks of as
being well parted between Bassanio and Shylock, in the
“Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2): “The old proverb is very well
parted between my master Shylock and you, sir; you have
the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough.”</p>

<p>“The Mayor of Northampton opens oysters with his
dagger.” This proverb is alluded to by Pistol in “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (ii. 2), when he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Why, then the world’s mine oyster,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which I with sword will open.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Northampton being some eighty miles from the sea, oysters
were so stale before they reached the town (before railroads,
or even coaches, were known), that the “Mayor would be
loath to bring them near his nose.”</p>

<p>“The more haste the worse speed.” In “Romeo and
Juliet” (ii. 6), Friar Laurence says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“These violent delights have violent ends<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in their triumph die; like fire and powder,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, as they kiss, consume: the sweetest honey<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is loathsome in his own deliciousness,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And in the taste confounds the appetite:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Therefore, love moderately; long love doth so;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The proverb thus alluded to seems to be derived from the
Latin adage, “Festinatio tarda est.” It defeats its own purpose
by the blunders and imperfect work it occasions.<a name="FNanchor_892_892" id="FNanchor_892_892"></a><a href="#Footnote_892_892" class="fnanchor">[892]</a>
Hence the French say: “He that goes too hastily along
often stumbles on a fair road.”</p>

<p>“There is flattery in friendship”—used by the Constable
of France in “Henry V.” (iii. 7); the usual form of this
proverb being: “There is falsehood in friendship.”</p>

<p>“There was but one way” (“Henry V.,” ii. 3). “This,”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[469]</a></span>
says Dyce, “is a kind of proverbial expression for death.”
(“Glossary,” p. 494.)</p>

<p>“The weakest goes to the wall.” This is quoted by
Gregory in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 1), whereupon Sampson
adds: “Women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust
to the wall: therefore, I will push Montague’s men from the
wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.”</p>

<p>“There went but a pair of shears between them” (“Measure
for Measure,” i. 2). That is, “We are both of the same
piece.”</p>

<p>“The world goes on wheels.” This proverbial expression
occurs in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 7); and Taylor, the
Water-Poet, has made it the subject of one of his pamphlets:
“The worlde runnes on wheeles, or, oddes betwixt carts and
coaches.”</p>

<p>“Three women and a goose make a market.” This proverb
is alluded to in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“thus came your argument in;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then the boy’s fat <i>l’envoy</i>, the goose that you bought;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And he ended the market.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The following lines in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 6),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy promises are like Adonis’ gardens<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That one day bloom’d, and fruitful were the next,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">allude to the <i>Adonis horti</i>, which were nothing but portable
earthen pots, with some lettuce or fennel growing in them.
On his yearly festival every woman carried one of them in
honor of Adonis, because Venus had once laid him in a lettuce
bed. The next day they were thrown away. The
proverb seems to have been used always in a bad sense, for
things which make a fair show for a few days and then
wither away. The Dauphin is here made to apply it as an
encomium. There is a good account of it in Erasmus’s
“Adagia;” but the idea may have been taken from the
“Fairy Queen,” bk. iii. cant. 6, st. 42 (Singer’s “Shakespeare,”
1875, vol. vi. p. 32).</p>

<p>“To clip the anvil of my sword.” “This expression, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[470]</a></span>
‘Coriolanus’ (iv. 5) is very difficult to be explained,” says
Mr. Green, “unless we regard it as a proverb, denoting the
breaking of the weapon and the laying aside of enmity.
Aufidius makes use of it in his welcome to the banished
Coriolanus.”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“here I clip<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The anvil of my sword; and do contest<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As hotly and as nobly with thy love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As ever in ambitious strength I did<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Contend against thy valour.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“To have a month’s mind to a thing.” Ray’s “Proverbs.”
So, in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (i. 2), Julia says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I see you have a month’s mind to them.”<a name="FNanchor_893_893" id="FNanchor_893_893"></a><a href="#Footnote_893_893" class="fnanchor">[893]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“’Tis merry in hall when beards wag all.”<a name="FNanchor_894_894" id="FNanchor_894_894"></a><a href="#Footnote_894_894" class="fnanchor">[894]</a> This is quoted
by Silence in “2 Henry IV.” (v. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Be merry, be merry, my wife has all;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For women are shrews, both short and tall;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis merry in hall when beards wag all,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And welcome merry shrove-tide.<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Be merry, be merry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“To have one in the wind.” This is one of Camden’s
proverbial sentences. In “All’s Well that Ends Well”
(iii. 6), Bertram says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I spoke with her but once,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And found her wondrous cold; but I sent to her,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By this same coxcomb that we have i’ the wind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tokens and letters which she did re-send.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“To hold a candle to the devil”—that is, “to aid or countenance
that which is wrong.” Thus, in the “Merchant of
Venice” (ii. 6), Jessica says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What, must I hold a candle to my shames?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the allusion being to the practice of the Roman Catholics
who burn candles before the image of a favorite saint, carry
them in funeral processions, and place them on their altars.</p>

<p>“To the dark house” (“All’s Well that Ends Well,” ii. 3).<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[471]</a></span>
A house which is the seat of gloom and discontent.</p>

<p>“Truth should be silent.” Enobarbus, in “Antony and
Cleopatra” (ii. 2), says: “That truth should be silent I had
almost forgot.”</p>

<p>“To take mine ease in mine inn.” A proverbial phrase
used by Falstaff in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3), implying, says Mr.
Drake, “a degree of comfort which has always been the
peculiar attribute of an English house of public entertainment.”<a name="FNanchor_895_895" id="FNanchor_895_895"></a><a href="#Footnote_895_895" class="fnanchor">[895]</a></p>

<p>“Twice away says stay” (“Twelfth Night,” v. 1). Malone
thinks this proverb is alluded to by the Clown: “conclusions
to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your
two affirmatives, why, then, the worse for my friends and the
better for my foes;” and quotes Marlowe’s “Last Dominion,”
where the Queen says to the Moor:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Come, let’s kisse.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Moor.</i><span style="padding-left: 8em">Away, away.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Queen.</i> No, no, sayes I, and twice away sayes stay.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Trust not a horse’s heel.” In “King Lear” (iii. 6) the
Fool says, “he’s mad that trusts a horse’s health.” Malone
would read “heels.”</p>

<p>“Two may keep counsel, putting one away.” So Aaron,
in “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Two may keep counsel, when the third’s away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Ungirt, unblest.” Falstaff alludes to the old adage, in
“1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3). “I pray God my girdle break.”
Malone quotes from an ancient ballad:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ungirt, unblest, the proverbe sayes;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And they to prove it right,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have got a fashion now adayes,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">That’s odious to the sight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like Frenchmen, all on points they stand,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">No girdles now they wear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Walls have ears.” So, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[472]</a></span>
(v. 1), Thisbe is made to say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For parting my fair Pyramus and me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Wedding and ill-wintering tame both man and beast.”
Thus, in “Taming of the Shrew” (iv. 1), Grumio says:
“Winter tames man, woman, and beast; for it hath tamed
my old master, and my new mistress, and myself.” We may
also compare the Spanish adage: “You will marry and grow
tame.”</p>

<p>“We steal as in a castle” (“1 Henry IV.,” ii. 1). This,
says Steevens, was once a proverbial phrase.</p>

<p>“What can’t be cured must be endured.” With this
popular adage may be compared the following: “Past cure
is still past care,” in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2). So in
“Richard II.” (ii. 3), the Duke of York says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Things past redress are now with me past care.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Macbeth” (iii. 2) Lady Macbeth says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Things without all remedy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Should be without regard: what’s done is done.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine”
(“Measure for Measure,” v. 1).</p>

<p>“When things come to the worst they’ll mend.” The
truth of this popular adage is thus exemplified by Pandulph
in “King John” (iii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Before the curing of a strong disease,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even in the instant of repair and health,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The fit is strongest; evils that take leave,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On their departure most of all show evil.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Of course it is equivalent to the proverb, “When the
night’s darkest the day’s nearest.”</p>

<p>“When? can you tell?” (“Comedy of Errors,” iii. 1).
This proverbial query, often met with in old writers, and
perhaps alluded to just before in this scene, when Dromio
of Syracuse says: “Right, sir; I’ll tell you when, an you’ll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[473]</a></span>
tell me wherefore;” occurs again in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 1):
“Ay, when? canst tell?”</p>

<p>“When two men ride the same horse one must ride behind.”
So in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 5) Dogberry
says: “An two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind.”<a name="FNanchor_896_896" id="FNanchor_896_896"></a><a href="#Footnote_896_896" class="fnanchor">[896]</a>
With this may be compared the Spanish adage, “He who
rides behind does not saddle when he will.”</p>

<p>“While the grass grows, the steed starves.” This is alluded
to by Hamlet (iii. 2): “Ay, sir, but ‘while the grass
grows,’ the proverb is something musty.” See Dyce’s
“Glossary,” p. 499.</p>

<p>“Who dares not stir by day must walk by night” (“King
John,” i. 1).</p>

<p>“Who goes to Westminster for a wife, to St. Paul’s for a
man, and to Smithfield for a horse, may meet with a queane,
a knave, and a jade.” This proverb, often quoted by old
writers, is alluded to in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Falstaff.</i> Where’s Bardolph?</p>

<p><i>Page.</i> He’s gone into Smithfield to buy your worship a horse.</p>

<p><i>Falstaff.</i> I bought him in Paul’s, and he’ll buy me a horse in Smithfield:
an I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed,
and wived.”</p></div>

<p>“Wit, whither wilt?” This was a proverbial expression
not unfrequent in Shakespeare’s day. It is used by Orlando
in “As You Like It” (iv. 1): “A man that had a wife with
such a wit, he might say—‘Wit, whither wilt?’”</p>

<p>“Will you take eggs for money?” This was a proverbial
phrase, quoted by Leontes in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), for
putting up with an affront, or being cajoled or imposed upon.</p>

<p>“Words are but wind, but blows unkind.” In “Comedy
of Errors” (iii. 1), Dromio of Ephesus uses the first part of
this popular adage.</p>

<p>“Worth a Jew’s eye.” Launcelot, in the “Merchant of
Venice” (ii. 5), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There will come a Christian by,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will be worth a Jewess’ eye.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to tradition, the proverb arose from the custom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[474]</a></span>
of torturing Jews to extort money from them. It is simply,
however, a corruption of the Italian <i>gióia</i> (a jewel).</p>

<p>“You’ll never be burned for a witch.” This proverb,
which was applied to a silly person, is probably referred to
in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2) by Charmian, when he says
to the soothsayer:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Out, fool; I forgive thee for a witch.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Young ravens must have food” (“Merry Wives of
Windsor,” i. 3).<a name="FNanchor_897_897" id="FNanchor_897_897"></a><a href="#Footnote_897_897" class="fnanchor">[897]</a> Ray has “Small birds must have meat.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_857_857" id="Footnote_857_857"></a><a href="#FNanchor_857_857"><span class="label">[857]</span></a> “Shakespeare Proverbs,” 1858.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_858_858" id="Footnote_858_858"></a><a href="#FNanchor_858_858"><span class="label">[858]</span></a> Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 159.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_859_859" id="Footnote_859_859"></a><a href="#FNanchor_859_859"><span class="label">[859]</span></a> Ibid. p. 94.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_860_860" id="Footnote_860_860"></a><a href="#FNanchor_860_860"><span class="label">[860]</span></a> “Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers,” 1870, p. 341.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_861_861" id="Footnote_861_861"></a><a href="#FNanchor_861_861"><span class="label">[861]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” 1870, p. 157.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_862_862" id="Footnote_862_862"></a><a href="#FNanchor_862_862"><span class="label">[862]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 390,
under Proverbs.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_863_863" id="Footnote_863_863"></a><a href="#FNanchor_863_863"><span class="label">[863]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” p. 91.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_864_864" id="Footnote_864_864"></a><a href="#FNanchor_864_864"><span class="label">[864]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 391.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_865_865" id="Footnote_865_865"></a><a href="#FNanchor_865_865"><span class="label">[865]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 326.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_866_866" id="Footnote_866_866"></a><a href="#FNanchor_866_866"><span class="label">[866]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 333; Kelly’s “Proverbs
of all Nations,” 1870, p. 173.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_867_867" id="Footnote_867_867"></a><a href="#FNanchor_867_867"><span class="label">[867]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 391.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_868_868" id="Footnote_868_868"></a><a href="#FNanchor_868_868"><span class="label">[868]</span></a> Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 86.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_869_869" id="Footnote_869_869"></a><a href="#FNanchor_869_869"><span class="label">[869]</span></a> Ray gives another form: “Every man is either a fool or a physician
after thirty years of age;” see Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,”
1857, p. 27.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_870_870" id="Footnote_870_870"></a><a href="#FNanchor_870_870"><span class="label">[870]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 199.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_871_871" id="Footnote_871_871"></a><a href="#FNanchor_871_871"><span class="label">[871]</span></a> See Green’s “Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers,” 1870, pp.
319, 323.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_872_872" id="Footnote_872_872"></a><a href="#FNanchor_872_872"><span class="label">[872]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 391.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_873_873" id="Footnote_873_873"></a><a href="#FNanchor_873_873"><span class="label">[873]</span></a> Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” 1872, p. 52.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_874_874" id="Footnote_874_874"></a><a href="#FNanchor_874_874"><span class="label">[874]</span></a> Ibid., 1870, pp. 175, 176.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_875_875" id="Footnote_875_875"></a><a href="#FNanchor_875_875"><span class="label">[875]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 100; Kelly’s “Proverbs
of All Nations,” p. 187.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_876_876" id="Footnote_876_876"></a><a href="#FNanchor_876_876"><span class="label">[876]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 392.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_877_877" id="Footnote_877_877"></a><a href="#FNanchor_877_877"><span class="label">[877]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” 1870, pp. 196, 197.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_878_878" id="Footnote_878_878"></a><a href="#FNanchor_878_878"><span class="label">[878]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 392.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_879_879" id="Footnote_879_879"></a><a href="#FNanchor_879_879"><span class="label">[879]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_880_880" id="Footnote_880_880"></a><a href="#FNanchor_880_880"><span class="label">[880]</span></a> “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 392.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_881_881" id="Footnote_881_881"></a><a href="#FNanchor_881_881"><span class="label">[881]</span></a> Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” 1857, p. 409.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_882_882" id="Footnote_882_882"></a><a href="#FNanchor_882_882"><span class="label">[882]</span></a> A shaft is an arrow for the longbow, a bolt is for the crossbow.
Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” p. 155.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_883_883" id="Footnote_883_883"></a><a href="#FNanchor_883_883"><span class="label">[883]</span></a> “But now consider the old proverbe to be true, yt saieth that marriage
is destinie.”—Hall’s “Chronicles.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_884_884" id="Footnote_884_884"></a><a href="#FNanchor_884_884"><span class="label">[884]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 116.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_885_885" id="Footnote_885_885"></a><a href="#FNanchor_885_885"><span class="label">[885]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” pp. 160, 251.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_886_886" id="Footnote_886_886"></a><a href="#FNanchor_886_886"><span class="label">[886]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 323.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_887_887" id="Footnote_887_887"></a><a href="#FNanchor_887_887"><span class="label">[887]</span></a> Halliwell-Phillipps’s “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 393.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_888_888" id="Footnote_888_888"></a><a href="#FNanchor_888_888"><span class="label">[888]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 333.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_889_889" id="Footnote_889_889"></a><a href="#FNanchor_889_889"><span class="label">[889]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_890_890" id="Footnote_890_890"></a><a href="#FNanchor_890_890"><span class="label">[890]</span></a> Brewer’s “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” p. 860.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_891_891" id="Footnote_891_891"></a><a href="#FNanchor_891_891"><span class="label">[891]</span></a> Ray’s “Proverbs” (Bohn’s Edition), 1857, p. 76.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_892_892" id="Footnote_892_892"></a><a href="#FNanchor_892_892"><span class="label">[892]</span></a> Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” p. 80.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_893_893" id="Footnote_893_893"></a><a href="#FNanchor_893_893"><span class="label">[893]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_385">385</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_894_894" id="Footnote_894_894"></a><a href="#FNanchor_894_894"><span class="label">[894]</span></a> See Bohn’s “Handbook of Proverbs,” p. 115.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_895_895" id="Footnote_895_895"></a><a href="#FNanchor_895_895"><span class="label">[895]</span></a> “Shakespeare and his Times,” vol. i. p. 216.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_896_896" id="Footnote_896_896"></a><a href="#FNanchor_896_896"><span class="label">[896]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Proverbs of All Nations,” p. 49.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_897_897" id="Footnote_897_897"></a><a href="#FNanchor_897_897"><span class="label">[897]</span></a> “Handbook Index to Shakespeare,” p. 395.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[475]</a></span></h2>

<h3>THE HUMAN BODY.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">It</span> would be difficult to enumerate the manifold forms
of superstition which have, in most countries, in the course
of past centuries, clustered round the human body. Many
of these, too, may still be found scattered, here and there,
throughout our own country, one of the most deep-rooted
being palmistry, several allusions to which are made by
Shakespeare.</p>

<p>According to a popular belief current in years past, a
trembling of the body was supposed to be an indication of
demoniacal possession. Thus, in the “Comedy of Errors”
(iv. 4) the Courtezan says of Antipholus of Ephesus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and Pinch adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I charge thee, Satan, hous’d within this man,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To yield possession to my holy prayers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “The Tempest” (ii. 2), Caliban says to Stephano,
“Thou dost me yet but little hurt; thou wilt anon, I know
it by thy trembling.”</p>

<p>It was formerly supposed that our bodies consisted of the
four elements—fire, air, earth, and water, and that all diseases
arose from derangement in the due proportion of these
elements. Thus, in Antony’s eulogium on Brutus, in “Julius
Cæsar” (v. 5), this theory is alluded to:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“His life was gentle, and the elements<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 3) it is also noticed:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[476]</a></span></p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Sir Toby.</i> Do not our lives consist of the four elements?</p>

<p><i>Sir Andrew.</i> ’Faith, so they say; but I think, it rather consists of
eating and drinking.</p>

<p><i>Sir Toby.</i> Thou art a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.
Marian, I say!—a stoop of wine!”</p></div>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (v. 2), Shakespeare makes
the latter say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am fire, and air, my other elements<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I give to baser life.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This theory is the subject, too, of Sonnets xliv. and xlv.,
and is set forth at large in its connection with physic in
Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O elements, by whose (men say) contention,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our bodies be in living power maintained,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was this man’s death the fruit of your dissension?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O physic’s power, which (some say) hath restrained<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Approach of death, alas, thou keepest meagerly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When once one is for Atropos distrained.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Great be physicians’ brags, but aide is beggarly<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When rooted moisture fails, or groweth drie;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They leave off all, and say, death comes too eagerly.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They are but words therefore that men doe buy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of any, since God Esculapius ceased.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion was substantially adopted by Galen, and embraced
by the physicians of the olden times.<a name="FNanchor_898_898" id="FNanchor_898_898"></a><a href="#Footnote_898_898" class="fnanchor">[898]</a></p>

<p><i>Blood.</i> In old phraseology this word was popularly used
for disposition or temperament. In “Timon of Athens”
(iv. 2), Flavius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Strange, unusual blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When man’s worst sin is, he does too much good!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the opening passage of “Cymbeline” it occurs in the same
sense:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Still seem as does the king,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the meaning evidently being that “our dispositions no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[477]</a></span>
longer obey the influences of heaven; they are courtiers,
and still seem to resemble the disposition the king is in.”</p>

<p>Again, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 3): “wisdom
and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs
to one, that blood hath the victory.”</p>

<p>Once more, in “King Lear” (iv. 2), the Duke of Albany
says to Goneril:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Were’t my fitness<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To let these hands obey my blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They are apt enough to dislocate and tear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy flesh and bones.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, the phrase “to be in blood” was a term of the
chase, meaning, to be in good condition, to be vigorous. In
“1 Henry VI.” (iv. 2), Talbot exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If we be English deer, be, then, in blood;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not rascal-like, to fall down with a pinch”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the expression being put in opposition to “rascal,” which
was the term for the deer when lean and out of condition.
In “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 2), Holofernes says: “The
deer was, as you know, <i>sanguis</i>,—in blood.”</p>

<p>The notion that the blood may be thickened by emotional
influences is mentioned by Polixenes in the “Winter’s Tale”
(i. 2), where he speaks of “thoughts that would thick my
blood.” In King John’s temptation of Hubert to murder
Arthur (iii. 3), it is thus referred to:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Or if that surly spirit, melancholy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Had bak’d thy blood and made it heavy, thick,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which else runs tickling up and down the veins.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Red blood was considered a traditionary sign of courage.
Hence, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 1), the Prince of
Morocco, when addressing himself to Portia, and urging his
claims for her hand, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bring me the fairest creature northward born,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[478]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And let us make incision for your love,<a name="FNanchor_899_899" id="FNanchor_899_899"></a><a href="#Footnote_899_899" class="fnanchor">[899]</a><br /></span>
<span class="i0">To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in the same play, cowards are said to “have livers
as white as milk,” and an effeminate man is termed a
“milk-sop.” Macbeth, too (v. 3), calls one of his frighted
soldiers a “lily-liver’d boy.” And in “King Lear” (ii. 2),
the Earl of Kent makes use of the same phrase. In illustration
of this notion Mr. Douce<a name="FNanchor_900_900" id="FNanchor_900_900"></a><a href="#Footnote_900_900" class="fnanchor">[900]</a> quotes from Bartholomew
Glantville, who says: “Reed clothes have been layed upon
deed men in remembrance of theyr hardynes and boldnes,
whyle they were in theyr bloudde.”</p>

<p>The absence of blood in the liver as the supposed property
of a coward, originated, says Dr. Bucknill,<a name="FNanchor_901_901" id="FNanchor_901_901"></a><a href="#Footnote_901_901" class="fnanchor">[901]</a> in the old theory
of the circulation of the blood, which explains Sir Toby’s
remarks on his dupe, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 2): “For Andrew,
if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his
liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I’ll eat the rest of the
anatomy.”</p>

<p>We may quote here a notion referred to in “Lucrece”
(1744-50), that, ever since the sad death of Lucrece, corrupted
blood has watery particles:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“About the mourning and congealed face<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of that black blood a watery rigol goes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which seems to weep upon the tainted place:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ever since, as pitying Lucrece’ woes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Corrupted blood some watery token shows;<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And blood untainted still doth red abide,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Blushing at that which is so putrefied.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Brain.</i> By old anatomists the brain was divided into
three ventricles, in the hindermost of which they placed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[479]</a></span>
memory. That this division was not unknown to Shakespeare
is apparent from “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 2),
where Holofernes says: “A foolish extravagant spirit, full
of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions,
revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory.”
Again, Lady Macbeth (i. 7), speaking of Duncan’s
two chamberlains, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Will I with wine and wassail so convince,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That memory, the warder of the brain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A limbeck only.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The “third ventricle is the cerebellum, by which the brain
is connected with the spinal marrow and the rest of the
body; the memory is posted in the cerebellum, like a warder
or sentinel, to warn the reason against attack. Thus, when
the memory is converted by intoxication into a mere fume,<a name="FNanchor_902_902" id="FNanchor_902_902"></a><a href="#Footnote_902_902" class="fnanchor">[902]</a>
then it fills the brain itself—the receipt or receptacle of reason,
which thus becomes like an alembic, or cap of a still.”<a name="FNanchor_903_903" id="FNanchor_903_903"></a><a href="#Footnote_903_903" class="fnanchor">[903]</a></p>

<p>A popular nickname, in former times, for the skull, was
“brain-pan;” to which Cade, in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 10)
refers: “many a time, but for a sallet, my brain-pan had
been cleft with a brown bill.” The phrase “to beat out
the brains” is used by Shakespeare metaphorically in the
sense of defeat or destroy; just as nowadays we popularly
speak of knocking a scheme on the head. In “Measure for
Measure” (v. 1), the Duke, addressing Isabella, tells her:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“O most kind maid,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It was the swift celerity of his death,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which I did think with slower foot came on,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That brain’d my purpose.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The expression “to bear a brain,” which is used by the
Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 3),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, I do bear a brain,”<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[480]</a></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">denoted “much mental capacity either of attention, ingenuity,
or remembrance.”<a name="FNanchor_904_904" id="FNanchor_904_904"></a><a href="#Footnote_904_904" class="fnanchor">[904]</a> Thus, in Marston’s “Dutch Courtezan”
(1605), we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My silly husband, alas! knows nothing of it, ’tis<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I that must beare a braine for all.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The notion of the brain as the seat of the soul is mentioned
by Prince Henry, who, referring to King John (v. 7),
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“his pure brain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which some suppose the soul’s frail dwelling-house,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth, by the idle comments that it makes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Foretell the ending of mortality.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Ear.</i> According to a well-known superstition, much credited
in days gone by, and still extensively believed, a tingling
of the right ear is considered lucky, being supposed to denote
that a friend is speaking well of one, whereas a tingling
of the left is said to imply the opposite. This notion, however,
varies in different localities, as in some places it is the
tingling of the left ear which denotes the friend, and the
tingling of the right ear the enemy. In “Much Ado About
Nothing” (iii. 1), Beatrice asks Ursula and Hero, who had
been talking of her:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What fire is in mine ears?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">the reference, no doubt, being to this popular fancy. Sir
Thomas Browne<a name="FNanchor_905_905" id="FNanchor_905_905"></a><a href="#Footnote_905_905" class="fnanchor">[905]</a> ascribes the idea to the belief in guardian
angels, who touch the right or left ear according as the conversation
is favorable or not to the person.</p>

<p>In Shakespeare’s day it was customary for young gallants
to wear a long lock of hair dangling by the ear, known as a
“love-lock.” Hence, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 3),
the Watch identifies one of his delinquents: “I know him;
a’ wears a lock.”<a name="FNanchor_906_906" id="FNanchor_906_906"></a><a href="#Footnote_906_906" class="fnanchor">[906]</a></p>

<p>Again, further on (v. 1), Dogberry gives another allusion to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[481]</a></span>
this practice: “He wears a key in his ear, and a lock hanging
by it.”</p>

<p>An expression of endearment current in years gone by
was “to bite the ear.” In “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), Mercutio
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I will bite thee by the ear for that jest,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">a passage which is explained in Nares (“Glossary,” vol. i. p.
81) by the following one from Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist”
(ii. 3):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>Mammon.</i> Th’ hast witch’d me, rogue; take, go.</p>

<p><i>Face.</i> Your jack, and all, sir.</p>

<p><i>Mammon.</i> Slave, I could bite thine ear.... Away, thou dost not
care for me!”</p></div>

<p class="ni">Gifford, in his notes on Jonson’s “Works” (vol. ii. p. 184), says
the odd mode of expressing pleasure by biting the ear seems
“to be taken from the practice of animals, who, in a playful
mood, bite each other’s ears.”</p>

