60. Seal' d-appropriated and secured.

See Rom. xv, 28.

64. Blood and judgment-passion and discretion. Like It, V, iv, 54, and Hamlet, III, iv, 70, 71.

See As You

68. Heart's core. Anthony Scoloker in Diaphantus; or the Passions of Love, 1604-in which he notices friendly Shakespeare's tragedies' and 'Prince Hamlet '-borrows the idea of his line:

'Oh, I could wear her in my heart's heart's core.

75. Occulted guilt. This is the correct law phrase. Murder was defined by the old legal writers as occulta hominis occisio, etc., the secret slaying of a person'-Coke's Institutes, iii, cap. 7.

114. Black.

sables. 'Sable,' from the French, signifies deep, dull, black, and so is applicable to mourning garments; but sable is the fur of the Zibellina. 'Sable,' says Peacham, 'is worn of great personages, and brought out of Russia, being the fur of a little beast of that name, esteemed for the perfectness of the colours of the hairs, which are very black. Hence sables, in heraldry, signifies the black colour in gentlemen's arms'-Quoted in Dr R. G. Latham's Johnson's Dictionary. 119. Hobby-horse. 'The morris and the May games of Robin Hood attained their most perfect form when united with the Hobby-horse and the Dragon. Of these, the former was the resemblance of the