<p>While speaking of the ear, it may be noted that the so-called
want of ear for music has been regarded as a sign of
an austere disposition. Thus Cæsar says of Cassius (“Julius
Cæsar,” i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“He hears no music<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seldom he smiles.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There is, too, the well-known passage in the “Merchant of
Venice” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The man that hath no music in himself,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">According to the Italian proverb: “Whom God loves not,
that man loves not music.”<a name="FNanchor_907_907" id="FNanchor_907_907"></a><a href="#Footnote_907_907" class="fnanchor">[907]</a></p>

<p><i>Elbow.</i> According to a popular belief, the itching of the
elbow denoted an approaching change of some kind or
other.<a name="FNanchor_908_908" id="FNanchor_908_908"></a><a href="#Footnote_908_908" class="fnanchor">[908]</a> Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (v. 1), the king speaks of</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“Fickle changelings, and poor discontents,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[482]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Which gape, and rub the elbow, at the news<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of hurlyburly innovation.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">With this idea we may compare similar ones connected with
other parts of the body. Thus, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), one of
the witches exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By the pricking of my thumbs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Something wicked this way comes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1), Ajax says: “My
fingers itch,”<a name="FNanchor_909_909" id="FNanchor_909_909"></a><a href="#Footnote_909_909" class="fnanchor">[909]</a> and an itching palm was said to be an indication
that the person would shortly receive money. Hence,
it denoted a hand ready to receive bribes. Thus, in “Julius
Cæsar” (iv. 3), Brutus says to Cassius:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are much condemn’d to have an itching palm;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To sell and mart your offices for gold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To undeservers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">So, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3), Shallow says: “If
I see a sword out, my finger itches to make one.”</p>

<p>Again, in “Othello” (iv. 3), poor Desdemona says to
Emilia:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Mine eyes do itch;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Doth that bode weeping?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Grose alludes to this superstition, and says: “When the
right eye itches, the party affected will shortly cry; if the
left, they will laugh.” The itching of the eye, as an omen, is
spoken of by Theocritus, who says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My right eye itches now, and I will see my love.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Eyes.</i> A good deal of curious folk-lore has, at one time
or another, clustered round the eye; and the well-known
superstition known as the “evil eye” has already been described
in the chapter on Birth and Baptism. Blueness
above the eye was, in days gone by, considered a sign of
love, and as such is alluded to by Rosalind in “As You Like
It” (iii. 2), where she enumerates the marks of love to Orlando:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[483]</a></span>
“A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye, and
sunken, which you have not.”</p>

<p>The term “baby in the eye” was sportively applied by
our forefathers to the miniature reflection of himself which
a person may see in the pupil of another’s eye. In “Timon
of Athens” (i. 2), one of the lords says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Joy had the like conception in our eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, at that instant, like a babe sprung up,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">an allusion probably being made to this whimsical notion.
It is often referred to by old writers, as, for instance, by
Drayton, in his “Ideas:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But O, see, see! we need enquire no further,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, in your eye, the boy that did the murder.”<a name="FNanchor_910_910" id="FNanchor_910_910"></a><a href="#Footnote_910_910" class="fnanchor">[910]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>We may compare the expression, “to look babies in the
eyes,” a common amusement of lovers in days gone by. In
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Loyal Subject” (iii. 2), Theodore
asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Can ye look babies, sisters,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the young gallants’ eyes, and twirl their band-strings?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And once more, to quote from Massinger’s “Renegado”
(ii. 4), where Donusa says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When a young lady wrings you by the hand, thus,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or with an amorous touch presses your foot;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Looks babies in your eyes, plays with your locks,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another old term for the eyes was “crystal,” which is used
by Pistol to his wife, Mrs. Quickly, in “Henry V.” (ii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Therefore, <i>caveto</i> be thy counsellor.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Go, clear thy crystals;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">that is, dry thine eyes.</p>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), the phrase is employed by
Benvolio:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Tut! you saw her fair, none else being by,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Herself pois’d with herself in either eye:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But in that crystal scales let there be weigh’d<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[484]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Your lady’s love against some other maid.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It also occurs in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Double Marriage”
(v. 3), where Juliana exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Sleep you, sweet glasses!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An everlasting slumber crown those crystals.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The expression “wall-eyed” denotes, says Dyce (“Glossary,”
p. 486), “eyes with a white or pale-gray iris—glaring-eyed.”
It is used by Lucius in “Titus Andronicus” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Say, wall-ey’d slave, whither wouldst thou convey<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This growing image of thy fiend-like face?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “King John” (iv. 3), Salisbury speaks of “wall-eyed
wrath.”</p>

<p>Brockett, in his “Glossary of North Country Words,” says:
“In those parts of the north with which I am best acquainted,
persons are said to be <i>wall-eyed</i> when the white
of the eye is very large and to one side; on the borders ‘sic
folks’ are considered lucky. The term is also occasionally
applied to horses with similar eyes, though its wider general
acceptation seems to be when the iris of the eye is white, or
of a very pale color. A <i>wall-eyed</i> horse sees perfectly well.”</p>

<p><i>Face.</i> A common expression “to play the hypocrite,” or
feign, was “to face.” So, in “1 Henry VI.” (v. 3), Suffolk
declares how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Fair Margaret knows<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That Suffolk doth not flatter, face, or feign.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hence the name of one of the characters in Ben Jonson’s
“Alchemist.” So, in the “Taming of the Shrew” (ii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Yet I have faced it with a card of ten.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The phrase, also, “to face me down,” implied insisting
upon anything in opposition. So, in the “Comedy of
Errors” (iii. 1), Antipholus of Ephesus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But here’s a villain that would face me down<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He met me on the mart.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Feet.</i> Stumbling has from the earliest period been considered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[485]</a></span>
ominous.<a name="FNanchor_911_911" id="FNanchor_911_911"></a><a href="#Footnote_911_911" class="fnanchor">[911]</a> Thus, Cicero mentions it among the
superstitions of his day; and numerous instances of this
unlucky act have been handed down from bygone times.
We are told by Ovid how Myrrha, on her way to Cinyra’s
chamber, stumbled thrice, but was not deterred by the omen
from an unnatural and fatal crime; and Tibullus (lib. I.,
eleg. iii. 20), refers to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O! quoties ingressus iter, mihi tristia dixi,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Offensum in porta signa dedisse pedem.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This superstition is alluded to by Shakespeare, who, in
“3 Henry VI.” (iv. 7), makes Gloster say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For many men that stumble at the threshold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are well foretold that danger lurks within.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Richard III.” (iii. 4), Hastings relates:<a name="FNanchor_912_912" id="FNanchor_912_912"></a><a href="#Footnote_912_912" class="fnanchor">[912]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Three times to-day my foot-cloth horse did stumble,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And started when he look’d upon the Tower,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As loath to bear me to the slaughter-house.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the same way, stumbling at a grave has been regarded
as equally unlucky; and in “Romeo and Juliet” (v. 3), Friar
Laurence says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“how oft to-night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have my old feet stumbled at graves.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hair.</i> From time immemorial there has been a strong
antipathy to red hair, which originated, according to some
antiquarians, in a tradition that Judas had hair of this color.
One reason, it may be, why the dislike to it arose, was that
this color was considered ugly and unfashionable, and on
this account a person with red hair would soon be regarded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[486]</a></span>
with contempt. It has been conjectured, too, that the odium
took its rise from the aversion to the red-haired Danes. In
“As You Like It” (iii. 4), Rosalind, when speaking of
Orlando, refers to this notion:<a name="FNanchor_913_913" id="FNanchor_913_913"></a><a href="#Footnote_913_913" class="fnanchor">[913]</a> “His very hair is of the
dissembling colour,” whereupon Celia replies: “Something
browner than Judas’s.”</p>

<p>Yellow hair, too, was in years gone by regarded with ill-favor,
and esteemed a deformity. In ancient pictures and
tapestries both Cain and Judas are represented with yellow
beards, in allusion to which Simple, in the “Merry Wives of
Windsor” (i. 4), when interrogated, says of his master: “He
hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard—a
Cain-coloured beard.”<a name="FNanchor_914_914" id="FNanchor_914_914"></a><a href="#Footnote_914_914" class="fnanchor">[914]</a></p>

<p>In speaking of beards, it may be noted that formerly they
gave rise to various customs. Thus, in Shakespeare’s day,
dyeing beards was a fashionable custom, and so Bottom, in
“A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 2), is perplexed as to
what beard he should wear when acting before the duke.
He says: “I will discharge it in either your straw-colour
beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard,
or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow.”<a name="FNanchor_915_915" id="FNanchor_915_915"></a><a href="#Footnote_915_915" class="fnanchor">[915]</a></p>

<p>To mutilate a beard in any way was considered an irreparable
outrage, a practice to which Hamlet refers (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “King Lear” (iii. 7), Gloster exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By the kind gods, ’tis most ignobly done<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To pluck me by the beard.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Stroking the beard before a person spoke was preparatory
to favor. Hence in “Troilus and Cressida” (i. 3), Ulysses,
when describing how Achilles asks Patroclus to imitate certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[487]</a></span>
of their chiefs, represents him as saying:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘Now play me Nestor; hem, and stroke thy beard,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As he, being drest to some oration.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, the phrase “to beard” meant to oppose face to
face in a hostile manner. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1),
Douglas declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No man so potent breathes upon the ground,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But I will beard him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Bishop of Winchester says
to Gloster:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Do what thou dar’st; I’ll beard thee to thy face.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It seems also to have been customary to swear by the
beard, an allusion to which is made by Touchstone in “As
You Like It” (i. 2): “stroke your chins, and swear by your
beards that I am a knave.”</p>

<p>We may also compare what Nestor says in “Troilus and
Cressida” (iv. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By this white beard, I’d fight with thee to-morrow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Our ancestors paid great attention to the shape of their
beards, certain cuts being appropriated to certain professions
and ranks. In “Henry V.” (iii. 6), Gower speaks of “a
beard of the general’s cut.” As Mr. Staunton remarks,
“Not the least odd among the fantastic fashions of our forefathers
was the custom of distinguishing certain professions
and classes by the cut of the beard; thus we hear, <i>inter alia</i>,
of the bishop’s beard, the judge’s beard, the soldier’s beard,
the citizen’s beard, and even the clown’s beard.” Randle
Holme tells us, “The broad or cathedral beard [is] so-called
because bishops or gown-men of the church anciently did
wear such beards.” By the military man, the cut adopted
was known as the stiletto or spade. The beard of the citizen
was usually worn round, as Mrs. Quickly describes it in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[488]</a></span>
“Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), “like a glover’s paring-knife.”
The clown’s beard was left bushy or untrimmed.
Malone quotes from an old ballad entitled “Le Prince d’
Amour,” 1660:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Next the clown doth out-rush<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With the beard of the bush.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>According to an old superstition, much hair on the head
has been supposed to indicate an absence of intellect, a notion
referred to by Antipholus of Syracuse, in the “Comedy
of Errors” (ii. 2): “there’s many a man hath more hair
than wit.” In the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1),
the same proverbial sentence is mentioned by Speed. Malone
quotes the following lines upon Suckling’s “Aglaura,”
as an illustration of this saying:<a name="FNanchor_916_916" id="FNanchor_916_916"></a><a href="#Footnote_916_916" class="fnanchor">[916]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This great voluminous pamphlet may be said<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be like one that hath more hair than head;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More excrement than body: trees which sprout<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Steevens gives an example from “Florio:” “A tisty-tosty
wag-feather, more haire than wit.”</p>

<p>Excessive fear has been said to cause the hair to stand on
end: an instance of which Shakespeare records in “Hamlet”
(iii. 4), in that celebrated passage where the Queen,
being at a loss to understand her son’s strange appearance
during his conversation with the Ghost, which is invisible
to her, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Starts up, and stands on end.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>A further instance occurs in “The Tempest” (i. 2), where
Ariel, describing the shipwreck, graphically relates how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“All, but mariners,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then all a-fire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,<br /></span>
<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[489]</a></span><span class="i0">With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was the first man that leap’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, Macbeth says (i. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“why do I yield to that suggestion<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on he says (v. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The time has been, my senses would have cool’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Would at a dismal treatise rouse, and stir<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As life were in’t.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) it is referred to by Suffolk as a
sign of madness:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My hair be fix’d on end, as one distract.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And, once more, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Hastings
declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Another popular notion mentioned by Shakespeare is,
that sudden fright or great sorrow will cause the hair to
turn white. In “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Falstaff, in his speech
to Prince Henry, tells him: “thy father’s beard is turned
white with the news.”</p>

<p>Among the many instances recorded to establish the truth
of this idea, it is said that the hair and beard of the Duke
of Brunswick whitened in twenty-four hours upon his hearing
that his father had been mortally wounded in the battle
of Auerstadt. Marie Antoinette, the unfortunate queen of
Louis XVI., found her hair suddenly changed by her troubles;
and a similar change happened to Charles I., when he
attempted to escape from Carisbrooke Castle. Mr. Timbs,
in his “Doctors and Patients” (1876, p. 201), says that
“chemists have discovered that hair contains an oil, a mucous
substance, iron, oxide of manganese, phosphate and
carbonate of iron, flint, and a large proportion of sulphur.
White hair contains also phosphate of magnesia, and its oil
is nearly colourless. When hair becomes suddenly white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[490]</a></span>
from terror, it is probably owing to the sulphur absorbing
the oil, as in the operation of whitening woollen cloths.”</p>

<p>Hair was formerly used metaphorically for the color,
complexion, or nature of a thing. In “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 1),
Worcester says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“I would your father had been here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The quality and hair of our attempt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Brooks no division.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Nice Valour” it is so used:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A lady of my hair cannot want pitying.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hands.</i> Various superstitions have, at different times,
clustered round the hand. Thus, in palmistry, a moist one
is said to denote an amorous constitution. In “Othello”
(iii. 4) we have the following allusion to this popular notion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Othello.</i> Give me your hand. This hand is moist, my lady.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Desdemona.</i> It yet has felt no age, nor known no sorrow.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Othello.</i> This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2), Iras says: “There’s
a palm presages chastity;” whereupon Charmian adds: “If
an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot
scratch mine ear.” And, in the “Comedy of Errors” (iii. 2),
Dromio of Syracuse speaks of barrenness as “hard in the
palm of the hand.”</p>

<p>A dry hand, however, has been supposed to denote age
and debility. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2) the Lord Chief Justice
enumerates this among the characteristics of such a constitution.<a name="FNanchor_917_917" id="FNanchor_917_917"></a><a href="#Footnote_917_917" class="fnanchor">[917]</a></p>

<p>In the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), Launcelot, referring
to the language of palmistry, calls the hand “the table,”
meaning thereby the whole collection of lines on the skin
within the hand: “Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer
table, which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have
good fortune.” He then alludes to one of the lines in the
hand, known as the “line of life:” “Go to, here’s a simple
line of life.”</p>

<p>In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 5) palmistry is further<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[491]</a></span>
mentioned:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Gaoler’s Daughter.</i> Give me your hand.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Gerrold.</i><span style="padding-left: 13em">Why?</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Gaoler’s Daughter.</i> I can tell your fortune.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It was once supposed that little worms were bred in the
fingers of idle servants. To this notion Mercutio refers in
“Romeo and Juliet” (i. 4), where, in his description of Queen
Mab, he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Not half so big as a round little worm<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This notion is alluded to by John Banister, a famous surgeon
in Shakespeare’s day, in his “Compendious Chyrurgerie”
(1585, p. 465): “We commonly call them worms, which
many women, sitting in the sunshine, can cunningly picke
out with needles, and are most common in the handes.”</p>

<p>A popular term formerly in use for the nails on the ten
fingers was the “ten commandments,” which, says Nares,<a name="FNanchor_918_918" id="FNanchor_918_918"></a><a href="#Footnote_918_918" class="fnanchor">[918]</a>
“doubtless led to the swearing by them, as by the real commandments.”
Thus, in “2 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the Duchess
of Gloster says to the queen:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Could I come near your beauty with my nails<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’d set my ten commandments in your face.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the same way the fingers were also called the “ten
bones,” as a little further on in the same play, where Peter
swears “by these ten bones.”</p>

<p>The phrase “of his hands” was equivalent to “of his
inches, or of his size, a hand being the measure of four
inches.” So, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Simple
says: “Ay, forsooth: but he is as tall a man of his hands
as any is between this and his head,” “the expression being
used probably for the sake of a jocular equivocation in the
word tall, which meant either bold or high.”<a name="FNanchor_919_919" id="FNanchor_919_919"></a><a href="#Footnote_919_919" class="fnanchor">[919]</a></p>

<p>Again, in the “Winter’s Tale” (v. 2), the Clown tells the
Shepherd: “I’ll swear to the prince, thou art a tall fellow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[492]</a></span>
of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know
thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be
drunk; but I’ll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall
fellow of thy hands.”</p>

<p>A proverbial phrase for being tall from necessity was “to
blow the nail.” In “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 5) the king says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“When dying clouds contend with growing light,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Can neither call it perfect day, nor night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It occurs in the song at the end of “Love’s Labour’s Lost:”</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And Dick the shepherd blows his nail.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“To bite the thumb” at a person implied an insult;
hence, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 1), Sampson says: “I will
bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if
they bear it.”</p>

<p>The thumb, in this action, we are told, “represented a fig,
and the whole was equivalent to a <i>fig</i> for you.”<a name="FNanchor_920_920" id="FNanchor_920_920"></a><a href="#Footnote_920_920" class="fnanchor">[920]</a> Decker,
in his “Dead Term” (1608), speaking of the various groups
that daily frequented St. Paul’s Church, says: “What swearing
is there, what shouldering, what justling, what jeering,
what byting of thumbs, to beget quarrels?”</p>

<p><i>Hare-lip.</i> A cleft lip, so called from its supposed resemblance
to the upper lip of a hare. It was popularly believed
to be the mischievous act of an elf or malicious fairy. So,
in “King Lear” (iii. 4), Edgar says of Gloster: “This is the
foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he ... squints the eye, and makes
the hare-lip.” In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 2),
Oberon, in blessing the bridal-bed of Theseus and Hippolyta,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,<br /></span>

<span class="i0">*<span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>

<span class="i0">Shall upon their children be.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The expression “hang the lip” meant to drop the lip in
sullenness or contempt. Thus, in “Troilus and Cressida”
(iii. 1), Helen explains why her brother Troilus is not abroad
by saying: “He hangs the lip at something.” We may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[493]</a></span>
compare, too, the words in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4): “a foolish
hanging of thy nether lip.”</p>

<p><i>Head.</i> According to the old writers on physiognomy, a
round head denoted foolishness, a notion to which reference
is made in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 3), in the following
dialogue, where Cleopatra, inquiring about Octavia, says to
the Messenger:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bear’st thou her face in mind? Is’t long, or round?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Messenger.</i> Round, even to faultiness.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Cleopatra.</i> For the most part, too, they are foolish that are so.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Hill’s “Pleasant History,” etc. (1613), we read: “The
head very round, to be forgetful and foolish.” Again: “The
head long, to be prudent and wary.”</p>

<p><i>Heart.</i> The term “broken heart,” as commonly applied
to death from excessive grief, is not a vulgar error, but may
arise from violent muscular exertion or strong mental emotions.
In “Macbeth” (iv. 3), Malcolm says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“The grief, that does not speak,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare, too, Queen Margaret’s words to Buckingham,
in “Richard III.” (i. 3), where she prophesies how
Gloster</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Shall split thy very heart with sorrow.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Mr. Timbs, in his “Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity”
(1861, p. 149), has given the following note on the
subject: “This affection was, it is believed, first described
by Harvey; but since his day several cases have been observed.
Morgagni has recorded a few examples: among
them, that of George II., who died suddenly of this disease
in 1760; and, what is very curious, Morgagni himself fell a
victim to the same malady. Dr. Elliotson, in his Lumleyan
Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, in 1839, stated that he
had only seen one instance; but in the ‘Cyclopædia of Practical
Medicine’ Dr. Townsend gives a table of twenty-five
cases, collected from various authors.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[494]</a></span>”</p>

<p>In olden times the heart was esteemed the seat of the
understanding. Hence, in “Coriolanus” (i. 1), the Citizen
speaks of “the counsellor heart.” With the ancients, also,
the heart was considered the seat of courage, to which
Shakespeare refers in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Servant.</i> Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">They could not find a heart within the beast.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Cæsar.</i> The gods do this in shame of cowardice:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cæsar should be a beast without a heart,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If he should stay at home to-day for fear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Liver.</i> By a popular notion, the liver was anciently supposed
to be the seat of love, a superstition to which Shakespeare
frequently alludes. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”
(iv. 3), Biron, after listening to Longaville’s sonnet, remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“This is the liver vein, which makes flesh a deity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A green goose, a goddess; pure, pure idolatry.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iv. 1), Friar Francis says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If ever love had interest in his liver.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind, professing to
be able to cure love, which, he says, is “merely a madness,”
says to Orlando, “will I take upon me to wash your liver as
clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one
spot of love in’t.” In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 4), the Duke,
speaking of women’s love, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Their love may be call’d appetite,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No motion of the liver, but the palate,” etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Fabian (ii. 5), alluding to Olivia’s supposed letter to
Malvolio, says: “This wins him, liver and all.”</p>

<p>Once more, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), Pistol
alludes to the liver as being the inspirer of amorous passions,
for, speaking of Falstaff, he refers to his loving Ford’s
wife “with liver burning hot.”<a name="FNanchor_921_921" id="FNanchor_921_921"></a><a href="#Footnote_921_921" class="fnanchor">[921]</a> Douce says, “there is some
reason for thinking that this superstition was borrowed from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[495]</a></span>
the Arabian physicians, or at least adopted by them; for, in
the Turkish tales, an amorous tailor is made to address his
wife by the titles of ‘thou corner of my liver, and soul of my
love;’ and, in another place, the King of Syria, who had sustained
a temporary privation of his mistress, is said to have
had ‘his liver, which had been burnt up by the loss of her,
cooled and refreshed at the sight of her.’”<a name="FNanchor_922_922" id="FNanchor_922_922"></a><a href="#Footnote_922_922" class="fnanchor">[922]</a> According to an
old Latin distich:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cor sapit, pulmo loquitur, fel commoret iras<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Splen ridere facit, cogit amare jecur.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Bartholomæus, in his “De Proprietatibus Rerum” (lib. v. 39),
informs us that “the liver is the place of voluptuousness and
lyking of the flesh.”</p>

<p><i>Moles.</i> These have, from time immemorial, been regarded
as ominous, and special attention has been paid by the superstitious
to their position on the body.<a name="FNanchor_923_923" id="FNanchor_923_923"></a><a href="#Footnote_923_923" class="fnanchor">[923]</a> In “A Midsummer-Night’s
Dream” (v. 1), a mole on a child is spoken of by
Oberon as a bad omen, who, speaking of the three couples
who had lately been married, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And the blots of Nature’s hand<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall not in their issue stand;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor mark prodigious, such as are<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Despised in nativity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall upon their children be.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Iachimo (“Cymbeline,” ii. 2) represents Imogen as having</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“On her left breast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ the bottom of a cowslip.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And we may also compare the words of Cymbeline (v. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Guiderius had<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It was a mark of wonder.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Spleen.</i> This was once supposed to be the cause of laughter,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[496]</a></span>
a notion probably referred to by Isabella in “Measure
for Measure” (ii. 2), where, telling how the angels weep
over the follies of men, she adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“who, with our spleens,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Would all themselves laugh mortal.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Taming of the Shrew” (Induction, sc. i.), the Lord says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“haply my presence<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May well abate the over-merry spleen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which otherwise would grow into extremes.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And Maria says to Sir Toby, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 2):
“If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into
stitches, follow me.”</p>

<p><i>Wits.</i> With our early writers, the five senses were usually
called the “five wits.” So, in “Much Ado About Nothing”
(i. 1), Beatrice says: “In our last conflict four of his
five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed
with one.” In Sonnet cxli., Shakespeare makes a distinction
between wits and senses:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But my five wits, nor my five senses can<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The five wits, says Staunton, are “common wit, imagination,
fantasy, estimation, memory.” Johnson says, the
“wits seem to have been reckoned five, by analogy to the
five senses, or the five inlets of ideas.” In “King Lear”
(iii. 4) we find the expression, “Bless thy five wits.”</p>

<p>According to a curious fancy, eating beef was supposed
to impair the intellect, to which notion Shakespeare has
several allusions. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), Sir Andrew
says: “Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than
a Christian, or an ordinary man has: but I am a great eater
of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” In “Troilus
and Cressida” (ii. 1), Thersites says to Ajax: “The plague
of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_898_898" id="Footnote_898_898"></a><a href="#FNanchor_898_898"><span class="label">[898]</span></a> See Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 120.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_899_899" id="Footnote_899_899"></a><a href="#FNanchor_899_899"><span class="label">[899]</span></a> Mr. Singer, in a note on this passage, says, “It was customary, in
the East, for lovers to testify the violence of their passion by cutting
themselves in the sight of their mistresses; and the fashion seems to
have been adopted here as a mark of gallantry in Shakespeare’s time,
when young men frequently stabbed their arms with daggers, and,
mingling the blood with wine, drank it off to the healths of their mistresses.”—Vol.
ii. p. 417.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_900_900" id="Footnote_900_900"></a><a href="#FNanchor_900_900"><span class="label">[900]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakspeare,” 1839, p. 156.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_901_901" id="Footnote_901_901"></a><a href="#FNanchor_901_901"><span class="label">[901]</span></a> “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 124.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_902_902" id="Footnote_902_902"></a><a href="#FNanchor_902_902"><span class="label">[902]</span></a> Cf. “Tempest,” v. 1:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“the ignorant fumes that mantle<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their clearer reason.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_903_903" id="Footnote_903_903"></a><a href="#FNanchor_903_903"><span class="label">[903]</span></a> Clark and Wright’s “Notes to Macbeth,” 1877, p. 101.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_904_904" id="Footnote_904_904"></a><a href="#FNanchor_904_904"><span class="label">[904]</span></a> Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. viii. p. 123.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_905_905" id="Footnote_905_905"></a><a href="#FNanchor_905_905"><span class="label">[905]</span></a> “Vulgar Errors,” book v. chap. 23 (Bohn’s edition, 1852, vol. ii. p. 82).</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_906_906" id="Footnote_906_906"></a><a href="#FNanchor_906_906"><span class="label">[906]</span></a> Prynne attacked the fashion in his “Unloveliness of Love-locks.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_907_907" id="Footnote_907_907"></a><a href="#FNanchor_907_907"><span class="label">[907]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 165, 166.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_908_908" id="Footnote_908_908"></a><a href="#FNanchor_908_908"><span class="label">[908]</span></a> Ibid. p. 273.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_909_909" id="Footnote_909_909"></a><a href="#FNanchor_909_909"><span class="label">[909]</span></a> See “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Capulet says, “My fingers
itch,” denoting anxiety.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_910_910" id="Footnote_910_910"></a><a href="#FNanchor_910_910"><span class="label">[910]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 44.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_911_911" id="Footnote_911_911"></a><a href="#FNanchor_911_911"><span class="label">[911]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 249; Jones’s “Credulities
Past and Present,” pp. 529-531; “Notes and Queries,” 5th series, vol.
viii. p. 201.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_912_912" id="Footnote_912_912"></a><a href="#FNanchor_912_912"><span class="label">[912]</span></a> The following is from Holinshed, who copies Sir Thomas More:
“In riding toward the Tower the same morning in which he (Hastings)
was beheaded his horse twice or thrice stumbled with him, almost to
the falling; which thing, albeit each man wot well daily happeneth to
them to whome no such mischance is toward; yet hath it beene of an
olde rite and custome observed as a token oftentimes notablie foregoing
some great misfortune.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_913_913" id="Footnote_913_913"></a><a href="#FNanchor_913_913"><span class="label">[913]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 127; Dyce’s “Glossary,” pp. 61, 230.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_914_914" id="Footnote_914_914"></a><a href="#FNanchor_914_914"><span class="label">[914]</span></a> The quartos of 1602 read “a kane-coloured beard.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_915_915" id="Footnote_915_915"></a><a href="#FNanchor_915_915"><span class="label">[915]</span></a> See Jaques’s Description of the Seven Ages in “As You Like It,”
(ii. 6).</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_916_916" id="Footnote_916_916"></a><a href="#FNanchor_916_916"><span class="label">[916]</span></a> “Parnassus Biceps,” 1656.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_917_917" id="Footnote_917_917"></a><a href="#FNanchor_917_917"><span class="label">[917]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 179.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_918_918" id="Footnote_918_918"></a><a href="#FNanchor_918_918"><span class="label">[918]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 871.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_919_919" id="Footnote_919_919"></a><a href="#FNanchor_919_919"><span class="label">[919]</span></a> Ibid. vol. i. p. 402.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_920_920" id="Footnote_920_920"></a><a href="#FNanchor_920_920"><span class="label">[920]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_921_921" id="Footnote_921_921"></a><a href="#FNanchor_921_921"><span class="label">[921]</span></a> Cf. “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2):
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Soothsayer.</i> You shall be more beloving, than belov’d.<br /></span>
<span class="i0"><br /></span>
<span class="i0"><i>Charmian.</i> I had rather heat my liver with drinking.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_922_922" id="Footnote_922_922"></a><a href="#FNanchor_922_922"><span class="label">[922]</span></a> “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 38, 39.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_923_923" id="Footnote_923_923"></a><a href="#FNanchor_923_923"><span class="label">[923]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 252-255.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[497]</a></span></h2>

<h3>FISHES.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> it has been suggested that Shakespeare found
but little recreation in fishing,<a name="FNanchor_924_924" id="FNanchor_924_924"></a><a href="#Footnote_924_924" class="fnanchor">[924]</a> rather considering, as he
makes Ursula say, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And greedily devour the treacherous bait,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and that it would be difficult to illustrate a work on angling
with quotations from his writings, the Rev. H.&nbsp;N. Ellacombe,
in his interesting papers<a name="FNanchor_925_925" id="FNanchor_925_925"></a><a href="#Footnote_925_925" class="fnanchor">[925]</a> on “Shakespeare as an
Angler,” has not only shown the strong probability that he
was a lover of this sport, but further adds, that “he may be
claimed as the first English poet that wrote of angling with
any freedom; and there can be little doubt that he would not
have done so if the subject had not been very familiar to him—so
familiar, that he could scarcely write without dropping
the little hints and unconscious expressions which prove
that the subject was not only familiar, but full of pleasant
memories to him.” His allusions, however, to the folk-lore
associated with fishes are very few; but the two or three
popular notions and proverbial sayings which he has quoted
in connection with them help to embellish this part of our
subject.</p>

<p><i>Carp.</i> This fish was, proverbially, the most cunning of
fishes, and so “Polonius’s comparison of his own worldly-wise
deceit to the craft required for catching a carp” is most
apt (“Hamlet,” ii. 1):<a name="FNanchor_926_926" id="FNanchor_926_926"></a><a href="#Footnote_926_926" class="fnanchor">[926]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“See you now;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[498]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion is founded on fact, the brain of the carp being
six times as large as the average brain of other fishes.</p>

<p><i>Cockle.</i> The badge of a pilgrim was, formerly, a cockle-shell,
which was worn usually in the front of the hat. “The
habit,” we are told,<a name="FNanchor_927_927" id="FNanchor_927_927"></a><a href="#Footnote_927_927" class="fnanchor">[927]</a> “being sacred, this served as a protection,
and therefore was often assumed as a disguise.” The
<i>escalop</i> was sometimes used, and either of them was considered
as an emblem of the pilgrim’s intention to go beyond
the sea. Thus, in Ophelia’s ballad (“Hamlet,” iv. 5, song),
the lover is to be known:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By his cockle hat and staff,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And his sandal shoon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” 1595, we read, “I will give
thee a palmer’s staff of ivory, and a scallop-shell of beaten
gold.” Nares, too, quotes from Green’s “Never Too Late”
an account of the pilgrim’s dress:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“A hat of straw, like to a swain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shelter for the sun and rain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With a scallop-shell before.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Cuttle.</i> A foul-mouthed fellow was so called, says Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps,<a name="FNanchor_928_928" id="FNanchor_928_928"></a><a href="#Footnote_928_928" class="fnanchor">[928]</a> because this fish is said to throw out of
its mouth, upon certain occasions, an inky and black juice
that fouls the water; and, as an illustration of its use in this
sense, he quotes Doll Tearsheet’s words to Pistol, “2 Henry
IV.” ii. 4: “By this wine, I’ll thrust my knife in your mouldy
chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me.” Dyce says
that the context would seem to imply that the term is equivalent
to “culter, swaggerer, bully.”<a name="FNanchor_929_929" id="FNanchor_929_929"></a><a href="#Footnote_929_929" class="fnanchor">[929]</a></p>

<p><i>Gudgeon.</i> This being the bait for many of the larger
fish, “to swallow a gudgeon” was sometimes used for to be
caught or deceived. More commonly, however, the allusion
is to the ease with which the gudgeon itself is caught, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[499]</a></span>
in the “Merchant of Venice” (i. 1), where Gratiano says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But fish not, with this melancholy bait,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For this fool-gudgeon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Gurnet.</i> The phrase “soused gurnet” was formerly a
well-known term of reproach, in allusion to which Falstaff,
in “1 Henry IV.” (iv. 2), says, “If I be not ashamed of my
soldiers, I am a soused gurnet.” The gurnet, of which there
are several species, was probably thought a very coarse and
vulgar dish when soused or pickled.</p>

<p><i>Loach.</i> A small fish, known also as “the groundling.”
The allusion to it by one of the carriers, in “1 Henry IV.”
(ii. 1), who says, “Your chamber-lie breeds fleas like a loach,”
has much puzzled the commentators. It appears, however,
from a passage in Holland’s translation of Pliny’s “Natural
History” (bk. ix. c. xlvii.), that anciently fishes were supposed
to be infested with fleas: “Last of all some fishes there be
which of themselves are given to breed fleas and lice; among
which the chalcis, a kind of turgot, is one.” Malone suggests
that the passage may mean, “breeds fleas as fast as a
loach breeds loaches;” this fish being reckoned a peculiarly
prolific one. It seems probable, however, that the carrier alludes
to one of those fanciful notions which make up a great
part of natural history among the common people.<a name="FNanchor_930_930" id="FNanchor_930_930"></a><a href="#Footnote_930_930" class="fnanchor">[930]</a> At
the present day there is a fisherman’s fancy on the Norfolk
coast that fish and fleas come together. “Lawk, sir!” said
an old fellow, near Cromer, to a correspondent of “Notes and
Queries” (Oct. 7th, 1865), “times is as you may look in my
flannel-shirt, and scarce see a flea, and then there ain’t but a
very few herrin’s; but times that’ll be right alive with ’em,
and then there’s sartin to be a sight o’ fish.”</p>

<p>Mr. Houghton, writing in the <i>Academy</i> (May 27th, 1882)
thinks that in the above passage the small river loach
(<i>Cobitis barbatula</i>) is the fish intended. He says, “At certain
times of the year, chiefly during the summer months,
almost all fresh-water fish are liable to be infested with some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[500]</a></span>
kind of Epizoa. There are two kinds of parasitic creatures
which are most commonly seen on various fish caught in
the rivers and ponds of this country; and these are the
<i>Argulus foliaccus</i>, a crustacean, and the <i>Piscicola piscium</i>, a
small, cylindrical kind of leech.”</p>

<p><i>Mermaids.</i> From the earliest ages mermaids have had a
legendary existence—the sirens of the ancients evidently
belonging to the same remarkable family. The orthodox
mermaid is half woman, half fish, the fishy half being sometimes
depicted as <i>doubly</i>-tailed. Shakespeare frequently
makes his characters talk about mermaids, as in the “Comedy
of Errors” (iii. 2), where Antipholus of Syracuse says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">To drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Spread o’er the silver waves thy golden hairs,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And as a bed I’ll take them and there lie,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And, in that glorious supposition, think<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He gains by death, that hath such means to die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, again, further on, he adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll stop mine ears against the mermaid’s song.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Staunton considers that in these passages the allusion is
obviously to the long-current opinion that the siren, or mermaid,
decoyed mortals to destruction by the witchery of her
songs. This superstition has been charmingly illustrated by
Leyden, in his poem, “The Mermaid” (see Scott’s “Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border,” vol. iv. p. 294):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thus, all to soothe the chieftain’s woe,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Far from the maid he loved so dear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The song arose, so soft and slow,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">He seem’d her parting sigh to hear.<br /></span>


<span class="i0"><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><span style="padding-left: 2.5em">*</span><br /></span>


<span class="i0">That sea-maid’s form of pearly light<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Was whiter than the downy spray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And round her bosom, heaving bright,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Her glossy, yellow ringlets play.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[501]</a></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">Borne on a foaming, crested wave,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">She reached amain the bounding prow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then, clasping fast the chieftain brave,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">She, plunging, sought the deep below.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This tradition gave rise to a curious custom in the Isle
of Man, which, in Waldron’s time, was observed on the
24th of December, though afterwards on St. Stephen’s Day.
It is said that, once upon a time, a fairy of uncommon beauty
exerted such undue influence over the male population
that she induced, by the enchantment of her sweet voice,
numbers to follow her footsteps, till, by degrees, she led
them into the sea, where they perished. This barbarous
exercise of power had continued for a great length of time,
till it was apprehended that the island would be exhausted
of its defenders. Fortunately, however, a knight-errant
sprang up, who discovered a means of counteracting the
charms used by this siren—even laying a plot for her destruction,
which she only escaped by taking the form of a
wren. Although she evaded instant annihilation, a spell
was cast upon her, by which she was condemned, on every
succeeding New Year’s Day, to reanimate the same form,
with the definite sentence that she must ultimately perish
by human hand. Hence, on the specified anniversary, every
effort was made to extirpate the fairy; and the poor wrens
were pursued, pelted, fired at, and destroyed without mercy,
their feathers being preserved as a charm against shipwreck
for one year. At the present day there is no particular
time for pursuing the wren; it is captured by boys alone,
who keep up the old custom chiefly for amusement. On
St. Stephen’s Day, a band of boys go from door to door
with a wren suspended by the legs, in the centre of two
hoops crossing each other at right angles, decorated with
evergreens and ribbons, singing lines called “Hunt the
Wren.”<a name="FNanchor_931_931" id="FNanchor_931_931"></a><a href="#Footnote_931_931" class="fnanchor">[931]</a></p>

<p>In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), Oberon speaks
of hearing “a mermaid on a dolphin’s back;” and in
“Hamlet,” the Queen, referring to Ophelia’s death, says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[502]</a></span>
(iv. 7):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Her clothes spread wide;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In two other passages Shakespeare alludes to this legendary
creature. Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) Gloster boasts
that he will “drown more sailors than the mermaid shall,”
and in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 2), Enobarbus relates
how</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And made their bends adornings: at the helm<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A seeming mermaid steers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In all these cases Shakespeare,<a name="FNanchor_932_932" id="FNanchor_932_932"></a><a href="#Footnote_932_932" class="fnanchor">[932]</a> as was his wont, made his
characters say what they were likely to think, in their several
positions and periods of life. It has been suggested,<a name="FNanchor_933_933" id="FNanchor_933_933"></a><a href="#Footnote_933_933" class="fnanchor">[933]</a>
however, that the idea of the mermaid, in some of the passages
just quoted, seems more applicable to the siren, especially
in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” where the “mermaid
on a dolphin’s back” could not easily have been so
placed, had she had a fish-like tail instead of legs.</p>

<p>Notices of mermaids are scattered abundantly in books
of bygone times. Mermen and mermaids, men of the sea,
and women of the sea, having been as “stoutly believed in
as the great sea-serpent, and on very much the same kind
of evidence.” Holinshed gives a detailed account of a merman
caught at Orford, in Suffolk, in the reign of King John.
He was kept alive on raw meal and fish for six months, but
at last “gledde secretelye to the sea, and was neuer after
seene nor heard off.” Even in modern times we are told
how, every now and then, a mermaid has made her appearance.
Thus, in the <i>Gentleman’s Magazine</i> (Jan., 1747), we
read: “It is reported from the north of Scotland that some
time this month a sea creature, known by the name of mermaid,
which has the shape of a human body from the trunk
upwards, but below is wholly fish, was carried some miles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[503]</a></span>
up the water of Dévron.” In 1824 a mermaid or merman
made its appearance, when, as the papers of that day inform
us, “upwards of 150 distinguished fashionables” went to
see it.</p>

<p>The “Mermaid” was a famous tavern, situated in Bread
Street.<a name="FNanchor_934_934" id="FNanchor_934_934"></a><a href="#Footnote_934_934" class="fnanchor">[934]</a> As early as the fifteenth century, we are told it
was one of the haunts of the pleasure-seeking Sir John
Howard, whose trusty steward records, anno 1464: “Paid
for wyn at the Mermayd in Bred Street, for my mastyr and
Syr Nicholas Latimer, xd. ob.” In 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh
established a Literary Club in this house, among its members
being Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Selden, Carew, Martin, Donne, etc. It is often alluded to by
Beaumont and Fletcher.</p>

<p><i>Minnow.</i> This little fish, from its insignificant character,
is used by “Coriolanus” (iii. 1) as a term of contempt:
“Hear you this Triton of the minnows?” and, again, in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (i. 1), it occurs: “‘that base minnow
of thy mirth.’”</p>

<p><i>Pike.</i> An old name for this fish was <i>luce</i>. In the “Merry
Wives of Windsor” (i. 1) we are told that “The luce is the
fresh fish.” There can be no doubt, too, that there is in this
passage an allusion to the armorial bearings of Shakespeare’s
old enemy, Sir Thomas Lucy. Among the various instances
of the use of this term we may quote Isaac Walton, who says:
“The mighty luce or pike is taken to be the tyrant, as the
salmon is the king, of the fresh waters.” Stow, in his “Survey
of London,” describes a procession of the Fishmongers’
Company in 1298, as having horses painted like <i>sea-luce</i>:
“Then four salmons of silver on foure horses, and after them
sixe and fortie armed knightes riding on horses made like
<i>luces of the sea</i>.”</p>

<p><i>Porpoise.</i> According to sailors, the playing of porpoises
round a ship is a certain prognostic of a violent gale of wind;
hence the allusion in “Pericles” (ii. 1), where one of the
fishermen says, speaking of the storm: “Nay, master, said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[504]</a></span>
not I as much, when I saw the porpus, how he bounced and
tumbled?” Thus, too, in the “Canterbury Guests, or a Bargain
Broken,” by Ravenscroft, we read: “My heart begins
to leap and play, like a porpice before a storm.” And a
further reference occurs in Wilsford’s “Nature’s Secrets:”
“Porpoises, or sea-hogs, when observed to sport and chase
one another about ships, expect then some stormy weather.”</p>

<p><i>Sea-monster.</i> The reference in “King Lear” (i. 4), to the
“sea-monster”—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More hideous, when thou show’st thee in a child,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than the sea-monster!”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">is generally supposed to be the hippopotamus, which, according
to Upton, was the hieroglyphical symbol of impiety
and ingratitude.<a name="FNanchor_935_935" id="FNanchor_935_935"></a><a href="#Footnote_935_935" class="fnanchor">[935]</a> Sandys<a name="FNanchor_936_936" id="FNanchor_936_936"></a><a href="#Footnote_936_936" class="fnanchor">[936]</a> gives a picture said to be portrayed
in the porch of the temple of Minerva, at Sais, in
which is the figure of a river-horse, denoting “murder, impudence,
violence, and injustice; for they say that he killeth
his sire and ravisheth his own dam.” His account is, no
doubt, taken from Plutarch’s “Isis and Osiris;” and Shakespeare
may have read it in Holland’s translation (p. 1300),
but why he should call the river-horse a “sea-monster” is
not very clear. It is more likely, however, that the whale
is meant.<a name="FNanchor_937_937" id="FNanchor_937_937"></a><a href="#Footnote_937_937" class="fnanchor">[937]</a></p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_924_924" id="Footnote_924_924"></a><a href="#FNanchor_924_924"><span class="label">[924]</span></a> See Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” 1871, p. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_925_925" id="Footnote_925_925"></a><a href="#FNanchor_925_925"><span class="label">[925]</span></a> “The Antiquary,” 1881, vol. iv. p. 193.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_926_926" id="Footnote_926_926"></a><a href="#FNanchor_926_926"><span class="label">[926]</span></a> Ibid.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_927_927" id="Footnote_927_927"></a><a href="#FNanchor_927_927"><span class="label">[927]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 175.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_928_928" id="Footnote_928_928"></a><a href="#FNanchor_928_928"><span class="label">[928]</span></a> “Handbook Index to the Works of Shakespeare,” 1866, p. 119.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_929_929" id="Footnote_929_929"></a><a href="#FNanchor_929_929"><span class="label">[929]</span></a> See a note in Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 112.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_930_930" id="Footnote_930_930"></a><a href="#FNanchor_930_930"><span class="label">[930]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 518.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_931_931" id="Footnote_931_931"></a><a href="#FNanchor_931_931"><span class="label">[931]</span></a> See “British Popular Customs,” pp. 494, 495.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_932_932" id="Footnote_932_932"></a><a href="#FNanchor_932_932"><span class="label">[932]</span></a> See “Book of Days,” vol. ii. pp. 612-614.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_933_933" id="Footnote_933_933"></a><a href="#FNanchor_933_933"><span class="label">[933]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 565; see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849,
vol. iii. pp. 411-414.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_934_934" id="Footnote_934_934"></a><a href="#FNanchor_934_934"><span class="label">[934]</span></a> “History of Sign-boards,” 1866, p. 226.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_935_935" id="Footnote_935_935"></a><a href="#FNanchor_935_935"><span class="label">[935]</span></a> Wright’s “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 133.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_936_936" id="Footnote_936_936"></a><a href="#FNanchor_936_936"><span class="label">[936]</span></a> “Travels,” 1673, p. 105.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_937_937" id="Footnote_937_937"></a><a href="#FNanchor_937_937"><span class="label">[937]</span></a> Cf. “King Lear,” iv. 2; “Troilus and Cressida,” v. 5; “All’s Well
that End’s Well,” iv. 3.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[505]</a></span></h2>

<h3>SUNDRY SUPERSTITIONS.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Almanacs.</span> In Shakespeare’s day these were published
under this title: “An Almanack and Prognostication made
for the year of our Lord God, 1595.” So, in the “Winter’s
Tale” (iv. 3), Autolycus says: “the hottest day prognostication
proclaims;” that is, the hottest day foretold in the
almanac. In Sonnet xiv. the prognostications in almanacs
are also noticed:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet methinks I have astronomy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But not to tell of good or evil luck,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of plagues, of dearths, or season’s quality;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or say with princes if it shall go well,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By oft predict that I in heaven find.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 2) Enobarbus says: “They
are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report;”
and in “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), Prince Henry says: “Saturn
and Venus this year in conjunction! what says the almanac
to that?”</p>

<p><i>Amulets.</i> A belief in the efficacy of an amulet or charm
to ward off diseases and to avert contagion has prevailed
from a very early period. The use of amulets was common
among the Greeks and Romans, whose amulets were principally
formed of gems, crowns of pearls, necklaces of coral,
shells, etc. The amulet of modern times has been of the
most varied kinds; objects being selected either from the
animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom, pieces of old rags or
garments, scraps of writing in legible or illegible characters,
in fact, of anything to which any superstitious property has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[506]</a></span>
been considered to belong.<a name="FNanchor_938_938" id="FNanchor_938_938"></a><a href="#Footnote_938_938" class="fnanchor">[938]</a> This form of superstition is
noticed in “1 Henry VI.” (v. 3), in the scene laid at Angiers,
where La Pucelle exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The regent conquers, and the Frenchmen fly.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now help, ye charming spells and periapts”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—periapts being charms which were worn as preservatives
against diseases or mischief. Thus Cotgrave<a name="FNanchor_939_939" id="FNanchor_939_939"></a><a href="#Footnote_939_939" class="fnanchor">[939]</a> explains the
word as “a medicine hanged about any part of the bodie.”</p>

<p><i>Ceremonies.</i> These, says Malone, were “omens or signs
deduced from sacrifices or other ceremonial rites.” Thus, in
“Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), Cassius says of Cæsar, that—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“he is superstitious grown of late,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Quite from the main opinion he held once<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in the next scene Calpurnia adds:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cæsar, I never stood on ceremonies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet now they fright me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Charms.</i> These, as Mr. Pettigrew<a name="FNanchor_940_940" id="FNanchor_940_940"></a><a href="#Footnote_940_940" class="fnanchor">[940]</a> has pointed out, differ
little from amulets, the difference consisting in the manner
in which they are used rather than in their nature. Thus,
whereas the amulet was to be suspended on the person when
employed, the charm was not necessarily subjected to such
a method of application. In days gone by, and even at the
present day, in country districts, so universal has been the
use of this source of supposed magical power that there is
scarcely a disease for which a charm has not been given.
It is not only to diseases of body and mind that the
superstitious practice has been directed; having been in
popular request to avert evil, and to counteract supposed
malignant influences. As might be expected, Shakespeare
has given various allusions to this usage, as, for example, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[507]</a></span>
“Cymbeline” (v. 3), where Posthumus says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To day, how many would have given their honours<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To have sav’d their carcases! took heel to do’t,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet died too! I, in mine own woe charm’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Could not find death where I did hear him groan,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor feel him where he struck”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—this passage referring to the notion of certain charms being
powerful enough to keep men unhurt in battle.</p>

<p>Othello (iii. 4), speaking of the handkerchief which he had
given to Desdemona, relates:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“That handkerchief<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did an Egyptian to my mother give;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She was a charmer, and could almost read<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The thoughts of people.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in the same play (i. 1), Brabantio asks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Is there not charms,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By which the property of youth and maidhood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May be abus’d?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), Benedick,
who is represented as having the toothache, after listening
to the banter of his comrades, replies: “Yet is this no charm
for the toothache.”</p>

<p>Perfect silence seems to have been regarded as indispensable
for the success of any charm; and Pliny informs us
that “favete linguis” was the usual exclamation employed
on such an occasion. From this circumstance it has been
suggested that the well-known phrase “to charm a tongue”
may have originated. Thus we have the following dialogue
in “Othello” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Iago.</i><span style="padding-left: 9em">Go to, charm your tongue.</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Emilia.</i> I will not charm my tongue; I am bound to speak.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Thus, on the appearance, amid thunder, of the first apparition
to Macbeth, after the witches have performed certain
charms (iv. 1), Shakespeare introduces the following dialogue:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[508]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Macbeth.</i> Tell me, thou unknown power—<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>First Witch.</i><span style="padding-left: 5em">He knows thy thought:</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hear his speech, but say thou nought.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “The Tempest” (iv. 1), Prospero says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“hush, and be mute,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or else our spell is marr’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Metrical Charms.</i> There was a superstition long prevalent
that life might be taken away by metrical charms.<a name="FNanchor_941_941" id="FNanchor_941_941"></a><a href="#Footnote_941_941" class="fnanchor">[941]</a> Reginald
Scot, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft” (1584), says: “The
Irishmen addict themselves, etc.; yea, they will not sticke
to affirme that they can <i>rime</i> a man to death.” In “1 Henry
VI.” (i. 1), the Duke of Exeter, referring to the lamented
death of Henry V., says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Shall we think the subtle-witted French<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Conjurers and sorcerers, that, afraid of him,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By magic verses have contrived his end?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">These “magic verses,” to which the death of Henry V. is
here attributed, were not required to be uttered in his presence;
their deadly energy existing solely in the words of
the imprecation and the malevolence of the reciter, which
were supposed to render them effectual at any distance.</p>

<p>Again, the alphabet was called the Christ-cross-row; either
because a cross was prefixed to the alphabet in the old
primers, or, more probably, from a superstitious custom of
writing the alphabet in the form of a cross by way of a charm.
In “Richard III.” (i. 1), Clarence relates how King Edward—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Hearkens after prophecies and dreams;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from the cross-row plucks the letter G.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Dreams.</i> These, considered as prognostics of good or evil,
are frequently introduced by Shakespeare. In “Troilus and
Cressida” (v. 3), Andromache exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My dreams will, sure, prove ominous to the day.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">While Romeo (“Romeo and Juliet,” v. 1) declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is chiefly as precursors of misfortune that the poet has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[509]</a></span>
availed himself of their supposed influence as omens of
future fate. Thus, there are few passages in his dramas more
terrific than the dreams of Richard III. and Clarence; the
latter especially, as Mr. Drake says,<a name="FNanchor_942_942" id="FNanchor_942_942"></a><a href="#Footnote_942_942" class="fnanchor">[942]</a> “is replete with the
most fearful imagery, and makes the blood run chill with
horror.”</p>

<p>Dreaming of certain things has generally been supposed
to be ominous either of good or ill luck;<a name="FNanchor_943_943" id="FNanchor_943_943"></a><a href="#Footnote_943_943" class="fnanchor">[943]</a> and at the present
day the credulous pay oftentimes no small attention to their
dreams, should these happen to have referred to what they
consider unlucky things. In the same way Shylock, in the
“Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), is a victim to much superstitious
dread:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Jessica, my girl,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Look to my house. I am right loath to go:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There is some ill a brewing towards my rest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For I did dream of money-bags to-night.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Julius Cæsar,” dreaming of banquet is supposed to presage
misfortune.</p>

<p>It was also supposed that malicious spirits took advantage
of sleep to torment their victims;<a name="FNanchor_944_944" id="FNanchor_944_944"></a><a href="#Footnote_944_944" class="fnanchor">[944]</a> hence Macbeth (ii. 1)
exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“Merciful powers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gives way to in repose!”<a name="FNanchor_945_945" id="FNanchor_945_945"></a><a href="#Footnote_945_945" class="fnanchor">[945]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Duels.</i> The death of the vanquished person was always
considered a certain evidence of his guilt. Thus, in “2 Henry
VI.” (ii. 3), King Henry, speaking of the death of Horner in
the duel with Peter, says:<a name="FNanchor_946_946" id="FNanchor_946_946"></a><a href="#Footnote_946_946" class="fnanchor">[946]</a></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Go, take hence that traitor from our sight;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For, by his death, we do perceive his guilt:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And God in justice hath reveal’d to us<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The truth and innocence of this poor fellow,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[510]</a></span>
<span class="i0">Which he had thought to have murder’d wrongfully.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come, fellow, follow us for thy reward.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may also compare what Arcite says to Palamon in the
“Two Noble Kinsmen” (iii. 6):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If I fall, curse me, and say I was a coward;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For none but such dare die in these just trials.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Among the customs connected with duelling, it appears that,
according to an old law, knights were to fight with the lance
and the sword, as those of inferior rank fought with an ebon
staff or baton, to the farther end of which was fixed a bag
crammed hard with sand.<a name="FNanchor_947_947" id="FNanchor_947_947"></a><a href="#Footnote_947_947" class="fnanchor">[947]</a> Thus Shakespeare, in “2 Henry
VI.” (ii. 3), represents Horner entering “bearing his staff
with a sand-bag fastened to it.” Butler, in his “Hudibras,”
alludes to this custom:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Engag’d with money-bags, as bold<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As men with sand-bags did of old.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Steevens adds that “a passage in St. Chrysostom very
clearly proves the great antiquity of this practice.”</p>

<p><i>Fortune-tellers.</i> A common method of fortune-tellers, in
pretending to tell future events, was by means of a beryl or
glass. In an extract from the “Penal Laws against Witches,”
it is said, “they do answer either by voice, or else set before
their eyes, in glasses, chrystal stones, etc., the pictures or
images of the persons or things sought for.” It is to this
kind of juggling prophecy that Angelo, in “Measure for
Measure” (ii. 2), refers, when he tells how the law—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“like a prophet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Looks in a glass, that shows what future evils,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Either new, or by remissness new-conceiv’d.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Again, Macbeth (iv. 1), when “a show of eight kings” is
presented to him, exclaims, after witnessing the seventh:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“I’ll see no more:—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which shows me many more.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Spenser<a name="FNanchor_948_948" id="FNanchor_948_948"></a><a href="#Footnote_948_948" class="fnanchor">[948]</a> has given a circumstantial account of the glass<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[511]</a></span>
which Merlin made for King Ryence. A mirror of the same
kind was presented to Cambuscan, in the “Squier’s Tale” of
Chaucer; and we are also told how “a certain philosopher
did the like to Pompey, the which showed him in a glass the
order of his enemies’ march.”<a name="FNanchor_949_949" id="FNanchor_949_949"></a><a href="#Footnote_949_949" class="fnanchor">[949]</a> Brand, in his “Popular Antiquities,”<a name="FNanchor_950_950" id="FNanchor_950_950"></a><a href="#Footnote_950_950" class="fnanchor">[950]</a>
gives several interesting accounts of this method
of fortune-telling; and quotes the following from Vallancey’s
“Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis:” “In the Highlands of
Scotland, a large chrystal, of a figure somewhat oval, was
kept by the priests to work charms by; water poured upon
it at this day is given to cattle against diseases; these stones
are now preserved by the oldest and most superstitious in
the country; they were once common in Ireland.”</p>

<p>Further allusions to fortune-tellers occur in “Comedy of
Errors” (v. 1), and “Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 2).</p>

<p>It appears, too, that the trade of fortune-telling was, in
Shakespeare’s day, as now, exercised by the wandering
hordes of gypsies. In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iv. 12), the
Roman complains that Cleopatra</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beguil’d me to the very heart of loss.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Giants.</i> The belief in giants and other monsters was much
credited in olden times, and, “among the legends of nearly
every race or tribe, few are more universal than those relating
to giants or men of colossal size and superhuman power.”<a name="FNanchor_951_951" id="FNanchor_951_951"></a><a href="#Footnote_951_951" class="fnanchor">[951]</a>
That such stories were current in Shakespeare’s day, is attested
by the fact that the poet makes Othello (i. 3), in his
eloquent defence before the Senate of Venice, when explaining
his method of courtship, allude to</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“the Cannibals that each other eat,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[512]</a></span>
<span class="i0">The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do grow beneath their shoulders.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Tempest” (iii. 3), Gonzalo relates how—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“When we were boys,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who would believe that there were mountaineers<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dew-lapp’d like bulls, whose throats had hanging at ’em<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose heads stood in their breasts?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>And after the appearance of Prospero’s magic repast, Sebastian
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Now I will believe<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That there are unicorns; that in Arabia<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There is one tree, the phœnix’ throne; one phœnix<br /></span>
<span class="i0">At this hour reigning there.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Among the numerous references to giants by Shakespeare,
we may quote the following. In “2 Henry VI.” (ii. 3),
Horner says: “Peter, have at thee with a downright blow
[as Bevis of Southampton fell upon Ascapart].”<a name="FNanchor_952_952" id="FNanchor_952_952"></a><a href="#Footnote_952_952" class="fnanchor">[952]</a></p>

<p>Ascapart, according to the legend, was “ful thyrty fote
longe,” and was conquered by Sir Bevis of Southampton.</p>

<p>In “Cymbeline” (iii 3), Belarius says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“the gates of monarchs<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Are arch’d so high, that giants may jet through<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And keep their impious turbans on, without<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Good morrow to the sun.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 1), Mrs. Page says:
“I had rather be a giantess, and lie under Mount Pelion.”<a name="FNanchor_953_953" id="FNanchor_953_953"></a><a href="#Footnote_953_953" class="fnanchor">[953]</a></p>

<p><i>Lucky Days.</i> From the most remote period certain days
have been supposed to be just as lucky as others are the
reverse, a notion which is not confined to any one country.
In Shakespeare’s day great attention was paid to this superstitious
fancy, which is probably alluded to in the “Winter’s
Tale” (iii. 3), where the Shepherd says to the Clown, “’Tis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[513]</a></span>
a lucky day, boy; and we’ll do good deeds on’t.”</p>

<p>In “King John” (iii. 1) Constance exclaims:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What hath this day deserv’d? what hath it done,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That it in golden letters should be set<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Among the high tides in the calendar?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nay, rather turn this day out of the week,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This day of shame, oppression, perjury:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or, if it must stand still, let wives with child<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pray that their burthens may not fall this day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lest that their hopes prodigiously be cross’d:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But on this day let seamen fear no wreck;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No bargains break that are not this day made:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This day, all things begun come to ill end,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yea, faith itself to hollow falsehood change!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, Macbeth (iv. 1) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Let this pernicious hour<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stand aye accursed in the calendar!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the old almanacs the days supposed to be favorable or
unfavorable are enumerated, allusion to which occurs in
Webster’s “Duchess of Malfy,” 1623:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“By the almanack, I think,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To choose good days and shun the critical.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>At the present day this superstition still retains its hold
on the popular mind, and in the transactions of life exerts
an important influence.<a name="FNanchor_954_954" id="FNanchor_954_954"></a><a href="#Footnote_954_954" class="fnanchor">[954]</a></p>

<p><i>Magic.</i> The system of magic, which holds such a prominent
place in “The Tempest,” was formerly an article in the
popular creed, and as such is frequently noticed by the writers
of Shakespeare’s time. Thus, in describing Prospero,
Shakespeare has given him several of the adjuncts, besides
the costume, of the popular magician, much virtue being
inherent in his very garments. So Prospero, when addressing
his daughter (i. 2), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Lend thy hand,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[514]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And pluck my magic garment from me.—So;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lie there, my art.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">A similar importance is assigned to his staff, for he tells
Ferdinand (i. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i3">“I can here disarm thee with this stick,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And make thy weapon drop.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And when he abjures the practice of magic, one of the
requisites is “to break his staff,” and to (v. 1)</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The more immediate instruments of power were books,
by means of which spells were usually performed. Hence,
in the old romances, the sorcerer is always furnished with a
book, by reading certain parts of which he is enabled to
summon to his aid what demons or spirits he has occasion
to employ. When he is deprived of his book his power
ceases. Malone quotes, in illustration of this notion, Caliban’s
words in “The Tempest” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">“Remember,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">First to possess his books; for without them<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One spirit to command.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Prospero, too, declares (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I’ll to my book;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For yet, ere supper time, must I perform<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Much business appertaining.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And on his relinquishing his art he says that:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Deeper than did ever plummet sound<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll drown my book.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Those who practise nocturnal sorcery are styled, in
“Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 2), “venomous wights.”</p>

<p><i>Merlin’s Prophecies.</i> In Shakespeare’s day there was an
extensive belief in strange and absurd prophecies, which
were eagerly caught up and repeated by one person to another.
This form of superstition is alluded to in “1 Henry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[515]</a></span>
IV.” (iii. 1), where, after Owen Glendower has been descanting
on the “omens and portents dire” which heralded his
nativity, and Hotspur’s unbelieving and taunting replies to
the chieftain’s assertions, the poet makes Hotspur, on Mortimer’s
saying,</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Fie, cousin Percy! how you cross my father!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">thus reply:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I cannot choose: sometime he angers me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And of a dragon and a finless fish.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “King Lear” (iii. 2) the Fool says</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go:<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When priests are more in word than matter;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When brewers mar their malt with water;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When nobles are their tailors’ tutors;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When every case in law is right;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When slanders do not live in tongues.<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">When usurers tell their gold i’ the field;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">And bawds and whores do churches build;—<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Then shall the realm of Albion<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Come to great confusion:<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Then comes the time, who lives to see’t,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">That going shall be us’d with feet.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This witty satire was probably against the prophecies
attributed to Merlin, which were then prevalent among the
people.<a name="FNanchor_955_955" id="FNanchor_955_955"></a><a href="#Footnote_955_955" class="fnanchor">[955]</a></p>

<p>Formerly, too, prophecies of apparent impossibilities were
common in Scotland; such as the removal of one place to
another. So in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), the apparition says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be, until<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall come against him.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Portents and Prodigies.</i> In years gone the belief in supernatural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[516]</a></span>
occurrences was a common article of faith; and our
ancestors made use of every opportunity to prove the truth
of this superstitious belief. The most usual monitions of
this kind were, “lamentings heard in the air; shakings and
tremblings of the earth; sudden gloom at noon-day; the
appearance of meteors; the shooting of stars; eclipses of
the sun and moon; the moon of a bloody hue; the shrieking
of owls; the croaking of ravens; the shrilling of crickets;
night-howlings of dogs; the death-watch; the chattering
of pies; wild neighing of horses; blood dropping from
the nose; winding-sheets; strange and fearful noises, etc.,”
many of which Shakespeare has used, introducing them as
the precursors of murder, sudden death, disasters, and superhuman
events.<a name="FNanchor_956_956" id="FNanchor_956_956"></a><a href="#Footnote_956_956" class="fnanchor">[956]</a> Thus in “Richard II.” (ii. 4), the following
prodigies are selected as the forerunners of the death or fall
of kings:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“’Tis thought, the king is dead: we will not stay.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The pale-fac’d moon looks bloody on the earth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The other to enjoy by rage and war:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Previous to the assassination of Julius Cæsar, we are told, in
“Hamlet” (i. 1), how:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In the most high and palmy state of Rome,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Disasters in the sun; and the moist star,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">More appalling still are the circumstances which preceded
and accompanied the murder of Duncan (“Macbeth,” ii. 3).<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[517]</a></span>
We may also compare the omens which marked the births
of Owen Glendower and Richard III. Indeed, the supposed
sympathy of the elements with human joy or sorrow or
suffering is evidently a very ancient superstition; and this
presumed sensitiveness, not only of the elements, but of
animated nature, to the perpetration of deeds of darkness
and blood by perverted nature, has in all ages been extensively
believed. It is again beautifully illustrated in the
lines where Shakespeare makes Lenox, on the morning following
the murder of Duncan by his host (“Macbeth,” ii. 3),
give the following narrative:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The night has been unruly; where we lay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And prophesying with accents terrible<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of dire combustion, and confus’d events,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Clamour’d the livelong night: some say, the earth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Was feverous and did shake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This idea is further illustrated in the dialogue which follows,
between Ross and an old man:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Old Man.</i> Threescore and ten I can remember well:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Within the volume of which time I have seen<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hours dreadful, and things strange: but this sore night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath trifled former knowings.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Ross.</i><span style="padding-left: 10em">Ah, good father,</span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou seest, the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Threaten his bloody stage: by the clock, ’tis day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That darkness does the face of earth entomb,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When living light should kiss it?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Supernatural Authority of Kings.</i> The belief in the supernatural
authority of monarchs is but a remnant of the long-supposed
“divine right” of kings to govern, which resulted
from a conviction that they could trace their pedigrees back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[518]</a></span>
to the deities themselves.<a name="FNanchor_957_957" id="FNanchor_957_957"></a><a href="#Footnote_957_957" class="fnanchor">[957]</a> Thus Shakespeare even puts
into the mouth of the murderer and usurper Claudius, King
of Denmark, the following sentence:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Let him go, Gertrude: do not fear our person:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That treason can but peep to what it would,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Acts little of his will.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">This notion is by no means confined to either civilized or
semi-civilized nations. It is, says Mr. Hardwick, “a universal
feeling among savage tribes.” The ignorant serf of Russia
believed, and, indeed, yet believes, that if the deity were to
die the emperor would succeed to his power and authority.</p>

<p><i>Sympathetic Indications.</i> According to a very old tradition
the wounds of a murdered person were supposed to
bleed afresh at the approach or touch of the murderer. This
effect, though impossible, remarks Nares,<a name="FNanchor_958_958" id="FNanchor_958_958"></a><a href="#Footnote_958_958" class="fnanchor">[958]</a> except it were by
miracle, was firmly believed, and almost universally, for a very
long period. Poets, therefore, were fully justified in their
use of it. Thus Shakespeare, in “Richard III.” (i. 2) makes
Lady Anne, speaking of Richard, Duke of Gloster, say:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry’s wounds<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Open their congeal’d mouths, and bleed afresh!—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For ’tis thy presence that exhales this blood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From cold and empty veins, where no blood dwells;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy deed, inhuman and unnatural,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Provokes this deluge most unnatural.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Stow alludes to this circumstance in his “Annals” (p. 424).
He says the king’s body “was brought to St. Paul’s in an
open coffin, barefaced, where he bled; thence he was carried
to the Blackfriars, and there bled.” Matthew Paris
also states that after Henry II.’s death his son Richard
came to view the body—“Quo superveniente, confestim
erupit sanguis ex naribus regis mortui; ac si indignaretur
spiritus in adventue ejus, qui ejusdem mortis causa esse
credebatur, ut videretur sanguis clamare ad Deum.”<a name="FNanchor_959_959" id="FNanchor_959_959"></a><a href="#Footnote_959_959" class="fnanchor">[959]</a> In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[519]</a></span>
the “Athenian Oracle” (i. 106), this supposed phenomenon
is thus accounted for: “The blood is congealed in the body
for two or three days, and then becomes liquid again, in its
tendency to corruption. The air being heated by many
persons coming about the body, is the same thing to it as
motion is. ’Tis observed that dead bodies will bleed in a
concourse of people, when murderers are absent, as well as
present, yet legislators have thought fit to authorize it, and
use this trial as an argument, at least to frighten, though ’tis
no conclusive one to condemn them.” Among other allusions
to this superstition may be mentioned one by King James
in his “Dæmonology,” where we read: “In a secret murder,
if the dead carkasse be at any time thereafter handled by the
murderer, it will gush out of blood, as if the blood were crying
to heaven for revenge of the murderer.” It is spoken
of also in a note to chapter v. of the “Fair Maid of Perth,”
that this bleeding of a corpse was urged as an evidence of
guilt in the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh as late
as the year 1668. An interesting survival of this curious
notion exists in Durham, where, says Mr. Henderson,<a name="FNanchor_960_960" id="FNanchor_960_960"></a><a href="#Footnote_960_960" class="fnanchor">[960]</a>
“touching of the corpse by those who come to look at it is
still expected by the poor on the part of those who come to
their house while a dead body is lying in it, in token that
they wished no ill to the departed, and were in peace and
amity with him.”</p>

<p>We may also compare the following passage, where Macbeth
(iii. 4), speaking of the Ghost, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Augurs and understood relations have<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The secret’st man of blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Shakespeare perhaps alludes to some story in which the
stones covering the corpse of a murdered man were said to
have moved of themselves, and so revealed the secret. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[520]</a></span>
idea of trees speaking probably refers to the story of the tree
which revealed to Æneas the murder of Polydorus (Verg.,
“Æneid,” iii. 22, 599). Indeed, in days gone by, this superstition
was carried to such an extent that we are told, in
D’Israeli’s “Curiosities of Literature,” “by the side of the
bier, if the slightest change was observable in the eyes, the
mouth, feet, or hands of the corpse, the murderer was conjectured
to be present, and many an innocent spectator
must have suffered death. This practice forms a rich picture
in the imagination of our old writers; and their histories
and ballads are labored into pathos by dwelling on
this phenomenon.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_938_938" id="Footnote_938_938"></a><a href="#FNanchor_938_938"><span class="label">[938]</span></a> Pettigrew’s “Medical Superstitions,” p. 48.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_939_939" id="Footnote_939_939"></a><a href="#FNanchor_939_939"><span class="label">[939]</span></a> “French and English Dictionary;” see Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,”
p. 316; Nares describes it as “a bandage, tied on for magical
purposes, from περιάπτω;” see Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii.
pp. 324-326; Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” 1839, pp. 305-307.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_940_940" id="Footnote_940_940"></a><a href="#FNanchor_940_940"><span class="label">[940]</span></a> “Medical Superstitions,” p. 55.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_941_941" id="Footnote_941_941"></a><a href="#FNanchor_941_941"><span class="label">[941]</span></a> See, under <a href="#Rat"><i>Rat</i></a>, a similar superstition noticed.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_942_942" id="Footnote_942_942"></a><a href="#FNanchor_942_942"><span class="label">[942]</span></a> “Shakespeare and his Times,” p. 355.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_943_943" id="Footnote_943_943"></a><a href="#FNanchor_943_943"><span class="label">[943]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 127-141.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_944_944" id="Footnote_944_944"></a><a href="#FNanchor_944_944"><span class="label">[944]</span></a> See p. <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_945_945" id="Footnote_945_945"></a><a href="#FNanchor_945_945"><span class="label">[945]</span></a> See Malone’s “Variorum Shakespeare,” 1821, vol. ii. p. 90.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_946_946" id="Footnote_946_946"></a><a href="#FNanchor_946_946"><span class="label">[946]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vi. p. 167.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_947_947" id="Footnote_947_947"></a><a href="#FNanchor_947_947"><span class="label">[947]</span></a> See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 765.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_948_948" id="Footnote_948_948"></a><a href="#FNanchor_948_948"><span class="label">[948]</span></a> “Fairy Queen,” bk. iii. c. 2; see Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. ix.
p. 82.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_949_949" id="Footnote_949_949"></a><a href="#FNanchor_949_949"><span class="label">[949]</span></a> Boisteau’s “Theatrum Mundi,” translated by John Alday (1574).</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_950_950" id="Footnote_950_950"></a><a href="#FNanchor_950_950"><span class="label">[950]</span></a> 1849, vol. iii. pp. 60, 61.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_951_951" id="Footnote_951_951"></a><a href="#FNanchor_951_951"><span class="label">[951]</span></a> See Hardwick’s “Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore,” 1872,
pp. 197, 224.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_952_952" id="Footnote_952_952"></a><a href="#FNanchor_952_952"><span class="label">[952]</span></a> The addition in brackets is rejected by the editors of the Globe
edition.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_953_953" id="Footnote_953_953"></a><a href="#FNanchor_953_953"><span class="label">[953]</span></a> Cf. “Measure for Measure,” ii. 2, iii. 1; “Much Ado About Nothing,”
v. 1; “Loves Labour’s Lost,” iii. 1.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_954_954" id="Footnote_954_954"></a><a href="#FNanchor_954_954"><span class="label">[954]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1879, vol. i. pp. 44-51; Jones’s “Credulities
Past and Present,” pp. 493-507; Hampson’s “Œvi Medii Kalendarium,”
vol. i. p. 210; see an article on “Day Fatality” in John Aubrey’s
“Miscellanies.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_955_955" id="Footnote_955_955"></a><a href="#FNanchor_955_955"><span class="label">[955]</span></a> See Kelly’s “Notices Illustrative of the Drama and Other Amusements
at Leicester,” 1865, pp. 116, 118.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_956_956" id="Footnote_956_956"></a><a href="#FNanchor_956_956"><span class="label">[956]</span></a> Drake’s “Shakespeare and his Times,” p. 352.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_957_957" id="Footnote_957_957"></a><a href="#FNanchor_957_957"><span class="label">[957]</span></a> “Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore,” p. 81.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_958_958" id="Footnote_958_958"></a><a href="#FNanchor_958_958"><span class="label">[958]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 974.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_959_959" id="Footnote_959_959"></a><a href="#FNanchor_959_959"><span class="label">[959]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 229-231.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_960_960" id="Footnote_960_960"></a><a href="#FNanchor_960_960"><span class="label">[960]</span></a> “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1849, p. 57.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[521]</a></span></h2>

<h3>MISCELLANEOUS CUSTOMS, ETC.</h3>


<p><span class="smcap">Badge of Poverty.</span> In the reign of William III., those
who received parish relief had to wear a badge. It was the
letter P, with the initial of the parish to which they belonged,
in red or blue cloth, on the shoulder of the right
sleeve. In “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1) Clifford says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Might I but know thee by thy household badge.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Bedfellow.</i> A proof of the simplicity of manners in olden
times is evidenced by the fact that it was customary for
men, even of the highest rank, to sleep together. In “Henry
V.” (ii. 2) Exeter says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whom he hath dull’d and cloy’d with gracious favours.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“This unseemly custom,” says Malone, “continued common
till the middle of the last century, if not later.” Beaumont
and Fletcher, in the “Coxcomb” (i. 1), thus refer to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Must we, that have so long time been as one,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seen cities, countries, kingdoms, and their wonders,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Been bedfellows, and in our various journey<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mixt all our observations.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the same way, letters from noblemen to each other often
began with the appellation <i>bedfellow</i>.<a name="FNanchor_961_961" id="FNanchor_961_961"></a><a href="#Footnote_961_961" class="fnanchor">[961]</a></p>

<p><i>Curfew Bell</i>, which is generally supposed to be of Norman
origin, is still rung in some of our old country villages,
although it has long lost its significance. It seems to
have been as important to ghosts as to living men, it being
their signal for walking, a license which apparently lasted
till the first cock. Fairies, too, and other spirits, were under
the same regulations; and hence Prospero, in “The Tempest”<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[522]</a></span>
(v. 1), says of his elves that they</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“rejoice<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hear the solemn curfew.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “King Lear” (iii. 4) we find the fiend Flibbertigibbet
obeying the same rule, for Edgar says: “This is the foul
fiend Flibbertigibbet; he begins at curfew, and walks till
the first cock.”</p>

<p>In “Measure for Measure” (iv. 2) we find another allusion:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Duke.</i> The best and wholesom’st spirits of the night<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Envelope you, good provost! Who call’d here of late?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Provost.</i> None, since the curfew rung.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And, once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 4), Capulet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, stir, stir, stir! the second cock hath crow’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The curfew bell hath rung, ’tis three o’clock.”<a name="FNanchor_962_962" id="FNanchor_962_962"></a><a href="#Footnote_962_962" class="fnanchor">[962]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sacring Bell.</i> This was a bell which rang for processions
and other holy ceremonies.<a name="FNanchor_963_963" id="FNanchor_963_963"></a><a href="#Footnote_963_963" class="fnanchor">[963]</a> It is mentioned in “Henry
VIII.” (iii. 2), by the Earl of Surrey:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“I’ll startle you<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Worse than the sacring bell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">It is rung in the Romish Church to give notice that the
“Host” is approaching, and is now called “Sanctus bell,”
from the words “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus
Sabaoth,” pronounced by the priest.</p>

<p>On the graphic passage where Macbeth (ii. 1) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“The bell invites me.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That summons thee to heaven or to hell”—<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Malone has this note: “Thus Raleigh, speaking of love, in
England’s ‘Helicon’ (1600):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘It is perhaps that sauncing bell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That toules all into heaven or hell.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sauncing</i> being probably a mistake for sacring or saint’s bell,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[523]</a></span>
originally, perhaps, written “saintis bell.” In “Hudibras”
we find:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The old saintis bell that rings all in.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Carpet-knights.</i> These were knights dubbed at court by
mere favor, and not on the field of battle, for their military
exploits. In “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), Sir Toby defines one
of them thus: “He is knight, dubbed with unhatched rapier,
and on carpet consideration.”</p>

<p>A “trencher knight” was probably synonymous, as in
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">These carpet-knights were sometimes called “knights of the
green cloth.”<a name="FNanchor_964_964" id="FNanchor_964_964"></a><a href="#Footnote_964_964" class="fnanchor">[964]</a></p>

<p><i>Chair Days.</i> Days of old age and infirmity. So, in “2
Henry VI.” (v. 2), young Clifford, on seeing his dead father,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Wast thou ordain’d, dear father,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To lose thy youth in peace, and to achieve<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The silver livery of advised age,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, in thy reverence, and thy chair-days, thus<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To die in ruffian battle?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Chivalry.</i> The expression “sworn brothers,” which Shakespeare
several times employs, refers to the “fratres jurati,”
who, in the days of chivalry, mutually bound themselves by
oath to share each other’s fortune. Thus, Falstaff says of
Shallow, in “2 Henry IV.” (iii. 2): “He talks as familiarly
of John o’ Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him.”
In “Henry V.” (ii. 1), Bardolph says: “we’ll be all three
sworn brothers to France.” In course of time it was used
in a laxer sense, to denote intimacy, as in “Much Ado About
Nothing” (i. 1), where Beatrice says of Benedick, that “He
hath every month a new sworn brother.”<a name="FNanchor_965_965" id="FNanchor_965_965"></a><a href="#Footnote_965_965" class="fnanchor">[965]</a></p>

<p>According to the laws of chivalry, a person of superior
birth might not be challenged by an inferior; or, if challenged,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[524]</a></span>
might refuse combat, a reference to which seems to
be made by Cleopatra (“Antony and Cleopatra,” ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“I will not hurt him.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">These hands do lack nobility, that they strike<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A meaner than myself.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 4), the same practice is
alluded to by Hector, who asks Thersites:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“What art thou, Greek? art thou for Hector’s match?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Art thou of blood and honour?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Singer quotes from “Melville’s Memoirs” (1735, p. 165):
“The Laird of Grange offered to fight Bothwell, who answered
that he was not his equal. The like answer made
he to Tullibardine. Then my Lord Lindsay offered to fight
him, which he could not well refuse; but his heart failed
him, and he grew cold on the business.”</p>

<p><i>Clubs.</i> According to Malone, it was once a common custom,
on the breaking-out of a fray, to call out “Clubs, clubs!”
to part the combatants. Thus, in “1 Henry VI.” (i. 3), the
Mayor declares:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I’ll call for clubs, if you will not away.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), Aaron says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Clubs, clubs! these lovers will not keep the peace.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“Clubs,” too, “was originally the popular cry to call forth
the London apprentices, who employed their clubs for the
preservation of the public peace. Sometimes, however, they
used those weapons to raise a disturbance, as they are described
doing in the following passage in ‘Henry VIII.’
(v. 4): ‘I miss’d the meteor once, and hit that woman;
who cried out ‘Clubs!’ when I might see from far some forty
truncheoners draw to her succour, which were the hope o’
the Strand, where she was quartered.’”<a name="FNanchor_966_966" id="FNanchor_966_966"></a><a href="#Footnote_966_966" class="fnanchor">[966]</a></p>

<p><i>Color-Lore.</i> Green eyes have been praised by poets of
nearly every land,<a name="FNanchor_967_967" id="FNanchor_967_967"></a><a href="#Footnote_967_967" class="fnanchor">[967]</a> and, according to Armado, in “Love’s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[525]</a></span>
Labour’s Lost” (i. 2), “Green, indeed, is the colour of lovers.”</p>

<p>In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), Thisbe laments:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“Lovers, make moan:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His eyes were green as leeks.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The Nurse, in her description of Romeo’s rival (“Romeo
and Juliet,” iii. 5), says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“An eagle, madam,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As Paris hath.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1), Emilia, praying to Diana,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“O vouchsafe,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With that thy rare green eye—which never yet<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beheld thing maculate—look on thy virgin.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The words of Armado have been variously explained as
alluding to green eyes—Spanish writers being peculiarly enthusiastic
in this praise—to the willow worn by unsuccessful
lovers, and to their melancholy.<a name="FNanchor_968_968" id="FNanchor_968_968"></a><a href="#Footnote_968_968" class="fnanchor">[968]</a> It has also been suggested<a name="FNanchor_969_969" id="FNanchor_969_969"></a><a href="#Footnote_969_969" class="fnanchor">[969]</a>
that, as green is the color most suggestive of freshness and
spring-time, it may have been considered the most appropriate
lover’s badge. At the same time, however, it is curious
that, as green has been regarded as an ominous color, it
should be connected with lovers, for, as an old couplet remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Those dressed in blue<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have lovers true;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In green and white,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Forsaken quite.”<a name="FNanchor_970_970" id="FNanchor_970_970"></a><a href="#Footnote_970_970" class="fnanchor">[970]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Merchant of Venice” (iii. 2), “green-eyed jealousy,”
and in “Othello” (iii. 3), its equivalent, “green-eyed monster,”
are expressions used by Shakespeare.</p>

<p><i>Yellow</i> is an epithet often, too, applied to jealousy, by the
old writers. In the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 3), Nym<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[526]</a></span>
says he will possess Ford “with yellowness.” In “Much
Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1) Beatrice describes the Count as
“civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.”
In “Twelfth Night” (ii. 4), Viola tells the Duke how
her father’s daughter loved a man, but never told her love:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“She pin’d in thought,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And with a green and yellow melancholy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She sat like patience on a monument.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Dinner Customs.</i> In days gone by there was but one
salt-cellar on the table, which was a large piece of plate,
generally much ornamented. The tables being long, the
salt was commonly placed about the middle, and served as
a kind of boundary to the different quality of the guests
invited. Those of distinction were ranked above; the space
below being assigned to the dependants, inferior relations
of the master of the house, etc.<a name="FNanchor_971_971" id="FNanchor_971_971"></a><a href="#Footnote_971_971" class="fnanchor">[971]</a> Shakespeare would seem
to allude to this custom in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), where
Leontes says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“lower messes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Perchance, are to this business purblind?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Upon which passage Steevens adds, “Leontes comprehends
inferiority of understanding in the idea of inferiority of
rank.” Ben Jonson, speaking of the characteristics of an
insolent coxcomb, remarks: “His fashion is not to take
knowledge of him that is beneath him in clothes. He never
drinks below the salt.”</p>

<p><i>Ordinary.</i> This was a public dinner, where each paid his
share, an allusion to which custom is made by Enobarbus,
in “Antony and Cleopatra” (ii. 2), who, speaking of Antony,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Being barber’d ten times o’er, goes to the feast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, for his ordinary, pays his heart<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For what his eyes eat only.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Again, in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 3), Lafeu says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[527]</a></span>
“I did think thee, for two ordinaries, to be a pretty wise
fellow; thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel.”</p>

<p>The “ordinary” also denoted the lounging-place of the
men of the town, and the fantastic gallants who herded together.
They were, says the author of “Curiosities of Literature”
(vol. iii. p. 82), “the exchange for news, the echoing-places
for all sorts of town talk; there they might hear of
the last new play and poem, and the last fresh widow sighing
for some knight to make her a lady; these resorts were
attended also to save charges of housekeeping.”</p>

<p><i>Drinking Customs.</i> Shakespeare has given several allusions
to the old customs associated with drinking, which
have always varied in different countries. At the present
day many of the drinking customs still observed are very
curious, especially those kept up at the universities and inns-of-court.</p>

<p><i>Alms-drink</i> was a phrase in use, says Warburton, among
good fellows, to signify that liquor of another’s share which
his companion drank to ease him. So, in “Antony and
Cleopatra” (ii. 7) one of the servants says of Lepidus:
“They have made him drink alms-drink.”</p>

<p><i>By-drinkings.</i> This was a phrase for drinkings between
meals, and is used by the Hostess in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3),
who says to Falstaff: “You owe money here besides, Sir
John, for your diet, and by-drinkings.”</p>

<p><i>Hooped Pots.</i> In olden times drinking-pots were made
with hoops, so that, when two or more drank from the same
tankard, no one should drink more than his share. There
were generally three hoops to the pots: hence, in “2 Henry
VI.” (iv. 2), Cade says: “The three-hooped pot shall have
ten hoops.” In Nash’s “Pierce Pennilesse” we read: “I
believe hoopes on quart pots were invented that every man
should take his hoope, and no more.”</p>

<p>The phrases “to do a man right” and “to do him reason”
were, in years gone by, the common expressions in
pledging healths; he who drank a bumper expected that a
bumper should be drunk to his toast. To this practice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[528]</a></span>
alludes the scrap of a song which Silence sings in “2 Henry
IV.” (v. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Do me right,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And dub me knight:<br /></span>
<span class="i1">Samingo.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>He who drank, too, a bumper on his knee to the health
of his mistress was dubbed a knight for the evening. The
word Samingo is either a corruption of, or an intended blunder
for, San Domingo, but why this saint should be the patron
of topers is uncertain.</p>

<p><i>Rouse.</i> According to Gifford,<a name="FNanchor_972_972" id="FNanchor_972_972"></a><a href="#Footnote_972_972" class="fnanchor">[972]</a> a <i>rouse</i> was a large glass in
which a health was given, the drinking of which, by the rest
of the company, formed a carouse. Hamlet (i. 4) says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The king doth wake to-night, and takes his rouse.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The word occurs again in the following act (1), where Polonius
uses the phrase “o’ertook in’s rouse;” and in the sense
of a bumper, or glass of liquor, in “Othello” (ii. 3), “they
have given me a rouse already.”</p>

<p><i>Sheer Ale.</i> This term, which is used in the “Taming of
the Shrew” (Induction, sc. 2), by Sly—“Ask Marian Hacket,
the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I
am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale”—according
to some expositors, means “ale alone, nothing but ale,”
rather than “unmixed ale.”</p>

<p><i>Sneak-cup.</i> This phrase, which is used by Falstaff in
“1 Henry IV.” (iii. 3)—“the prince is a Jack, a sneak-cup”—was
used to denote one who balked his glass.</p>

<p><i>Earnest Money.</i> It was, in olden times, customary to ratify
an agreement by a bent coin. In “Henry VIII.” (ii. 3),
the old lady remarks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Tis strange: a three-pence bow’d would hire me,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Old as I am, to queen it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">There were, however, no threepences so early as the reign
of Henry VIII.</p>

<p><i>Exclamations.</i> “Charity, for the Lord’s sake!” was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[529]</a></span>
form of ejaculatory supplication used by imprisoned debtors
to the passers-by. So, in Davies’s “Epigrams” (1611):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Good, gentle writers, ‘for the Lord’s sake, for the Lord’s sake,’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like Ludgate prisoner, lo, I, begging, make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My mone.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Measure for Measure” (iv. 3), the phrase is alluded to
by Pompey: “all great doers in our trade, and are now ‘for
the Lord’s sake.’”</p>

<p>“Cry Budget.” A watchword. Thus Slender says to
Shallow, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 2); “We
have a nay-word, how to know one another: I come to her
in white, and cry ‘mum;’ she cries ‘budget;’ and by that
we know one another.”</p>

<p>“God save the mark.” “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 2). This
exclamation has hitherto baffled the research of every commentator.
It occurs again in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3); and in
the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2) and in “Othello” (i. 1),
we have “God bless the mark.” In the quarto, 1597, instead
of “God save the mark” in the first passage quoted, we have
“God save the sample,” an expression equally obscure.<a name="FNanchor_973_973" id="FNanchor_973_973"></a><a href="#Footnote_973_973" class="fnanchor">[973]</a></p>

<p><i>Halidom.</i> This exclamation was used, says Minsheu,<a name="FNanchor_974_974" id="FNanchor_974_974"></a><a href="#Footnote_974_974" class="fnanchor">[974]</a> by
old countrymen, by manner of swearing. In “Two Gentlemen
of Verona” (iv. 2), the Hostess says: “By my halidom,
I was fast asleep;” the probable derivation being <i>holy</i>, with
the termination <i>dome.</i></p>

<p><i>Hall! Hall!</i> An exclamation formerly used, to make a
clear space in a crowd, for any particular purpose, was “<i>A hall,
a hall</i>.” So, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 5), Capulet says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Come, musicians, play.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A hall, a hall! give room! and foot it, girls.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Hay.</i> This is equivalent to “you have it,” an exclamation
in fencing, when a thrust or hit is received by the antagonist.
In “Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4), Mercutio speaks of “the punto<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[530]</a></span>
reverso! the hay!”</p>

<p><i>Hold.</i> To cry <i>hold!</i> when persons were fighting, was an
authoritative way of separating them, according to the old
military law. So Macbeth, in his struggle with Macduff, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And damn’d be he that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">We may compare Lady Macbeth’s words (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“I’ the name of me.” A vulgar exclamation formerly in
use. So in the “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 2) it is used by the
Clown.</p>

<p>“<i>O ho, O ho!</i>” This savage exclamation was, says Steevens,
constantly appropriated by the writers of our ancient mysteries
and moralities to the devil. In “The Tempest” (i. 2),
Caliban, when rebuked by Prospero for seeking “to violate
the honor of my child,” replies:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O ho, O ho! would it had been done!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This isle with Calibans.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Push.</i> An exclamation equivalent to <i>pish</i>.<a name="FNanchor_975_975" id="FNanchor_975_975"></a><a href="#Footnote_975_975" class="fnanchor">[975]</a> It is used by
Leonato in “Much Ado About Nothing” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“And made a push at chance and sufferance;”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">and again, in “Timon of Athens” (iii. 6), where one of the
lords says: “Push! did you see my cap?”</p>

<p><i>Rivo</i> was an exclamation often used in Bacchanalian revels,
but its origin is uncertain. It occurs in “1 Henry IV.”
(ii. 4): “‘Rivo!’ says the drunkard.” Gifford suggests that
it is “corrupted, perhaps, from the Spanish <i>rio</i>, which is
figuratively used for a large quantity of liquor,” a derivation,
however, which Mr. Dyce does not think probable.</p>

<p><i>Sneck-up.</i> This was an exclamation of contempt, equivalent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[531]</a></span>
to “go and hang yourself.”<a name="FNanchor_976_976" id="FNanchor_976_976"></a><a href="#Footnote_976_976" class="fnanchor">[976]</a> It is used by Sir Toby in
“Twelfth Night” (ii. 3), in reply to Malvolio’s rebuke: “We
did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up!”</p>

<p><i>So-ho.</i> This is the cry of sportsmen when the hare is
found in her seat.</p>

<p><i>Spy.</i> “I spy” is the usual exclamation at a well-known
childish game called “Hie spy, hie!”<a name="FNanchor_977_977" id="FNanchor_977_977"></a><a href="#Footnote_977_977" class="fnanchor">[977]</a></p>

<p><i>Tailor.</i> Johnson explains the following words of Puck in
“A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1) thus:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">“The custom of crying tailor at a sudden fall backwards,
I think I remember to have observed. He that slips beside
his chair, falls as a tailor squats upon his board.” Mr. Dyce,<a name="FNanchor_978_978" id="FNanchor_978_978"></a><a href="#Footnote_978_978" class="fnanchor">[978]</a>
however, adds, “it may be doubted if this explains the
text.”</p>

<p><i>Tilly-vally.</i> An exclamation of contempt, the etymology
of which is uncertain. According to Douce it is a hunting
phrase borrowed from the French. Singer says it is equivalent
to <i>fiddle-faddle</i>. It occurs in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 3),
being used by Sir Toby: “Am not I consanguineous? am
I not of her blood? Tilly-vally, lady!”</p>

<p>In “2 Henry IV.” (ii. 4), the Hostess corrupts it to <i>tilly-fally</i>:
“Tilly-fally, Sir John, ne’er tell me: your ancient
swaggerer comes not in my doors.”</p>

<p>As a further illustration of the use of this word, Singer
quotes a conversation between Sir Thomas More and his
wife, given in Roper’s Life: “Is not this house, quoth he, as
nigh heaven as my own? To whom she, after her accustomed
homely fashion, not liking such talk, answered, Tylle-valle,
Tylle-valle.”</p>

<p><i>Westward, ho.</i> This was one of the exclamations of the
watermen who plied on the Thames, and is used by Viola in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[532]</a></span>
“Twelfth Night” (iii. 1). Dyce<a name="FNanchor_979_979" id="FNanchor_979_979"></a><a href="#Footnote_979_979" class="fnanchor">[979]</a> quotes from Peel’s “Edward
I.” to illustrate the use of this word:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Queen Elinor.</i> Ay, good woman, conduct me to the court,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That there I may bewail my sinful life,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And call to God to save my wretched soul.<br /></span>
<span class="i13">[<i>A cry of ‘Westward, ho!’</i><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Woman, what noise is this I hear?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Potter’s Wife.</i> An like your grace, it is the watermen that call for<br /></span>
<span class="i0">passengers to go westward now.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Dekker took the exclamation “Westward, ho!” for the
title of a comedy; and Jonson, Chapman, and Marston
adopted that of “Eastward, ho!” for one jointly written by
them a few years afterwards.</p>

<p><i>Fools.</i> Mr. Douce, in his essay “On the Clowns and Fools
of Shakespeare,” has made a ninefold division of English
fools, according to quality or place of employment, as the
domestic fool, the city or corporation fool, the tavern fool,
the fool of the mysteries and moralities. The last is generally
called the “vice,” and is the original of the stage
clowns so common among the dramatists of the time of
Elizabeth, and who embody so much of the wit of Shakespeare.</p>

<p>A very palpable distinction is that which distinguishes
between such creatures as were chosen to excite to laughter
from some deformity of mind or body, and such as were
chosen for a certain alertness of mind and power of repartee—or,
briefly, butts and wits. The dress of the regular court
fool of the middle ages was not altogether a rigid uniform,
but seems to have changed from time to time. The head
was shaved, the coat was motley, and the breeches tight, with,
generally, one leg different in color from the other. The
head was covered with a garment resembling a monk’s cowl,
which fell over the breast and shoulders, and often bore asses’
ears, and was crested with a coxcomb, while bells hung from
various parts of the attire. The fool’s bauble was a short
staff bearing a ridiculous head, to which was sometimes attached<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[533]</a></span>
an inflated bladder, by which sham castigations were
inflicted; a long petticoat was also occasionally worn, but
seems to have belonged rather to the idiots than the wits.
The fool’s business was to amuse his master, to excite his
laughter by sharp contrast, to prevent the over-oppression of
state affairs, and, in harmony with a well-known physiological
precept, by his liveliness at meals to assist his lord’s digestion.<a name="FNanchor_980_980" id="FNanchor_980_980"></a><a href="#Footnote_980_980" class="fnanchor">[980]</a></p>

<p>The custom of shaving and nicking the head of a fool
is very old. There is a penalty of ten shillings, in one of
Alfred’s Ecclesiastical Laws, if one opprobriously shave a
common man like a fool; and Malone cites a passage from
“The Choice of Change,” etc., by S.&nbsp;R. Gent, 4to, 1598—“Three
things used by monks, which provoke other men to
laugh at their follies: 1. They are shaven and notched on
the head like fooles.”</p>

<p>In the “Comedy of Errors” (v. 1), the servant says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“My master preaches patience to him, and the while<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His man with scissors nicks him like a fool.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Forfeits.</i> In order to enforce some kind of regularity in
barbers’ shops, which were once places of great resort for the
idle, certain laws were usually made, the breaking of which
was to be punished by forfeits. Rules of this kind, however,
were as often laughed at as obeyed. So, in “Measure for
Measure” (v. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“laws for all faults,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But faults so countenanc’d, that the strong statutes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As much in mock as mark.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Gambling.</i> It was once customary for a person when
going abroad “to put out” a sum of money on condition of
receiving good interest for it on his return home; if he never
returned the deposit was forfeited. Hence such a one was
called “a putter-out.” It is to this practice that reference<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[534]</a></span>
is made in the following passage (“The Tempest,” iii. 3):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“or that there were such men<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Each putter-out of five for one will bring us<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Good warrant of.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Malone quotes from Moryson’s “Itinerary” (1617, pt. i.
p. 198): “This custom of giving out money upon these adventures
was first used in court and noblemen;” a practice
which “banker-outs, stage-players, and men of base condition
had drawn into contempt,” by undertaking journeys
merely for gain upon their return. In Ben Jonson’s “Every
Man Out of His Humour” (ii. 3) the custom is thus
alluded to: “I do intend, this year of jubilee coming on, to
travel; and because I will not altogether go upon expence,
I am determined to put forth some five thousand pound, to
be paid me <i>five for one</i>, upon the return of my wife, myself,
and my dog, from the Turk’s court at Constantinople. If all,
or either of us, miscarry in the journey, ’tis gone; if we be
successful, why then there will be five and twenty thousand
pound to entertain time with.”</p>

<p><i>Garters.</i> It was the regular amorous etiquette in the reign
of Elizabeth,<a name="FNanchor_981_981" id="FNanchor_981_981"></a><a href="#Footnote_981_981" class="fnanchor">[981]</a> “for a man, professing himself deeply in love,
to assume certain outward marks of negligence in his dress,
as if too much occupied by his passion to attend to such
trifles, or driven by despondency to a forgetfulness of all outward
appearance.” His “garters, in particular, were not to
be tied up.” In “As You Like It” (iii. 2), this custom is
described by Rosalind, who tells Orlando: “There is none
of my uncle’s marks upon you: he taught me how to know
a man in love; ... your hose should be ungarter’d, your
bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied,
and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation.”
Another fashion which seems to have been common
among the beaux of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, was that of
wearing garters across about the knees, an allusion to which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[535]</a></span>
we find in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 5), in the letter which Malvolio
reads: “Remember who commended thy yellow stockings,
and wished to see thee ever cross-gartered.” Douce
quotes from the old comedy of “The Two Angrie Women
of Abingdon” (1599), where a servingman is thus described:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“Hee’s a fine neate fellow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A spruce slave, I warrant ye, he’ele have<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His cruell garters crosse about the knee.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In days gone by, when garters were worn in sight, the
upper classes wore very expensive ones, but the lower orders
worsted galloon ones. Prince Henry calls Poins (“1 Henry
IV.,” ii. 4) a “caddis garter,” meaning a man of mean rank.</p>

<p><i>Gaudy Days.</i> Feast-days in the colleges of our universities
are so called, as they were formerly at the inns-of-court.
In “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 13), Antony says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i13">“come,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let’s have one other gaudy night: call to me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Let’s mock the midnight bell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">They were so called, says Blount, “from <i>gaudium</i>, because,
to say truth, they are days of joy, as bringing good cheer to
the hungry students.”</p>

<p><i>Glove.</i> As an article of dress the glove held a conspicuous
place in many of our old customs and ceremonies. Thus, it
was often worn in the hat as a favor, and as a mark to be
challenged by an enemy, as is illustrated by the following
dialogue in “Henry V.” (iv. 1):</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>“<i>King Henry.</i> Give me any gage of thine, and I will wear it in my
bonnet: then, if ever thou darest acknowledge it, I will make it my
quarrel.</p>

<p><i>Williams.</i> Here’s my glove: give me another of thine.</p>

<p><i>King Henry.</i> There.</p>

<p><i>Williams.</i> This will I also wear in my cap: if ever thou come to me
and say, after to-morrow, ‘This is my glove,’ by this hand, I will take
thee a box on the ear.</p>

<p><i>King Henry.</i> If ever I live to see it, I will challenge it.</p>

<p><i>Williams.</i> Thou darest as well be hanged.”</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[536]</a></span></p>

<p class="ni">Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 2), Diomedes, taking the
glove from Cressida, says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To-morrow will I wear it on my helm,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And grieve his spirit that dares not challenge it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Richard II.” (v. 3), Percy narrates how Prince Henry
boasted that—</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“he would unto the stews,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And from the common’st creature pluck a glove,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And wear it as a favour; and with that<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He would unhorse the lustiest challenger.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The glove was also worn in the hat as the memorial of a
friend, and in the “Merchant of Venice” (iv. 1), Portia, in her
assumed character, asks Bassanio for his gloves, which she
says she will wear for his sake:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Give me your gloves, I’ll wear them for your sake.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">When the fashion of thus wearing gloves declined, “it fell
into the hands of coxcombical and dissolute servants.”<a name="FNanchor_982_982" id="FNanchor_982_982"></a><a href="#Footnote_982_982" class="fnanchor">[982]</a>
Thus Edgar, in “King Lear” (iii. 4), being asked by Lear
what he had been, replies: “A serving-man, proud in heart
and mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap.”</p>

<p>To throw the glove, as the signal of a challenge, is alluded
to by Troilus (iv. 4), who tells Cressida:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“For I will throw my glove to Death himself,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That’s there’s no maculation in thy heart”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">—the meaning being, says Johnson: “I will challenge Death
himself in defence of thy fidelity.”</p>

<p>The glove then thrown down was popularly called “a
gage,”<a name="FNanchor_983_983" id="FNanchor_983_983"></a><a href="#Footnote_983_983" class="fnanchor">[983]</a> from the French, signifying a pledge, and in “Richard
II.” (iv. 1), it is so termed by Aumerle:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“There is my gage, the manual seal of death,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[537]</a></span>
<span class="i0">That marks thee out for hell.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In the same play it is also called “honor’s pawn.” Thus
Bolingbroke (i. 1) says to Mowbray:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Disclaiming here the kindred of the king;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And lay aside my high blood’s royalty,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which fear, not reverence, makes thee to except.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If guilty dread hath left thee so much strength<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As to take up mine honour’s pawn, then stoop.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And further on (iv. 1), one of the lords employs the same
phrase:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“There is my honour’s pawn;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Engage it to the trial, if thou dar’st.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>It is difficult to discover why the glove was recognized as
the sign of defiance. Brand<a name="FNanchor_984_984" id="FNanchor_984_984"></a><a href="#Footnote_984_984" class="fnanchor">[984]</a> suggests that the custom of
dropping or sending the glove, “as the signal of a challenge,
may have been derived from the circumstance of its being
the cover of the hand, and therefore put for the hand itself.
The giving of the hand is well known to intimate that the
person who does so will not deceive, but stand to his agreement.
<i>To shake hands upon it</i> would not be very delicate in
an agreement to fight, and, therefore, gloves may possibly
have been deputed as substitutes.”</p>

<p>Again, the glove was often thrown down as a pledge, as
in “Timon of Athens” (v. 4), where the senator says to
Alcibiades:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“Throw thy glove,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or any token of thine honour else,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not as our confusion.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Whereupon Alcibiades answers: “Then there’s my glove.”
In “King Lear” (v. 2), Albany thus speaks:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thou art arm’d, Gloster:—let the trumpet sound:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If none appear to prove, upon thy person,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy heinous, manifest, and many treasons,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[538]</a></span>
<span class="i0">There is my pledge; [<i>Throwing down a glove</i>] I’ll prove it on thy heart.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 5), Hector further alludes to
this practice:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Your quondam wife swears still by Venus’ glove:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">She’s well, but bade me not commend her to you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Scented gloves were formerly given away as presents.
In “Winter’s Tale” the custom is referred to by Mopsa,
who says to the Clown (iv. 4): “Come, you promised me a
tawdry lace, and a pair of sweet gloves;” and Autolycus is
introduced singing:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Gloves as sweet as damask roses.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 4), Hero says:
“These gloves the count sent me; they are an excellent
perfume.” Trinity College, Oxford, not ungrateful to its
founder and his spouse, has many entries, after the date of
1556, in the Bursar’s books, “pro fumigatis chirothecis,” for
perfumed gloves.</p>

<p><i>Kiss.</i> In years past, a kiss was the recognized fee of a
lady’s partner, and as such is noticed in “Henry VIII.”
(i. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I were unmannerly to take you out,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And not to kiss you.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">In “The Tempest” (i. 2) it is alluded to in Ariel’s song:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come unto these yellow sands,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">And then take hands:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Court’sied when you have, and kiss’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">The wild waves whist,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Foot it featly here and there,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>There is probably a veiled allusion to the same ceremony
in “Winter’s Tale” (iv. 4), where, at the dance of shepherds
and shepherdesses, the following dialogue occurs:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[539]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“<i>Clown.</i><span style="padding-left: 6em">Come on, strike up!</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Dorcas.</i> Mopsa must be your mistress: marry, garlic,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To mend her kissing with.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Mopsa.</i><span style="padding-left: 8em">Now, in good time!</span><br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1"><i>Clown.</i> Not a word, a word; we stand upon our manners.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come, strike up!”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In an old treatise entitled the “Use and Abuse of Dancing
and Minstrelsie” we read:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“But some reply, what fools will daunce,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">If that when daunce is doon,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He may not have at ladyes lips,<br /></span>
<span class="i1">That which in daunce he doon.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>The practice of saluting ladies with a kiss was once very
general, and in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” to kiss the
hostess is indirectly spoken of as a common courtesy of the
day.</p>

<p>In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 5) a further instance occurs,
where Romeo kisses Juliet at Capulet’s entertainment;
and, in “Henry VIII.” (i. 4), Lord Sands is represented as
kissing Anne Bullen, next to whom he sits at supper.</p>

<p>The celebrated “kissing comfits” were sugar-plums, once
extensively used by fashionable persons to make the breath
sweet. Falstaff, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (v. 5),
when embracing Mrs. Ford, says: “Let it thunder to the
tune of ‘Green Sleeves,’ hail kissing comfits, and snow eringoes.”</p>

<p>In “Measure for Measure” (iv. 1, song) kisses are referred
to as “seals of love.” A Judas kiss was a kiss of treachery.
Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (v. 7), Gloster says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“so Judas kiss’d his master,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And cried ‘All hail!’ when-as he meant all harm.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Lace Songs.</i> These were jingling rhymes, sung by young
girls while engaged at their lace-pillows. A practice alluded
to by the Duke in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“O, fellow, come, the song we had last night.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mark it, Cesario; it is old and plain;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[540]</a></span>
<span class="i0">And the free maids that weave their thread with bones<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Do use to chant it.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Miss Baker, in her “Northamptonshire Glossary” (1854,
vol. i. p. 378). says, “The movement of the bobbins is timed
by the modulation of the tune, which excites them to regularity
and cheerfulness; and it is a pleasing sight to see them, in
warm, sunny weather, seated outside their cottage doors, or
seeking the shade of a neighboring tree; where, in cheerful
groups, they unite in singing their rude and simple rhymes.
The following is a specimen of one of these ditties, most
descriptive of the occupation:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“‘Nineteen long lines, bring over my down,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The faster I work it, I’ll shorten my score,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But if I do play, it’ll stick to a stay,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So heigh ho! little fingers, and twank it away.’”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Letters.</i> The word Emmanuel was formerly prefixed,
probably from feelings of piety, to letters and public deeds.
So in “2 Henry VI.” (iv. 2) there is the following allusion
to it:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Cade.</i> What is thy name?<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Clerk.</i> Emmanuel.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Dick.</i> They use to write it on the top of letters.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Staunton says: “We can refer to one MS. alone, in the
British Museum (Ad. MSS. 19, 400), which contains no less
than fourteen private epistles headed ‘Emanewell,’ or ‘Jesus
Immanuel.’”</p>

<p>Another superscription of a letter in years gone by was
“to the bosom” of a lady. Thus Hamlet (ii. 2) says in his
letter to Ophelia:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“In her excellent white bosom, these.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (iii. 1), Proteus
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Thy letters may be here, though thou art hence;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, being writ to me, shall be deliver’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Even in the milk-white bosom of thy love.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>This custom seems to have originated in the circumstance
of women having a pocket in the forepart of their stays, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[541]</a></span>
which, according to Steevens, “they carried not only love-letters
and love-tokens, but even their money and materials
for needlework.”</p>

<p><i>Livery.</i> The phrase “sue my livery,” which occurs in the
following speech of Bolingbroke (“Richard II.” ii. 3),</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“I am denied to sue my livery here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And yet my letters-patents give me leave;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My father’s goods are all distrain’d, and sold,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And these, and all, are all amiss employ’d,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">is thus explained by Malone: “On the death of every person
who held by knight’s service, the escheator of the court
in which he died summoned a jury, who inquired what
estate he died seized of, and of what age his next heir was.
If he was under age, he became a ward of the king’s; but if
he was found to be of full age, he then had a right to sue
out a writ of <i>ouster le main</i>, that is, his livery, that the king’s
hand might be taken off, and the land delivered to him.”
York (“Richard II.,” ii. 1) also says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“If you do wrongfully seize Hereford’s rights,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Call in the letters-patents that he hath<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By his attorneys-general to sue<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His livery.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Love-Day.</i> This denoted a day of amity or reconciliation;
an expression which is used by Saturninus in “Titus Andronicus”
(i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“You are my guest, Lavinia, and your friends.—<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This day shall be a love-day, Tamora.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><span class="smcap">Military Lore.</span> <i>Fleshment.</i> This is a military term;
a young soldier being said to <i>flesh</i> his sword the first time
he draws blood with it. In “King Lear” (ii. 2), Oswald
relates how Kent</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">“in the fleshment of this dread exploit,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Drew on me here again,”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">upon which passage Singer (vol. ix. p. 377) has this note:
“Fleshment, therefore, is here metaphorically applied to the
first act which Kent, in his new capacity, had performed for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[542]</a></span>
master; and, at the same time, in a sarcastic sense, as though
he had esteemed it an heroic exploit to trip a man behind,
who was actually falling.” The phrase occurs again in “1
Henry IV.” (v. 4), where Prince Henry tells his brother:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Come, brother John, full bravely hast thou flesh’d<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy maiden sword.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Swearing by the Sword.</i> According to Nares,<a name="FNanchor_985_985" id="FNanchor_985_985"></a><a href="#Footnote_985_985" class="fnanchor">[985]</a> “the singular
mixture of religious and military fanaticism which
arose from the Crusades gave rise to the custom of taking
a solemn oath upon a sword. In a plain, unenriched sword,
the separation between the blade and the hilt was usually
a straight transverse bar, which, suggesting the idea of a
cross, added to the devotion which every true knight felt for
his favorite weapon, and evidently led to this practice.”
Hamlet makes Horatio swear that he will never divulge
having seen the Ghost (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Never to speak of this that you have seen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Swear by my sword.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In the “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 3), Leonato says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Swear by this sword<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou wilt perform my bidding.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">The cross of the sword is also mentioned to illustrate the
true bearing of the oath. Hence, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4),
Falstaff says jestingly of Glendower, that he “swore the
devil his true liegeman upon the cross of a Welsh hook.”<a name="FNanchor_986_986" id="FNanchor_986_986"></a><a href="#Footnote_986_986" class="fnanchor">[986]</a>
On account of the practice of swearing by a sword, or, rather,
by the cross or upper end of it, the name of <i>Jesus</i> was
sometimes inscribed on the handle or some other part.</p>

<p><i>Mining Terms.</i> According to Mr. Collier, the phrase
“truepenny” is a mining term current in the north of England,
signifying a particular indication in the soil, of the
direction in which ore is to be found. Thus Hamlet (i. 5)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[543]</a></span>
says</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Ah, ha, boy! say’st thou so? art thou there, truepenny?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">when making Horatio and Marcellus again swear that they
will not divulge having seen the ghost.</p>

<p><i>Patrons.</i> The custom of clergymen praying for their
patrons, in what is called the bidding prayer, seems alluded
to by Kent in “King Lear” (i. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“Royal Lear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whom I have ever honour’d as my king,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lov’d as my father, as my master follow’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As my great patron thought on in my prayers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sagittary.</i> This was a monster, half man, half beast, described
as a terrible archer; neighing like a horse, and with
its eyes of fire striking men dead as if with lightning. In
“Troilus and Cressida” (v. 5), Agamemnon says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i5">“The dreadful Sagittary<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Appals our numbers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Hence any deadly shot was called a sagittary. In “Othello”
(i. I) the barrack is so named from the figure of an archer
over the door.</p>

<p><i>Salad Days.</i> Days of green youth and inexperience.
Cleopatra says (i. 5):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i8">“My salad days,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I was green in judgment:—cold in blood.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Salt.</i> The salt of youth is that vigor and strong passion
which then predominates. The term is several times used
by Shakespeare for strong amorous passion. Iago, in
“Othello” (iii. 3), refers to it as “hot as monkeys, as salt as
wolves in pride.” In “Measure for Measure” (v. I), the
Duke calls Angelo’s base passion his “salt imagination,”
because he supposed his victim to be Isabella, and not his
betrothed wife, whom he was forced by the Duke to marry.<a name="FNanchor_987_987" id="FNanchor_987_987"></a><a href="#Footnote_987_987" class="fnanchor">[987]</a></p>

<p><i>Salutations.</i> God-den was used by our forefathers as
soon as noon was past, after which time “good-morrow” or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[544]</a></span>
“good-day” was esteemed improper; the phrase “God ye
good den” being a contraction of “God give you a good
evening.” This fully appears from the following passage in
“Romeo and Juliet” (ii. 4):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“<i>Nurse.</i> God ye good morrow, gentlemen.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0"><i>Mercutio.</i> God ye good den, fair gentlewoman.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Upon being thus corrected, the Nurse asks, “Is it good den?”
to which Mercutio replies, “’Tis no less, I tell you, for the
bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.”</p>

<p>A further corruption of the same phrase was “God dig-you-den,”
as used by Costard in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”
(iv. 1): “God dig-you-den all!” Shakespeare uses it several
times, as in “Titus Andronicus” (iv. 4), where the Clown
says: “God and Saint Stephen give you good den;” and in
“King John” (i. 1) we have “Good-den, Sir Richard!”</p>

<p>Another old popular salutation was “good even and
twenty” (“Merry Wives of Windsor,” ii. 1), equivalent to
“twenty good-evenings.” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps quotes a
similar phrase from Elliot’s “Fruits of the French” (1593),
“God night, and a thousand to everybody.”</p>

<p>We may also compare the phrase “good deed” in “Winter’s
Tale” (i. 2)—a species of asseveration, as “in very deed.”</p>

<p><i>Servants Customs.</i> The old custom of the servants of
great families taking an oath of fidelity on their entrance
into office—as is still the case with those of the sovereign—is
alluded to by Posthumus in “Cymbeline” (ii. 4), where,
speaking of Imogen’s servants, he says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“Her attendants are<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All sworn and honourable.”<a name="FNanchor_988_988" id="FNanchor_988_988"></a><a href="#Footnote_988_988" class="fnanchor">[988]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Gold chains were formerly worn by persons of rank and
dignity, and by rich merchants—a fashion which descended
to upper servants in great houses—and by stewards as
badges of office. These chains were usually cleaned by being
rubbed with crumbs. Hence, in “Twelfth Night” (ii. 3),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[545]</a></span>
Sir Toby says to the Clown:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>In days gone by, too, it was customary for the servants
of the nobility, particularly the gentleman-usher, to attend
bare-headed. In the procession to the trial in “Henry
VIII.” (ii. 4), one of the persons enumerated is a gentleman-usher
“bare-headed.” On grand occasions, coachmen, also,
drove bare-headed, a practice alluded to in Beaumont and
Fletcher’s “Woman-Hater” (iii. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Or a pleated lock, or a bareheaded coachman,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">This sits like a sign where great ladies are<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To be sold within.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Sheriffs’ Post.</i> At the doors of sheriffs were usually set
up ornamental posts, on which royal and civic proclamations
were fixed. So, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 5), Malvolio says:
“He’ll stand at your door like a sheriff’s post.” “A pair
of mayors’ posts,” says Staunton, “are still standing in Norwich,
which, from the initials T.&nbsp;P., and the date 159, are
conjectured to have belonged to Thomas Pettys, who was
mayor of that city in 1592.”</p>

<p><i>Shoeing-Horn.</i> This, from its convenient use in drawing
on a tight shoe, was applied in a jocular metaphor to other
subservient and tractable assistants. Thus Thersites, in
“Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), in his railing mood gives this
name to Menelaus, whom he calls “a thrifty shoeing-horn in
a chain, hanging at his brother’s [Agamemnon] leg.”</p>

<p>It was also employed as a contemptuous name for danglers
on young women.</p>

<p>In the same way “shoe-tye” became a characteristic name
for a traveller, a term used by Shakespeare in “Measure for
Measure” (iv. 3), “Master Forthright the tilter, and brave
Master Shoe-tie, the great traveller.”</p>

<p><i>A Solemn Supper.</i> In Shakespeare’s day this was a phrase
for a feast or banquet given on any important occasion, such
as a birth, marriage, etc. Macbeth says (iii. 1):<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[546]</a></span></p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I’ll request your presence.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>Howel, in a letter to Sir T. Hawke, 1636, says: “I was
invited yesternight to a <i>solemne supper</i> by B.&nbsp;J. [Ben Jonson],
where you were deeply remembered.”</p>

<p>So, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 5), Tybalt says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i6">“What! dares the slave<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Come hither, cover’d with an antic face,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (ii. 3), the King, on
the conclusion of the contract between Helena and Bertram,
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i7">“The solemn feast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shall more attend upon the coming space,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Expecting absent friends.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Statute Caps.</i> These were woollen caps enforced by Statute
13 Elizabeth, which, says Strype, in his “Annals” (vol. ii.
p. 74), was “for continuance of making and wearing woollen
caps in behalf of the trade of cappers; providing that all
above the age of six years (excepting the nobility and some
others) should on Sabbath-days and holy-days wear caps of
wool, knit thicked, and drest in England, upon penalty of ten
groats.” Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), Rosaline
says:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Well, better wits have worn plain statute-caps.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">Jonson considered that the statute caps alluded to were
those worn by the members of the universities.</p>

<p><i>Theatrical Lore.</i> At the conclusion of a play, or of the
epilogue, it was formerly customary for the actors to kneel
down on the stage, and pray for the sovereign, nobility,
clergy, and sometimes for the commons. So, in the epilogue
to “2 Henry IV.,” the dancer says: “My tongue is weary;
when my legs are too, I will bid you good night; and so
kneel down before you:—but, indeed, to pray for the queen.”
Collier, in his “History of English Dramatic Poetry” (vol.
iii. p. 445), tells us that this practice continued in the commencement
of the 17th century.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[547]</a></span></p>

<p><i>Tournaments.</i> In “Coriolanus” (ii. 1) Shakespeare attributes
some of the customs of his own times to a people who
were wholly unacquainted with them. In the following passage
we have an exact description of what occurred at tiltings
and tournaments when a combatant had distinguished
himself:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i9">“Matrons flung gloves,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ladies and maids their scarfs and handkerchers,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon him as he pass’d: the nobles bended,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As to Jove’s statue; and the commons made<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A shower and thunder with their caps and shouts:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">never saw the like.”<a name="FNanchor_989_989" id="FNanchor_989_989"></a><a href="#Footnote_989_989" class="fnanchor">[989]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>An allusion to the mock tournaments, in which the combatants
were armed with rushes in place of spears, is used
in “Othello” (v. 2):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Man but a rush against Othello’s breast.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><i>Trumpet.</i> In olden times it was the fashion for persons
of distinction, when visiting, to be accompanied by a trumpeter,
who announced their approach by a flourish of his
trumpet. It is to this custom, Staunton<a name="FNanchor_990_990" id="FNanchor_990_990"></a><a href="#Footnote_990_990" class="fnanchor">[990]</a> thinks, that Lorenzo
refers in the “Merchant of Venice” (v. 1), where he
tells Portia:</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Your husband is at hand; I hear his trumpet.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p><span class="smcap">War-Cry.</span> “<i>God and Saint George!</i>”—the common cry
of the English soldier when he charged the enemy. “Richard
III.” (v. 3). The author of the “Old Arte of Warre,”
printed in the latter end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, formally
enjoins the use of this cry among his military laws (p. 84):
“Item. That all souldiers entring into battaile, assaulte,
skirmishe, or other faction of armes, shall have for their
common cry-word, ‘Saint George, forward, or upon them,
Saint George!’ whereby the souldier is much comforted to
minde the ancient valour of England, which with that name
has been so often victorious; and therefore he who upon
any sinister zeale shall maliciously omit so fortunate a name,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[548]</a></span>
shall be severely punished for his obstinate, erroneous heart
and perverse mind.”</p>

<p>“<i>Havoc!</i>” To cry “havoc” appears to have been a signal
for indiscriminate slaughter. The expression occurs in
“King John” (ii. 1): “Cry havoc, kings!” In “Coriolanus”
Menenius says (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With modest warrant.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p class="ni">And in “Julius Cæsar” (iii. 1):</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”<br /></span>
</div></div>

<p>“<i>Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!</i>” This was the ancient cry
of the English troops when they charged the enemy. It
occurs where the conspirators kill Coriolanus (v. 6).</p>

<p><i>Leet-Ale.</i> This was the dinner provided for the jury and
customary tenants at the court-leet of a manor, or “view of
frank-pledge,” formerly held once or twice a year, before the
steward of the leet.<a name="FNanchor_991_991" id="FNanchor_991_991"></a><a href="#Footnote_991_991" class="fnanchor">[991]</a> To this court Shakespeare alludes in
the “Taming of the Shrew” (i. 2), where the servant tells
Sly that in his dream he would “rail upon the hostess of the
house,” and threaten to “present her at the leet.”</p>

<p>Aubrey, in his MS. History of Wiltshire, 1678, tells us, too,
how “in the Easter holidays was the Clerk’s ale for his private
benefit, and the solace of the neighbourhood.”</p>

<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_961_961" id="Footnote_961_961"></a><a href="#FNanchor_961_961"><span class="label">[961]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 68.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_962_962" id="Footnote_962_962"></a><a href="#FNanchor_962_962"><span class="label">[962]</span></a> See Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. pp. 220-225; also, Harland
and Wilkinson’s “Lancashire Folk-Lore,” 1867, p. 44.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_963_963" id="Footnote_963_963"></a><a href="#FNanchor_963_963"><span class="label">[963]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 379.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_964_964" id="Footnote_964_964"></a><a href="#FNanchor_964_964"><span class="label">[964]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” pp. 65, 66.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_965_965" id="Footnote_965_965"></a><a href="#FNanchor_965_965"><span class="label">[965]</span></a> We may compare, too, what Coriolanus says (ii. 3): “I will, sir,
flatter my sworn brother, the people.”</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_966_966" id="Footnote_966_966"></a><a href="#FNanchor_966_966"><span class="label">[966]</span></a> Cf. “Romeo and Juliet,” i. 1; “As You Like It,” v. 2.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_967_967" id="Footnote_967_967"></a><a href="#FNanchor_967_967"><span class="label">[967]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. viii. p. 204.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_968_968" id="Footnote_968_968"></a><a href="#FNanchor_968_968"><span class="label">[968]</span></a> See Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 133.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_969_969" id="Footnote_969_969"></a><a href="#FNanchor_969_969"><span class="label">[969]</span></a> See an article by Mr. Black, in <i>Antiquary</i>, 1881, vol. iii.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_970_970" id="Footnote_970_970"></a><a href="#FNanchor_970_970"><span class="label">[970]</span></a> See Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties,” pp. 34, 35.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_971_971" id="Footnote_971_971"></a><a href="#FNanchor_971_971"><span class="label">[971]</span></a> Gifford’s note on “Massinger’s Works,” 1813, vol. i. p. 170; see
Dyce’s “Glossary to Shakespeare,” pp. 269, 380.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_972_972" id="Footnote_972_972"></a><a href="#FNanchor_972_972"><span class="label">[972]</span></a> See Dyce, vol. iv. p. 395.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_973_973" id="Footnote_973_973"></a><a href="#FNanchor_973_973"><span class="label">[973]</span></a> Staunton’s “Shakespeare,” vol i. p. 257.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_974_974" id="Footnote_974_974"></a><a href="#FNanchor_974_974"><span class="label">[974]</span></a> “Guide into Tongues,” 1607.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_975_975" id="Footnote_975_975"></a><a href="#FNanchor_975_975"><span class="label">[975]</span></a> See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 343.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_976_976" id="Footnote_976_976"></a><a href="#FNanchor_976_976"><span class="label">[976]</span></a> Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 402.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_977_977" id="Footnote_977_977"></a><a href="#FNanchor_977_977"><span class="label">[977]</span></a> Ibid., vol. vi. p. 45.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_978_978" id="Footnote_978_978"></a><a href="#FNanchor_978_978"><span class="label">[978]</span></a> Ibid., p. 43.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_979_979" id="Footnote_979_979"></a><a href="#FNanchor_979_979"><span class="label">[979]</span></a> “Glossary,” p. 497; see Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 952.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_980_980" id="Footnote_980_980"></a><a href="#FNanchor_980_980"><span class="label">[980]</span></a> “Encyclopædia Britannica,” 1879, vol. ix. p. 366; see Doran’s “History
of Court Fools,” 1858.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_981_981" id="Footnote_981_981"></a><a href="#FNanchor_981_981"><span class="label">[981]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 350.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_982_982" id="Footnote_982_982"></a><a href="#FNanchor_982_982"><span class="label">[982]</span></a> Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. i. p. 371.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_983_983" id="Footnote_983_983"></a><a href="#FNanchor_983_983"><span class="label">[983]</span></a> The verb “to gage,” or “to pledge,” occurs in “Merchant of
Venice,” i. 1:
</p>

<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“but my chief care<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Is, to come fairly off from the great debts<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wherein my time, something too prodigal,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath left me gaged.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
<p>
Cf. “1 Henry IV.,” i. 3.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_984_984" id="Footnote_984_984"></a><a href="#FNanchor_984_984"><span class="label">[984]</span></a> “Pop. Antiq.,” vol. ii. p. 127.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_985_985" id="Footnote_985_985"></a><a href="#FNanchor_985_985"><span class="label">[985]</span></a> “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 858; see Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 431.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_986_986" id="Footnote_986_986"></a><a href="#FNanchor_986_986"><span class="label">[986]</span></a> A Welsh hook was a sort of bill, hooked at the end, and with a
long handle. See Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 497; and Singer’s “Shakespeare,”
vol. ix. p. 168.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_987_987" id="Footnote_987_987"></a><a href="#FNanchor_987_987"><span class="label">[987]</span></a> Brewer’s “Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,” p. 782.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_988_988" id="Footnote_988_988"></a><a href="#FNanchor_988_988"><span class="label">[988]</span></a> See Percy’s “Northumberland Household Book,” p. 49.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_989_989" id="Footnote_989_989"></a><a href="#FNanchor_989_989"><span class="label">[989]</span></a> See Singer’s “Shakespeare,” vol. vii. p. 350.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_990_990" id="Footnote_990_990"></a><a href="#FNanchor_990_990"><span class="label">[990]</span></a> “Shakespeare,” 1864, vol. i. p. 61.</p></div>

<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_991_991" id="Footnote_991_991"></a><a href="#FNanchor_991_991"><span class="label">[991]</span></a> See page <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</p></div>
</div>


<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[549]</a></span></h2>

<hr />

<ul><li>Aconite, its deadly poison, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>

<li><i>Adonis horti</i>, <a href="#Page_469">469</a>.</li>

<li>Agate, applied to a diminutive person, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</li>

<li>Ague, spider a cure for, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>

<li>Air, drizzling dew, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>

<li>All hid, all hid, children’s game, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>

<li>All-Saints’ Day, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li>All-Souls’ Day, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li>Almanacs, <a href="#Page_505">505</a>.</li>

<li>Alms-drink, <a href="#Page_527">527</a>.</li>

<li>Alphabet, called Christ-cross-row, <a href="#Page_508">508</a>.</li>

<li>Amaimon, name of evil spirit, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>

<li>Amulets, <a href="#Page_505">505</a>.</li>

<li>Anemone, legend relating to, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li>

<li>Ant, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li>Antic, a dance, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.</li>

<li>Ape, term of contempt or endearment, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">  leading of, in hell, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</li>

<li>Apostle-spoons, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>.</li>

<li>Apple, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li>

<li>Apple-John, name of apple, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li>

<li>Apple-squire, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, note.</li>

<li>Apricock or apricot, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>

<li>Archery, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>.</li>

<li>Ariel, fairy so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>

<li>Aroint thee, meaning of, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.</li>

<li>Aspen, supplied wood of Cross, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">trembling of, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li>

<li>Ass, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</li>

<li>Astrology, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>-<a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>

<li>Audry’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">lace, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Baby-in-the-eye, <a href="#Page_483">483</a>.</li>

<li>Bachelor’s buttons, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li>

<li>Backgammon, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</li>

<li>Badge of Poverty, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>.</li>

<li>Baffle, old punishment, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</li>

<li>Bagatelle, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</li>

<li>Bakie bird, name of bat, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>

<li>Balm, curative properties of, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">as oil of consecration, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li>Bandy, term at tennis, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>.</li>

<li>Barbason, evil spirit, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>.</li>

<li>Barbers’ forfeits, <a href="#Page_533">533</a>.</li>

<li>Barefoot, dancing, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>.</li>

<li>Barla-breikis, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</li>

<li>Barley-break, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</li>

<li>Barley broth, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li>Barnacle goose, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</li>

<li>Bartholomew’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li>Bartholomew Fair, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">pigs <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li>Base, old game, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.</li>

<li>Basilisk, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>

<li>Basins, burning, held before the eyes, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.</li>

<li>Bat, superstitions relating to, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>

<li>Bat-fowling, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</li>

<li>Bate, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, note.</li>

<li>Bay-tree, ominous, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>

<li>Bear, folk-lore of, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">caught by mirrors, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">baiting, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li>Beard, characteristic of a witch, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">customs associated with, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mutilation of, considered an outrage, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stroking of, preparatory to a favor, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">swearing by, <a href="#Page_487">487</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">shape of, <a href="#Page_487">487</a>.</li>

<li>Beauty, characteristic of fairies, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>

<li>Bedfellow, custom of having, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>.</li>

<li>Beef, supposed to impair intellect, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>.</li>

<li>Beetle, old name for, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Belemnite, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>

<li>Bell, tolling of, at funerals, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">curfew, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>.</li>

<li>Belly-blind, old game, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</li>

<li>Bergomask, dance, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.</li>

<li>Betrothing customs, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>-<a href="#Page_350">350</a>.</li>

<li>Bid the base, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</li>

<li>Bilboes, punishment, <a href="#Page_435">435</a>.</li>

<li>Billiards, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.</li>

<li>Bird-batting, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>, note.</li>

<li>Birding, term of hawking, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>

<li>Birth and baptism, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>-<a href="#Page_341">341</a>.</li>

<li>Biting of thumb, as an insult, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>.</li>

<li>Bitter-sweeting, apple so called, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>

<li>Blackbird, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Black Monday, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li>Bleeding, custom of, in spring, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cures for, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li>Blessed thistle, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li>Blindness, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>

<li>Blind-worm, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>

<li>Blister, superstition relating to, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>

<li>Blood, thickened by emotional influences, <a href="#Page_477">477</a>;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[550]</a></span></li>
<li class="sube">phrases connected with, <a href="#Page_476">476</a>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a>.</li>

<li>Blood-drinking sighs, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li>Blood-sucker, name for leech, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li>Blue-bottle, insect so called, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li>Boar-hunting, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>

<li>Body, trembling of, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>.</li>

<li>Boiling to death, old punishment, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.</li>

<li>Bone-ace, old game, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.</li>

<li>Bone-ache, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>

<li>Boots, to give the, harvest custom, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>.</li>

<li>Bots, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>

<li>Brain, notions relating to, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>.</li>

<li>Brain-pan, name for skull, <a href="#Page_479">479</a>.</li>

<li>Brand, old punishment, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>.</li>

<li>Brawl, old dance, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.</li>

<li>Breech, term for whipping, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>.</li>

<li>Breese, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>

<li>Bridal-bed, blessing of, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">decorating with flowers, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.</li>

<li>Bridal couple serenaded, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

<li>Bride-ale, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li>Bride’s veil, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">hair loose at wedding ceremony, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>.</li>

<li>Brine, soaking in, old punishment, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</li>

<li>Bruise, remedies for, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li>Bubukle, name for pimple, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li>Bull-baiting, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>

<li>Bullfinch, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, note.</li>

<li>Bully-rook, term of reproach, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li>Burn, remedy for, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li>Buzzard, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>By-drinkings, <a href="#Page_527">527</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Cakes and ale at festivals, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li>Camomile, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li>Canary, old dance, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.</li>

<li>Candles of the night, stars so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Carbuncle, supernatural qualities of, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</li>

<li>Cards, playing, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.</li>

<li>Carnations, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>

<li>Carp, most cunning of fishes, <a href="#Page_497">497</a>.</li>

<li>Carraways, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</li>

<li>Castor and Pollux, meteors so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Cat, familiar of witches, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>-<a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">said to have nine lives, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used as a term of contempt, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li>Cataract, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li>Cattle, destroyed by witches, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>

<li>Ceremonies, omens from sacrifices, <a href="#Page_506">506</a>.</li>

<li>Chaffinch, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Challenge, glove sent as a, <a href="#Page_537">537</a>.</li>

<li>Chameleon, said to feed on air, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">changes color, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>

<li>Changelings, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>

<li>Charity, St., <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li>Charles’s wain, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>

<li>Charms, <a href="#Page_506">506</a>.</li>

<li>Check, term in hawking, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</li>

<li>Cherry-pit, old game, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.</li>

<li>Cherry-tree, in connection with cuckoo-rhyme, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li>

<li>Chess, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.</li>

<li>Chester mysteries, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>

<li>Chewet, meaning of term, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li>Chilblains, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li>Children of the revels, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li>Christ-cross-row, name for alphabet, <a href="#Page_508">508</a>.</li>

<li>Christening day, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.</li>

<li>Christenings, entertainments at, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>.</li>

<li>Christmas, customs at, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">carol, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">eve, cock-crow on, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">gambol, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">wassail-bowl at, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">candle, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mummers, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">nutmeg, gift at, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>

<li>Christom child, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.</li>

<li>Chrysolite, supernatural virtues of, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>.</li>

<li>Cicely, St., <a href="#Page_321">321</a>, note.</li>

<li>Cinders of the elements, stars so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Cinque-pace, old dance, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.</li>

<li>Clacking at Easter, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>

<li>Clare’s (St.) fire, meteor so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Closing eye of the dead, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>.</li>

<li>Clouds, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>

<li>Cloud-in-the-face, term applied to a horse, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>

<li>Clover-flowers, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li>Cobwebs, used for stanching blood, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li>Cock, crows on Christmas Eve, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">spirits disappear at cock-crow, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>

<li>Cock-a-hoop, applied to a reckless person, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>.</li>

<li>Cockatrice, superstitions relating to, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">applied to a loose woman, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>

<li>Cock-boat, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, note.</li>

<li>Cock-chafer, old name for, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Cock-fighting, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li>

<li>Cockle, badge of pilgrims, <a href="#Page_498">498</a>.</li>

<li>Cock-light, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li>Cock’s-body, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.</li>

<li>Cock-shut time, name for twilight, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</li>

<li>Cock’s-passion, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.</li>

<li>Coddling, apple so called, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li>Cold palsies, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li>Colt, its metaphorical use, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">pixey, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li>Columbine, a thankless flower, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li>Comets, considered ominous, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>

<li>Cony-catch, term for cheating, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li>Cooling-card, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.</li>

<li>Coranto, old dance, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.</li>

<li>Cormorant, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li>Corpse, unlucky to keep on board, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.</li>

<li>Cotswold games, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

<li>Couch-glass, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li>“Coventry Mysteries,” <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li>Crab, name of apple, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[551]</a></span></li>

<li>Crants, name for garlands, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>.</li>

<li>Cricket, a good omen; <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">unlucky, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li>Crispin’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>

<li>Crocodile, tears of, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">said to be deceitful, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.</li>

<li>Cross, wood of, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>

<li>Cross-bow, shooting with, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li>Cross-road, ghosts of suicides haunt, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</li>

<li>Crow, bird of ill-omen, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li>Crow-flowers, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li>Crowfoot, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li>Crow-keeper, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>

<li>Crown, burning, placed on criminals, <a href="#Page_436">436</a>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.</li>

<li>Cry, applied to pack of hounds, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>

<li>Cry Budget, a watchword, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>.</li>

<li>Crystal, old term for the eye, <a href="#Page_483">483</a>.</li>

<li>Cuckold, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>

<li>Cuckoo, superstitions connected with, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>-<a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>

<li>Cuckoo-buds, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li>Cuckoo-flowers, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li>Cuerpo-Santo, meteor so called, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>

<li>Curfew-bell, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li>Curtal dog, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>

<li>Cut, name for a horse, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>.</li>

<li>Cuttle, a foul-mouthed person so called, <a href="#Page_498">498</a>.</li>

<li>Cypress, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Daffodil, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>.</li>

<li>Dances, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>-<a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</li>

<li>Dancing, ascribed to fairies, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>

<li>Dark-house, term for a mad-house, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>

<li>Darnel, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>

<li>Date, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>

<li>David’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li>Dead, burying of, in their ordinary dress, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">feasts of the, <a href="#Page_378">378</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">tombs of, ornamented, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cannot die on pigeons’ feathers, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">closing eyes of, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">decorated with flowers, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>.</li>

<li>Dead men’s fingers, orchis so called, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>

<li>Death and burial customs, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>-<a href="#Page_385">385</a>.</li>

<li>Death, prophecy at point of, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">high spirits presage impending, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">warnings at time of, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">watch, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">delayed until ebb of tide, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">devil seizes soul at, <a href="#Page_365">365</a>.</li>

<li>Death’s-head rings, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>.</li>

<li>Deer, hunting customs relating to, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_181">181</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">shooting with cross-bow, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">tears of, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.</li>

<li>Deformed children, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li>Deformity, superstitions connected with, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>

<li>Demoniacal possession, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>.</li>

<li>Demonology, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Dennis, St., patron saint of France, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li>Devil, cloven foot of, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li>Devil’s Dyke, myth of, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>

<li>Dew, its supposed virtues, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">curious notions respecting, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>

<li>Dice, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.</li>

<li>Disedge, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li>Divine right of kings, <a href="#Page_512">512</a>.</li>

<li>Dog, its howl ominous, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">rides with ghosts, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">days, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">killer, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>

<li>Domestic fowl, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>

<li>Dove, customs associated with, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>-<a href="#Page_115">115</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">Mahomet’s, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">of Venus, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li>Dragon, type of evil, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">draws chariot of night, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">folk-lore of, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>

<li>Dreams, prognostics of good and evil, <a href="#Page_508">508</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">malicious spirits torment their victims in, <a href="#Page_509">509</a>.</li>

<li>Dribble, term in archery, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</li>

<li>Drowning, dangerous to save a person from, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.</li>

<li>Duck, to swim like a, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>

<li>Duck-hunting, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li>Duels, <a href="#Page_509">509</a>.</li>

<li>Dun is in the mire, Christmas game, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.</li>

<li>Dwarf elder, superstition connected with, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Eagle, gazes on the sun, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">its great age, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bird of good omen, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">selected for Roman standard, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li>Ear, tingling of, <a href="#Page_480">480</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">biting of, expression of endearment, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">want of, for music, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>.</li>

<li>Earnest-money, <a href="#Page_528">528</a>.</li>

<li>Earthquakes, cause of, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">ominous, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li>Easter morning, dancing of sun on, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">clacking at, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">new clothes worn on, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">Monday, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li>Ebb of tide, death delayed until, <a href="#Page_370">370</a>.</li>

<li>Ebony, emblem of darkness, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>.</li>

<li>Eclipses, savage notions respecting, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">unlucky, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">a bad omen, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>

<li>Eels, roused by thunder, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>

<li>Eggs in moonshine, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">witches sail in, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li>Eisel, name for vinegar, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.</li>

<li>Elberich, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>

<li>Elbow, itching of, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>.</li>

<li>Elder, tree on which Judas hanged himself, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">plant of bad omen, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>

<li>Elements, the four, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>.</li>

<li>Elephant, said to have no joints, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">capture of, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>

<li>Elf-fire, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note;</li>
<li class="sube">elf-locks, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>

<li>Elfin-grey, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[552]</a></span></li>

<li>Elmo’s (St.) stars, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>

<li>Elves, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li>Embossed, applied to deer, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>

<li>Emmew, a term in falconry, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>

<li>Engine, name for the rack, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>.</li>

<li>Epilepsy, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

<li>Equinox, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>

<li>Eringoes, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li>Etheldreda’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li>Evil spirits, assume various forms, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">a dead friend, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>.</li>

<li>Exclamations, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>-<a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Exorcism of spirits, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>.</li>

<li>Eyas-musket, name for a young sparrow-hawk, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>

<li>Eye, closing of, at death, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bitten, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">blueness of, <a href="#Page_482">482</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">the evil, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_482">482</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Face, to play the hypocrite, <a href="#Page_484">484</a>.</li>

<li>Fading, a dance, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.</li>

<li>Fairies, assume various forms, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">attentive to youthful dead, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">beauty of, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fond of cleanliness, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">diminutiveness of, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">dislike irreligious people, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">dress of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">enrich their favorites, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">exchange children, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">expeditious in their actions, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fatal to speak to, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fond of dancing and music, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">haunts of, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">immortality of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">kind to mortals, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">malignant, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mischievous, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">perpetual youth of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">vanish at will, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>

<li>Fairy revels, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>

<li>Fairy-rings, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

<li>Falcon-gentle, species of hawk, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

<li>Falling-sickness, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.</li>

<li>Fast and loose, a cheating game, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.</li>

<li>Feet, stumbling of, unlucky, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>.</li>

<li>Fencing, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</li>

<li>Fennel, an inflammatory herb, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>

<li>Fern-seed, renders invisible, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li><i>Feux follets</i>, name for will-o’-the-wisp, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>

<li>Fever, spider a cure for, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>

<li>Fiery dragon, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li>Fiery Trigon, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>

<li>Fig, phrases connected with, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li>Filliping the toad, game of boys, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.</li>

<li>Finch-egg, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>

<li>Finger, itching of, <a href="#Page_482">482</a>.</li>

<li>Finger-stone, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>

<li>Fire-drake, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li>Fistula, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.</li>

<li>Fit, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</li>

<li>Fitchew, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li>Flagellation, treatment for persons possessed, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>

<li>Flap-dragon, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.</li>

<li>Flap-jacks, name for pancakes, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>

<li>Flaws, sudden gusts of wind, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>

<li>Fleas, loach said to breed, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>.</li>

<li>Fleshment, military term, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>.</li>

<li>Fleur-de-lys, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li>Flibbertigibbet, a fiend, name also for <i>ignis fatuus</i>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li>Flitter-mouse, term for the bat, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>

<li>Flower-de-luce, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>

<li>Flowers, carried on a maiden’s coffin, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">for decorating corpses, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">on graves, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">at weddings, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>.</li>

<li>Flowering Sunday, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>.</li>

<li>Fly, form of an evil spirit, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li>

<li>Folk-medicine, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>-<a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li>Fools, <a href="#Page_532">532</a>.</li>

<li>Football, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>.</li>

<li>Forelooked, term for evil eye, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.</li>

<li>Forfeits, <a href="#Page_533">533</a>.</li>

<li>Fortune-tellers, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>.</li>

<li>Fox, hunting of, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">a weapon so called, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>

<li>Frateretto, fiend so called, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Friar’s lantern, name for <i>ignis fatuus</i>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>Frogs used for divination, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>

<li>Fullams, false dice, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>.</li>

<li>Funeral rites, supposed necessity for, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Gad-fly, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>

<li>Gage, a glove so called, <a href="#Page_536">536</a>, note.</li>

<li>Gall of goat, used by witches, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</li>

<li>Galliard, dance, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>, note.</li>

<li>Gambling, <a href="#Page_533">533</a>.</li>

<li>Game laws, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.</li>

<li>Garters, <a href="#Page_534">534</a>.</li>

<li>Gaudy days, <a href="#Page_535">535</a>.</li>

<li>George (St.) and dragon, myth of, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</li>

<li>George’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</li>

<li>Giants, belief in, <a href="#Page_512">512</a>.</li>

<li>Gib cat, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</li>

<li>Gillyflower, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>

<li>Gimmal-ring, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</li>

<li>Gleek, old game, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.</li>

<li>Glove, worn as a favor, <a href="#Page_536">536</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">memorial of a friend, <a href="#Page_536">536</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">signal of a challenge, <a href="#Page_536">536</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">a pledge, <a href="#Page_537">537</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">scented, <a href="#Page_538">538</a>.</li>

<li>Glow-worm, superstition relating to, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>

<li>Goat, superstition relating to, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>.</li>

<li>“God save the mark,” exclamation, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>.</li>

<li>God’s tokens, plague-spots, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li>Gold, melted, poured down the throat, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">chains, worn by persons of rank, <a href="#Page_544">544</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">medicinal virtues of, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</li>

<li>Golden-russeting, name of an apple, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li>Goldfinch, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[553]</a></span></li>

<li>Good Friday, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li>Good Lubber, name of a spirit, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li>Good year, corruption of <i>goujère</i>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.</li>

<li>Goose, emblem of cowardice, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">terms connected with, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li>Gossamer, notions relating to, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>

<li>Gossip’s bowl, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>

<li>Gourds, false dice, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>.</li>

<li>Gout, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>

<li>Grand liquor, the <i>aurum potabile</i> of alchemists, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>.</li>

<li>Grave, position of, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">yards, haunted by spectres, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>.</li>

<li>Gudgeon, <a href="#Page_498">498</a>.</li>

<li>Guinea-hen, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>

<li>Gull, term for a fool, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used for a trick or imposition, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>

<li>Gull-catcher, applied to sharpers, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">groper, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>

<li>Gurnet, term of reproach, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Habundia, Mab, perhaps, a contraction of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>

<li>Hack, punishment of knight, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</li>

<li>Hag-seed, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li>Haggard, term in hawking, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</li>

<li>Hair, antipathy to red and yellow, <a href="#Page_485">485</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">much, denotes want of intellect, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stands on end through fear, <a href="#Page_488">488</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">turns white through sorrow and fear, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used metaphorically, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bride’s, dishevelled at wedding, ceremony, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>, <a href="#Page_353">353</a>.</li>

<li>Halcyon days, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>

<li>Halidom, meaning of, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>.</li>

<li>Hallowmas, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li>Hand, palmistry of, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">worms bred in fingers of idle servants, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">terms associated with, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>.</li>

<li>Hare, a melancholy animal, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">proverb relating to, <a href="#Page_462">462</a>.</li>

<li>Harebell, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>

<li>Hare-lip, supposed to be work of fairy, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>.</li>

<li>Hairie-racket, old game, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>.</li>

<li>Hart royal, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li>Havoc, to cry, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>.</li>

<li>Hawk, catching game with, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>-<a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">to seel a, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">training of, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">to imp a, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>

<li>Hay, old dance, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">exclamation, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>.</li>

<li>Head, shape of, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>.</li>

<li>Heart, seat of understanding, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>, <a href="#Page_494">494</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">courage, <a href="#Page_494">494</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">death from broken, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>.</li>

<li>Heart’s-ease, nickname of, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used for love-philtres, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>

<li>Hecate, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>

<li>Hedgehog, said to suck udders of cows, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">familiar of witches, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">legends connected with, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">a term of reproach, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</li>

<li>Helen’s (St.) fire, meteor so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Helme’s (St.) the, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Hemlock, its poisonous character, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">supposed to be death-drink of Greeks, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">nickname for, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li>Henbane, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li>Herb of Grace, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li>Herm’s (St.) the, meteor, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Herne’s oak, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>

<li>Heron, used in hawking, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>

<li>Hid, or hide fox, game so called, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.</li>

<li>High spirits a bad omen, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>.</li>

<li>Hippopotamus, <a href="#Page_504">504</a>.</li>

<li>Hob-and-his-lanthorn, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>Hobany’s lanthorn, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>Hobbididance, evil spirit so called, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Hobgoblin, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>

<li>Hobby-horse, character in morris-dance, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">applied to a loose woman, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li>Hock cart, at harvest-home, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>

<li>Hold, term in fighting, <a href="#Page_530">530</a>.</li>

<li>Holy-Cross Day, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li>Holyrood Day, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li>Holy thistle, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>

<li>Honey-dew, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li>Honey-stalks, name for clover-flowers, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li>

<li>Hoodman-blind, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</li>

<li>Horn-mad, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>

<li>Horses, fairies play pranks with, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">witches harass, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">terms connected with, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">forehorse of a team decorated, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">hair, notion respecting, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">racing, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</li>

<li>Hum-buz, name for cockchafer, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Hunting customs, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>

<li>Hunt’s-up, morning song to a newly-married couple, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

<li>Hysteria, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Idiots, said to be fairies’ children, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>.</li>

<li>Imp, to, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>

<li>Incubi, class of devils, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li>Infection, notions respecting, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>

<li>Iniquity, character in old miracle-plays, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</li>

<li>Insane root, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li>Insanity, influenced by moon, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>

<li>Irreligious persons, fairies dislike, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>

<li>Ivy, hung at door of a vintner, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Jack-a-lantern, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>

<li>Jack-a-Lent, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>

<li>Jackdaw, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>

<li>Jacket-a-wad, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>Jane Shore, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>

<li>Jaundice, spider a cure for, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>

<li>Jay, applied to loose woman, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[554]</a></span></li>

<li>Jesses, trappings of hawks, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>

<li>Jesus, inscribed on letters, <a href="#Page_540">540</a>.</li>

<li>Jews, torturing of, <a href="#Page_474">474</a>.</li>

<li>Jew’s eye, <a href="#Page_473">473</a>.</li>

<li>Jig, an old dance, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>.</li>

<li>Joan of Arc, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>

<li>Joan in-the wad, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>John (St.) Baptist’s night, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>

<li>John’s (St.) wort, divination by, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li>Judas, hanged himself on an elder, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">kiss, <a href="#Page_539">539</a>.</li>

<li>Justice Jarvis, old pastime, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Kecksies, stalks of hemlock, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</li>

<li>Kestrel, applied to hawk, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>

<li>Key cold, meaning of, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>.</li>

<li>Kid fox, game, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>.</li>

<li>Kingfisher, weather lore of, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">hung up in cottages, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>

<li>Kings, supernatural authority of, <a href="#Page_517">517</a>.</li>

<li>King’s evil, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>

<li>Kiss, at betrothal, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">at marriage ceremony, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fee of lady’s partner, <a href="#Page_538">538</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">saluting ladies with, <a href="#Page_539">539</a>.</li>

<li>Kissing comfits, <a href="#Page_539">539</a>.</li>

<li>Kit-with-the-candle-stick, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>

<li>Kite, bird of ill-omen, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">curious notion respecting, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li>

<li>Knotgrass, hinders growth, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Lace songs, <a href="#Page_539">539</a>.</li>

<li>Lachrymatory vials, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.</li>

<li>Lady-bird, term of endearment, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>

<li>Lady-smocks, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>

<li>Lamb ale, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>.</li>

<li>Lamb-mass, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li>Lambert’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li>Lamb’s-wool, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>

<li>Lammas Day, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li>Lamps, perpetual, <a href="#Page_383">383</a>.</li>

<li>Lapwing, an eccentric bird, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">symbol of insincerity, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">draws pursuers from its nest, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>

<li>Lark, changes eyes with toad, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">song of, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mode of capturing, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>.</li>

<li>Laudatory verses, affixed to tomb, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.</li>

<li>Laugh-and-lie-down, game at cards, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.</li>

<li>Laurel, symbol of victory, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>

<li>Lavolta, French dance, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>.</li>

<li>Leap-frog, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</li>

<li>Leather-coat, name of apple, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>

<li>Leech, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li>Leek, on St. David’s Day, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>

<li>Leet ale, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_548">548</a>.</li>

<li>Lent, Jack-a-lent made at, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fleshmeat not sold during, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>.</li>

<li>Leprosy, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>

<li>Lethargy, confounded with apoplexy, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>

<li>Letters, Emmanuel prefixed to, <a href="#Page_540">540</a>.</li>

<li>Light-o’-love, tune of dance, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.</li>

<li>Lightning, persons struck by, accounted holy, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>

<li>Lily, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>

<li>Lion, supposed generosity of, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">will not injure a royal prince, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">kept without food, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>

<li>Liver, seat of love, <a href="#Page_494">494</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">absence of blood in, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>.</li>

<li>Livery, to sue one’s, <a href="#Page_541">541</a></li>

<li>Lizard, said to be venomous, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used by witches, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li>Loach breeds fleas, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>.</li>

<li>Loaf mass, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>.</li>

<li>Lob of spirit, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li>Lob’s pound, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li>Loggat, game so called, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>.</li>

<li>Long purples, name of orchis, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>

<li>Loose, term in archery, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>

<li>Lord Mayor’s Day, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">show, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fool, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>

<li>Love charms <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.</li>

<li>Love-day, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>.</li>

<li>Love-in-idleness, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>

<li>Love-lock, <a href="#Page_480">480</a>.</li>

<li>Love philtres, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.</li>

<li>Lovers, eccentricities of, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>, note, <a href="#Page_534">534</a>.</li>

<li>Lucky days, <a href="#Page_512">512</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Mab, fairy queen, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>.</li>

<li>Magpie, regarded as mysterious bird, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">claims for averting ill-luck of seeing, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">nicknamed magot-pie, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>

<li>Magic, system of, <a href="#Page_482">482</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">verses, <a href="#Page_508">508</a>.</li>

<li>Mahu, prince of darkness, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Mahomet’s dove, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>

<li>Man in the moon, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li>Mandrake, resemblance of, to human figure, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">watched over by Satan, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">its groans, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">superstitions relating to, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>-<a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>

<li>Manningtree ox, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li>Marbles, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</li>

<li>Marigold, opens its flowers at sun’s bidding, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>

<li>Marriage, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>-<a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">ceremony mostly on Sunday, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>.</li>

<li>Martin, unlucky to molest a, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">builds near human habitations, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>

<li>Martin’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">summer, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>

<li>Martlemas, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>.</li>

<li>Mary-bud, name for marigold, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>

<li>Mankin, used for hare, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, note.</li>

<li>May-day observances, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>.</li>

<li>Maying, going a, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li>May-pole, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>.</li>

<li>Meadow cress, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li>Measles, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[555]</a></span></li>

<li>Medlar, applied to woman of loose character, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>

<li>Merlin, <a href="#Page_511">511</a>;</li>
<li>  prophecies of, <a href="#Page_515">515</a>.</li>

<li>Mermaid, <a href="#Page_500">500</a>-<a href="#Page_503">503</a>.</li>

<li>Meteors, regarded as ominous, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">names for, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Metrical charms, <a href="#Page_508">508</a>.</li>

<li>Michaelmas, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>

<li>Midsummer Eve, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">man, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">watch, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li>Military lore, <a href="#Page_541">541</a>.</li>

<li>Mill, name for nine-men’s-morris, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</li>

<li>Mines, guarded by evil spirits, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">truepenny, mining term, <a href="#Page_542">542</a>.</li>

<li>Minnow, term of contempt, <a href="#Page_503">503</a>.</li>

<li>Miracle-plays, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li>Mirror, bears surprised by, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>

<li>Mistletoe, notions respecting, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

<li>Mock-water, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>

<li>Moist star, name for moon, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>

<li>Moldwarp, term for mole, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>

<li>Mole said to be blind, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>

<li>Moles on body ominous, <a href="#Page_495">495</a>.</li>

<li>Moon, adoration of, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">eclipse of, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">man in the, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">sanguine color of, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">paleness of, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>-<a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">insane persons affected by, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">swearing by, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">enchantment of, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">invocation of, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">inconstancy of, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">horns of, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">moisture of, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">influence over agricultural affairs, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">waxing and waning of, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">affected by witchcraft, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li>

<li>Moon-calf, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.</li>

<li>Moralities, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</li>

<li>Morris-dance, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, note, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</li>

<li>Moth, a fairy, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">insect, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>

<li>Mother, name for hysteria, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>

<li>Mother of all humors, the moon, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>

<li>Mouse, term of endearment, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>

<li>Mouse-hunt, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>

<li>Mummy, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>

<li>Murdered persons bleed at approach of murderer, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>.</li>

<li>Mushroom, superstitions relating to, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

<li>Music, ascribed to fairies, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">as a medical agency, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cure for madness, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">at funerals, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">weddings, <a href="#Page_352">352</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">of the spheres, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.</li>

<li>Muss, a scramble, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</li>

<li>Mustard, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mustard-seed, a fairy, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Narcissus, legend concerning, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>

<li>Negro, form of evil spirit, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>

<li>Nicholas’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">patron of children, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">clerks, cant term for highwaymen, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>.</li>

<li>Night crow, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">heron, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">raven, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>

<li>Nightingale, sings with breast on thorn, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">evil spirits assume form of, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">story of, and glow-worm, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>

<li>Nightmare, charms for, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

<li>Nine-holes, old game, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</li>

<li>Nine-men’s-morris, rustic game, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>.</li>

<li>Nine Worthies, the, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

<li>Noddy, game at cards, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</li>

<li>Nose, bleeding of, unlucky, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li><i>Novem quinque</i>, game of dice, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</li>

<li>Numbers, odd, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li>Nuptial kiss, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>.</li>

<li>Nutmeg, gift at Christmas, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>O ho! exclamation, <a href="#Page_530">530</a>.</li>

<li>Oak, crown of, a mark of honor, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">Herne’s, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>

<li>Oberon, king of fairyland, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li>

<li>Obidicut, evil spirit, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Odd numbers, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>

<li>Olive, emblem of peace, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>

<li>One-and-thirty, old game, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>.</li>

<li>Osprey, fascinating influence of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>

<li>Ostrich, extraordinary digestion of, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>

<li>Otnit, German story of, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>

<li>Ouphe, name for fairy, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>

<li>Our Lady’s smock, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>

<li>Ousel, name for blackbird, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>

<li>Owl, bird of ill-omen, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">legend concerning, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>

<li>Owlet’s wing used by witches, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>

<li>Oysters, proverb relating to, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Paddock, term for toad, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>

<li>Pageants, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>

<li>Palm, symbol of victory, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>

<li>Palmers, name for pilgrims, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Palmistry, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>, <a href="#Page_490">490</a>.</li>

<li>Paralysis, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li>Parish-top, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</li>

<li>Parrot, restless before rain, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">taught unlucky words, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>

<li>Partridge, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</li>

<li>Passing-bell, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>.</li>

<li>Patrick (St.) drives reptiles from Ireland, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">his festival, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">purgatory, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>.</li>

<li>Patrons, praying for, <a href="#Page_543">543</a>.</li>

<li>Pavan, a dance, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.</li>

<li>Peacock, its proverbial use, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>

<li>Peajock, peacock so called, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>

<li>Pear, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Pearls, swallowing of, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">powdered, thrown over sovereigns, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">medicinal properties of, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">legendary origin of, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.</li>

<li>Peas-blossom, name of fairy, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li>Peascod wooing, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Peg-a-lantern, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, note.</li>

<li>Peg-morris, game so called, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[556]</a></span></li>

<li>Pelican, feeds young ones with her blood, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">hatched dead, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>

<li>Periapts, <a href="#Page_506">506</a>.</li>

<li>Pheasant, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>

<li>Philip, name for sparrow, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>

<li>Philomel, term for nightingale, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>

<li>Philosopher’s stone, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>

<li>Phœnix, rises from its own ashes, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>

<li>Pigeon, feathers of, unlucky, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used as carrier, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">constancy of, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>

<li>Pike, old name for, <a href="#Page_503">503</a>.</li>

<li>Pilgrims, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Pillory, mode of punishment, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>.</li>

<li>Piskey, Devonshire name for fairy, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li>Pismire, name for ant, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>

<li>Pixy, name for fairy, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li>Pixy-led, misled by fairies, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li>Planets, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">influence of, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">irregular motion of, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li>Plantain, its medicinal use, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">water, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li>Pleurisy, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>

<li>Plica Polonica, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>

<li>Pluck a crow, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>

<li>Plucking geese, a boy’s sport, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li>Poake-ledden, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>

<li>Poison, vulgar error relating to, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>

<li>Polecat, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li>Pomander, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>

<li>Pomewater, name of apple, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</li>

<li>Pooka, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>

<li>Poor man’s parmacetti, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>

<li>Poperin, name for pear, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Popinjay, name for parrot, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>

<li>Poppy, deadly qualities of, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</li>

<li>Porcupine darts his quills, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li>Porpoise, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_503">503</a>.</li>

<li>Portents, belief in, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li>Posy rings, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.</li>

<li>Potato, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</li>

<li>Poverty, badge of, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>.</li>

<li>Prayers, of Church, morbific influence of, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">witches say backwards, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.</li>

<li>Press, old torture, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</li>

<li>Primavista, game at cards, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.</li>

<li>Primero, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>.</li>

<li>Primrose, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</li>

<li>Priser, term for a wrestler, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>.</li>

<li>Prison bars or base, rustic game, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.</li>

<li>Prophecy, at death, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>.</li>

<li>Proud tailor, name for goldfinch, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li>Proverbs, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>-<a href="#Page_474">474</a>.</li>

<li>Puck, name of fairy, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>

<li>Punishments, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>-<a href="#Page_443">443</a>.</li>

<li>Push, exclamation, <a href="#Page_498">498</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">pin, game, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.</li>

<li>Puttock, name for kite, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Quails, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">fighting, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>

<li>Quarry, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>

<li>Quintam, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>.</li>

<li>Quoits, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Rabbit, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">suckers, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>

<li>Race of horses, term for a stud, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>

<li>Rack, torture of, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</li>

<li>Racking clouds, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>

<li>Ragged-robin, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>

<li>Rainbow, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li>Rapture, name for trance, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>.</li>

<li>Rat, rhymed to death, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">leaving a ship, ominous, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>

<li>Raven, bird of ill-omen, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">supposed longevity of, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">deserts its young, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">feathers, used by witches, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</li>

<li>Red blood, sign of courage, <a href="#Page_477">477</a>.</li>

<li>Red pestilence, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li>Reed, for shepherds’ pipes, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>

<li>Rere-mouse, name for bat, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>

<li>Rheumatism, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>

<li>Rhyne toll, old manorial custom, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li>

<li>Rings, symbolical use, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">exchange in marriage contracts, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">death’s-head, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">running for the, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">rush, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">posy, <a href="#Page_388">388</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">token, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">thumb, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.</li>

<li>Rivo, an exclamation, <a href="#Page_530">530</a>.</li>

<li>Robin Goodfellow, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>-<a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>

<li>Robin Hood, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li>Robin Redbreast covers dead bodies with leaves, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>

<li>Rook, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bird of good omen, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">deserting a rookery, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li>Rose, associated with “Wars of Roses,” <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">divination by, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">symbolical use, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">customs connected with, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cakes, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">water, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</li>

<li>Rosemary, strengthens memory, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">symbol of remembrance, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">at weddings and funerals, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">for garnishing dishes at Christmas, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>

<li>Roundel, a dance, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>.</li>

<li>Rouse, <a href="#Page_528">528</a>.</li>

<li>Ruddock, name for redbreast, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>

<li>Rue, divination by, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li>Running, for the ring, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">the figure of eight, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">counter, hunting term, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>

<li>Rush-bearings, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>

<li>Rush candle, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>

<li>Rush-ring, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Sabbath of witches, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>

<li>Saffron, its uses, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li>Sagittary, <a href="#Page_543">543</a>.</li>

<li>Salad-days, <a href="#Page_543">543</a>.</li>

<li>Saliva, medical notion respecting, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li>Salt, used metaphorically, <a href="#Page_543">543</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">sitting below the, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>.</li>

<li>Salutations, <a href="#Page_544">544</a>.</li>

<li>Sampson, Agnes, reputed witch, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[557]</a></span></li>

<li>Satyrs’ dance, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.</li>

<li>Scale of dragon, used by witches, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>

<li>Scambling days, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>

<li>Scammell or scamel, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>

<li>Scare-crow, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>

<li>Scrofula, cure for, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>

<li>Sea, source of dew, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">persons drowned in, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">eagle, name for osprey, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">gull, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mell or mew, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">monster, <a href="#Page_504">504</a>.</li>

<li>Secondary rainbow, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li>See-saw, game, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>.</li>

<li>Seel, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li>Serpent, called a worm, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">its forked tongue supposed to injure, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">said to cause death without pain, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">used by witches, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">emblem of ingratitude, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cures for bite of, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">driven out of Ireland by St. Patrick, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">casting of its slough, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>

<li>Serpigo, name for skin disease, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>

<li>Servants, taking oath of fidelity, <a href="#Page_544">544</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">gold chains worn by, <a href="#Page_544">544</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">attend bare-headed, <a href="#Page_545">545</a>.</li>

<li>Sheep-shearing customs, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>

<li>Sheer ale, <a href="#Page_528">528</a>.</li>

<li>Shepherd’s, mill, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">purse, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>

<li>Shepherd-queen, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li>Sheriffs’ post, <a href="#Page_545">545</a>.</li>

<li>Shoe-tye, name for a traveller, <a href="#Page_545">545</a>.</li>

<li>Shoeing-horn, <a href="#Page_545">545</a>.</li>

<li>Shooting stars, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li>Shore, Jane, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>

<li>Shove-groat, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">shove-halfpenny, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</li>

<li>Shrouding-sheet, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.</li>

<li>Shrove Tuesday, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>

<li>Sickness, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>.</li>

<li>Sieve, used by witches, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">toss in a, punishment so called, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</li>

<li>Sigh, notions respecting, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li>Signatures, doctrine of, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>

<li>Silence before thunder, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>

<li>“Six Worthies,” <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>

<li>Skimmington, old ceremony of, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>.</li>

<li>Slide, board, or groat, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, note;</li>
<li class="sube">thrift, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, note.</li>

<li>Slip-thrift, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, note.</li>

<li>Slough of snake, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>

<li>Slow-worm, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>

<li>Smulkin, evil spirit, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>

<li>Smithfield fair, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>

<li>Snails, charming of, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">omens of fine weather, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>

<li>Sneak-cup, <a href="#Page_528">528</a>.</li>

<li>Sneck-up, exclamation, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Snipe, applied to foolish man, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>

<li>Snowballs, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</li>

<li>Solemn supper, <a href="#Page_545">545</a>.</li>

<li>Sop o’ the moonshine, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li>Souls, transmigration of, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>

<li>Soul-bell, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mass cakes, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>.</li>

<li>Souling, going a, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>

<li>Span-counter, old game, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>.</li>

<li>Sparrow, called Philip, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">hawk, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>

<li>Spear-grass, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li>Spectre huntsman, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>

<li>Spider, considered venomous, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cure for jaundice and ague, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">web used for stopping blood, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bottled, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">gossamer, notion respecting, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>

<li>Spirits, various kinds of, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">unlucky to cross their path, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">disappear at cock-crow, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">impatient at being interrogated, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">their appearance, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">walking of, by way of penance, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">reason for appearing, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">allotted time for work, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">signs of their approach, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">of revenge, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>

<li>Spleen, supposed cause of laughter, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>.</li>

<li>Spy, I, exclamation, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Squalls, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>

<li>Stalking horse, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>

<li>Starling, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>

<li>Stars, influence on mundane events, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">heroes reckoned among, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>

<li>Statute-cap, <a href="#Page_546">546</a>.</li>

<li>Stephen’s (St.) Day, hunting wren on, <a href="#Page_501">501</a>.</li>

<li>Sterility, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>

<li>Stigmatic, deformed person so called, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>

<li>Stocks, old punishment, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>.</li>

<li>Stool-ball, old game, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.</li>

<li>Stoop, or swoop, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>.</li>

<li>Stover, fodder for cattle, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li>Strappado, military punishment, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>.</li>

<li>Strawberry, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>

<li>Succubi, class of devils, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>

<li>Suicide, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>

<li>Sun, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">dancing of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">cloudy rising, ominous, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">red sunrise, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">watery sunset, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">supposed to be a planet, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</li>

<li>Sunday, fashionable day for weddings, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</li>

<li>Sunshine in March, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li>

<li>Swallow, harbinger of spring, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bird of good omen, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li>Swan, sings before death, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>

<li>Sword, swearing by, <a href="#Page_542">542</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">dance, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>.</li>

<li>Sympathetic indications, <a href="#Page_518">518</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Tailor, exclamation, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Tailor’s goose, name for pressing-iron, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li>Tassel-gentle, name of hawk, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li>

<li>Tavy’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>.</li>

<li>Tawdry lace, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>.</li>

<li>Tears, of the deer, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">crocodile, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>.</li>

<li>Teeth, superstitions relating to, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[558]</a></span></li>

<li>Telme’s (St.) fire, meteor so called, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>

<li>Ten bones, name for fingers, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>.</li>

<li>Ten commandments, <a href="#Page_491">491</a>.</li>

<li>Tennis, <a href="#Page_419">419</a>.</li>

<li>Termagant, tyrant of miracle-plays, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>

<li>Tewksbury mustard, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>

<li>Theatrical lore, <a href="#Page_546">546</a>.</li>

<li>Thorns, legend relating to, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li>Threshold, bride must not cross, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>.</li>

<li>Thumb, biting of, an insult, <a href="#Page_492">492</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">rings, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>.</li>

<li>Thunder, notions relating to, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">bolt, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stone, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li>Tick-tack, old game, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>.</li>

<li>Tiger, roars in stormy weather, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>

<li>Tire, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>

<li>Titania, fairy queen, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>

<li>Tilly-vally, exclamation, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Toad, evil spirit likened to, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">changes eyes with lark, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">said to be venomous, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stone, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>

<li>Tokens plague-spots, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>

<li>Tomb, ornamenting, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.</li>

<li>Tongue, blister on, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>

<li>Toothache, <a href="#Page_507">507</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">caused by a worm, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>

<li>Torches at weddings, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

<li>Toss in a sieve, punishment so called, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</li>

<li>Touching for king’s evil, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>

<li>Tournaments, <a href="#Page_547">547</a>.</li>

<li>Tower, term in falconry, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</li>

<li>Transmigration of souls, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>

<li>Tread a measure, dance, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</li>

<li>Trefoil, divination by, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li>Trial by the stool, for detecting witches, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>

<li>Trip and go, a morris-dance, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>.</li>

<li>Troll-my-dame, or Troll-madam, game so called, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</li>

<li>Truepenny, mining term, <a href="#Page_542">542</a>.</li>

<li>Trump, old game, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</li>

<li>Trumpet, for announcing visitors, <a href="#Page_547">547</a>.</li>

<li>Tub-fast, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>.</li>

<li>Turkey, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

<li>Turquoise, supposed virtues of, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>.</li>

<li>Tutelary guardians, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>

<li>Twelfth Day, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>

<li>Tybert or Tybalt, cat so called, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Unicorn, mode of betraying, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>

<li>Up-spring, German dance, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_432">432</a>.</li>

<li>Urchin, name for fairy, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>

<li>Urchins’ dance, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Valentine’s (St.) Day, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">birds choose their mates on, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">selecting valentines on, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">customs in France on, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>.</li>

<li>Vervain, divination by, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>.</li>

<li>Vice, character in old miracle-plays, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>.</li>

<li>Violet, associated with early death, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">superstition relating to, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>

<li><i>Virus lunare</i>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li>

<li>Vitalis (St.) invoked in case of nightmare, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>

<li>Vulture, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Wagtail, used in opprobrious sense, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</li>

<li>Wakes, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>.</li>

<li>Walking fire, name for <i>ignis fatuus</i>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>

<li>Wandering, knight, name of sun, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stars, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>

<li>War-cry, <a href="#Page_547">547</a>.</li>

<li>Warden, name of pear, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>.</li>

<li>Wasp, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>

<li>Wassail, bowl, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">candle, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>.</li>

<li>Wat, name for hare, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</li>

<li>Water, casting, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">galls, name for rainbow, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>

<li>Waxen images, used by witches, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>

<li>Weasel, considered ominous, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">kept in houses, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">said to be quarrelsome, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>

<li>Weathercocks, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>

<li>Web-and-pin, name for cataract, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>

<li>Wedding-torch, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>.</li>

<li>Were-wolf, mark of, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li>

<li>Westward, ho, exclamation, <a href="#Page_531">531</a>.</li>

<li>Whale, <a href="#Page_504">504</a>.</li>

<li>Wheel, punishment of, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</li>

<li>Whipping, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>.</li>

<li>Whistling of swan, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li>

<li>White dog-rose, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>

<li>Whitsun, ale, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">mysteries, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>

<li>Whitsuntide, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>

<li>Wild-goose chase, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>

<li>Will-o’-the-wisp, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>

<li>Will-with-a-wisp, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>

<li>Willow, symbol of sadness, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">garlands made of, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>

<li>Winchester, college, custom at, <a href="#Page_387">387</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">goose, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>

<li>Wind, weather-lore of, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">sale of, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>

<li>Winding-sheet, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_516">516</a>.</li>

<li>Wisp, punishment for a scold, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>.</li>

<li>Witches, in “Macbeth,” <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">create storms, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">drawing blood from, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">propitiation of, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">powers limited, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">harass horses, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">offspring of, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">say their prayers backwards, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">sell or give winds, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">ointment, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">intercourse between, and demons, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">protection from, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">vanish at will, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">destroy cattle, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">look into futurity, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">beard, characteristic of, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">trials, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li>

<li>Witch of Brentford, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>

<li>Wits, the five, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>.</li>

<li>Woodcock, applied to a foolish person, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[559]</a></span></li>

<li>Worm, a poor creature, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">name for serpent, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">toothache, said to be caused by, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>

<li>Wormwood used in weaning, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>

<li>Wren, its diminutiveness, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</li>

<li>Wrestling, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</li>

<li>&nbsp;</li>
<li>Yew, planted in churchyards, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">stuck in shroud, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>;</li>
<li class="sube">poisonous qualities, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li></ul>



<p class="center" style="font-size: 90%; padding-top: 2em">THE END.</p>


<div class="advertisements">
<h2><a name="ENGLISH_CLASSICS" id="ENGLISH_CLASSICS"></a>ENGLISH CLASSICS.</h2>

<p class="center"><small>EDITED BY</small></p>

<p class="center" style="font-size: 140%">WM.&nbsp;J. ROLFE, A.M.</p>

<p class="center">Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, 56 cents per vol.; Paper, 40 cents per vol.</p>

<hr />

<p>This work has been done so well that it could hardly have been done better.
It shows throughout knowledge, taste, discriminating judgment, and, what is
rarer and of yet higher value, a sympathetic appreciation of the poet’s moods
and purposes. * * * The peculiarities of Shakespeare’s style are pointed out and
elucidated; his allusions are explained; his singular use of words, and moods
and tenses and cases, is remarked upon; and the archaic and transitional phraseology
which is found in many passages of his plays are made the occasion of instructive
but unpedantic comment.—<i>N.&nbsp;Y. Times.</i></p>

<hr />

<h3>SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS.</h3>

<div class="twocolumns">

<div class="column_left">
<ul><li>OTHELLO.</li>
<li>JULIUS CÆSAR.</li>
<li>THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.</li>
<li>MIDSUMMER-NIGHT’S DREAM.</li>
<li>MACBETH.</li>
<li>HAMLET.</li>
<li>MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.</li>
<li>ROMEO AND JULIET.</li>
<li>AS YOU LIKE IT.</li>
<li>THE TEMPEST.</li>
<li>TWELFTH NIGHT.</li>
<li>THE WINTER’S TALE.</li>
<li>KING JOHN.</li>
<li>RICHARD II.</li>
<li>HENRY IV. <span class="smcap">Part I.</span></li>
<li>HENRY IV. <span class="smcap">Part II.</span></li>
<li>HENRY V.</li>
<li>RICHARD III.</li>
<li>HENRY VIII.</li></ul>
</div>
<div class="column_right">
<ul><li>KING LEAR.</li>
<li>THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.</li>
<li>ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.</li>
<li>CORIOLANUS.</li>
<li>THE COMEDY OF ERRORS.</li>
<li>CYMBELINE.</li>
<li>ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.</li>
<li>MEASURE FOR MEASURE.</li>
<li>MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.</li>
<li>LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST.</li>
<li>TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.</li>
<li>TIMON OF ATHENS.</li>
<li>TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.</li>
<li>HENRY VI. <span class="smcap">Part I.</span></li>
<li>HENRY VI. <span class="smcap">Part II.</span></li>
<li>HENRY VI. <span class="smcap">Part III.</span></li>
<li>PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE.</li>
<li>THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.</li>
<li>POEMS.</li>
<li>SONNETS.</li>
<li>TITUS ANDRONICUS.</li></ul>
</div></div>

<div class="clear"></div>

<hr />

<h3>GOLDSMITH’S SELECT POEMS.</h3>

<h3>GRAY’S SELECT POEMS.</h3>

<h2>ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.</h2>

<p class="center" style="font-size: 140%">EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.</p>

<p class="center">12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.</p>


<table summary="list of names">
<tr><td class="lal">SAMUEL JOHNSON</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Leslie Stephen</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">EDWARD GIBBON</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">J.&nbsp;C. Morison</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">SIR WALTER SCOTT</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">R.&nbsp;H. Hutton</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">J.&nbsp;A. Symonds</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">DAVID HUME</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">T.&nbsp;H. Huxley</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">OLIVER GOLDSMITH</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">William Black</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">DANIEL DEFOE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">William Minto</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">ROBERT BURNS</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">J.&nbsp;C. Shairp</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">EDMUND SPENSER</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">R.&nbsp;W. Church</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">WILLIAM M. THACKERAY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Anthony Trollope</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">EDMUND BURKE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">John Morley</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">JOHN MILTON</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Mark Pattison</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Henry James, Jr.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">ROBERT SOUTHEY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">E. Dowden</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">GEOFFREY CHAUCER</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;W. Ward</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">JOHN BUNYAN</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">J.&nbsp;A. Froude</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">WILLIAM COWPER</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Goldwin Smith</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">ALEXANDER POPE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Leslie Stephen</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">LORD BYRON</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">John Nichol</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">JOHN LOCKE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Thomas Fowler</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">WILLIAM WORDSWORTH</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">F.&nbsp;W. H. Myers</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">JOHN DRYDEN</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">G. Saintsbury</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Sidney Colvin</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">THOMAS DE QUINCEY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">David Masson</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">CHARLES LAMB</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Alfred Ainger</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">RICHARD BENTLEY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">R.&nbsp;C. Jebb</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">CHARLES DICKENS</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;W. Ward</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">THOMAS GRAY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">E.&nbsp;W. Gosse</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">JONATHAN SWIFT</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Leslie Stephen</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">LAURENCE STERNE</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">H.&nbsp;D. Traill</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">THOMAS B. MACAULAY</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">J. Cotter Morison</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">HENRY FIELDING</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Austin Dobson</span>.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="lal">RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN</td><td class="ral">By <span class="smcap">Mrs. Oliphant</span>.</td></tr>
</table>

<p class="center"><i>Others to follow.</i></p>



<h2>BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.</h2>

<hr />

<p class="ads">DOWDEN’S SHAKSPERE. Shakspere. A Critical Study of his Mind
and Art. By <span class="smcap">Edward Dowden</span>. 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.</p>

<p class="ads">GUIZOT’S SHAKSPEARE. Shakspeare and his Times. By <span class="smcap">M. Guizot</span>.
12mo, Cloth, $1.50.</p>

<p class="ads">PERRY’S ENGLISH LITERATURE. English Literature in the Eighteenth
Century. By <span class="smcap">Thomas Sergeant Perry</span>. 12mo, Cloth, $2.00.</p>

<p class="ads">SWINTON’S STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, Being Typical
Selections of British and American Authorship, from Shakespeare to the
Present Time; together with Definitions, Notes, Analyses, and Glossary,
as an aid to Systematic Literary Study. By <span class="smcap">William Swinton</span>. With
Portraits. Crown 8vo, Cloth, $1.50.</p>

<p class="ads">BAYNE’S LESSONS FROM MY MASTERS: Carlyle, Tennyson, and
Ruskin. By <span class="smcap">Peter Bayne</span>, M.A., LL.D. 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.</p>

<p class="ads">DESHLER’S AFTERNOONS WITH THE POETS. Afternoons with
the Poets. By <span class="smcap">C.&nbsp;D. Deshler</span>. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1.75.</p>

<p class="ads">HOWITT’S HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE BRITISH POETS.
By <span class="smcap">William Howitt</span>. Illustrated. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $3.50.</p>

<p class="ads">D’ISRAELI’S AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. Consisting of Sketches
and Characters of English Literature. By <span class="smcap">J. D’Israeli</span>, D.C.L., F.S.A.
2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.</p>

<p class="ads">TENNYSON’S POETICAL WORKS. Complete Edition, with <i>The Idyls
of the King</i> arranged in order. With numerous Illustrations and Three
Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, Paper, $1,00; Cloth, $1.50.</p>

<p class="ads">PRIMERS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: <i>The Romance Period.</i>—<i>The
Classical Period.</i>—<i>Modern Period.</i> By <span class="smcap">Eugene Lawrence</span>. 3 vols.,
32mo, Paper, 25 cents each; Cloth, 40 cents each.</p>

<p class="ads">MISS MITFORD’S RECOLLECTIONS. Recollections of a Literary
Life; or, Books, Places, and People. By <span class="smcap">Mary Russell Mitford</span>.
12mo, Cloth, $1.50.</p>

<p class="ads">THE FRIENDSHIPS OF MISS MITFORD, as Recorded in Letters from
her Literary Correspondents. Edited by the Rev. <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;G. L’Estrange</span>.
12mo, Cloth, $2.00; 4to, Paper, 25 cents.</p>

<p class="ads">LAMBS’ TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE. In 2 vols. Vol. I. Comedies.
Vol. II. Tragedies. By <span class="smcap">Charles</span> and <span class="smcap">Mary Lamb</span>. 32mo, Paper, 25
cents each; Cloth, 40 cents each.</p>

<p class="ads">MACAULAY’S LIFE AND LETTERS. By his Nephew, <span class="smcap">George Otto
Trevelyan</span>, M.P. With Portrait on Steel. Complete in 2 vols., 8vo,
Cloth. Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, $5.00; Sheep, $6.00; Half Calf,
$9.50. Popular Edition, 1 vol., 12mo, Cloth, $1.75.</p>

<p class="ads">FROUDE’S CARLYLE. Thomas Carlyle. A History of the First Forty
Years of his Life (1795-1835). By <span class="smcap">James Anthony Froude</span>, M.A.
With Portraits and Illustrations. 2 volumes in one, 12mo, Cloth, $1.00.
Also, in 2 vols., 4to, Paper, 15 cents per volume.</p>



<h2><a name="Harpers_Cyclopaedia_of_British_and_American_Poetry" id="Harpers_Cyclopaedia_of_British_and_American_Poetry"></a>Harper’s Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry.</h2>

<p class="ads">Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry. Edited by <span class="smcap">Epes Sargent</span>.
Large 8vo, nearly 1000 pages; Containing nearly 2000 Selections from
over 750 Authors; Arranged Chronologically: with a Biographical
Sketch, and a Critical Estimate of each Author. Illuminated Cloth,
with Colored Edges, $4.50; Half Leather, $5.00.</p>

<hr />

<p>Mr. Sargent has shown the knowledge and the skill that might have been expected
from so well-read and so accomplished a writer; he has shown a catholicity as well as a
sureness of taste; he has proceeded on what seems to me the true principle of arrangement,
that of chronology; he has made his selections as full as he could consistently with
the multitude to be selected from, neither rejecting old ones because they were old, nor
accepting new ones because they were new, but earnestly aiming in both cases to represent
the great body of British and American poets at their best, and their best only; and he has
felt the natural demand of its readers for information concerning it and its authors—an
imperative demand which he has fulfilled with a thoroughness that is honorable to his
scholarship, and with a modesty that is honorable to his genius. That such a work as this
might have been done differently I can see; that it could have been done better I do not
see at all.—<span class="smcap">R.&nbsp;H. Stoddard</span>, in <i>The Critic</i>, N.&nbsp;Y.</p>

<p>The special value of this collection is in the fact that it expresses the taste and feeling
of one of the most cultured men of this generation, who, with a poet’s sensibility, spent his
whole life in the companionship and atmosphere of books and authors. His judgment
could be trusted. His taste was almost unerring in literary matters. His criticism was as
keen as it was genial, and seemed to detect the faulty and the false almost by instinct. It
is a great privilege to have such a man’s selection of the poems in the English language
worth preserving. Mr. Sargent’s work deserves special commendation for the exquisite
justice it does to living writers but little known. It is a volume of rare and precious flowers,
culled because of their intrinsic value, without regard to the writers’ fame.—<i>Evening
Express</i>, N.&nbsp;Y.</p>

<p>Mr. Sargent was eminently fitted for the preparation of a work of this kind. Few men
possessed a wider or more profound knowledge of English literature; and his judgment
was clear, acute, and discriminating. * * * The beautiful typography and other exterior
charms broadly hint at the rich feast of instruction and enjoyment which the superb volume
is eminently fitted to furnish.—<i>N.&nbsp;Y. Times.</i></p>

<p>We commend it highly. It contains so many of the notable poems of our language,
and so much that is sound poetry, if not notable, that it will make itself a pleasure
wherever it is found.—<i>N.&nbsp;Y. Herald.</i></p>

<p>A handsome volume, which will give the purest pleasure to great numbers of hearts
and households. * * * Most readers will find their favorite poems, and selections from their
favorite poets. * * * As a cyclopædia for reference, and a volume for general reading, it is
both useful and delightful.—<i>Observer</i>, N.&nbsp;Y.</p>

<p>We consider Mr. Sargent’s “Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry” the best
of all such cyclopædias in existence.—<i>Buffalo Express.</i></p>

<p>A poet himself of no mean reputation, and a man of large experience and excellent taste
in literature, he possessed just the qualities requisite for the difficult task of sifting the great
mass of British and American poetry, and selecting not only the poems which were good in
themselves, but those which most fairly represent the genius and style of the several authors,
and still keep the book down to reasonable proportions. His biographical sketches
of the poets are admirable, giving just the information a reader cares for. We think
Mr. Sargent’s work is even better than Mr. Bryant’s, and that is of itself no small praise.—<i>Troy
Press.</i></p>

<p>We have in this volume the choicest from what would fill many library shelves, and
also, at hand here, many fragmentary pieces, familiar favorites, but such as otherwise we
should not know where to find when wanted.—<i>The Advance</i>, Chicago.</p>

<p>The selections are so judiciously made and so handsomely clothed that the public
cannot fail to be grateful, both for the skill of the editor and the taste of the publishers.—<i>Christian
Advocate</i>, N.&nbsp;Y.</p>

<hr />

<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Published by HARPER &amp; BROTHERS, New York.</span></p>

<p class="center">☞ <span class="smcap">Harper &amp; Brothers</span> <i>will send the above work by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of
the United States, on receipt of the price</i>.</p>
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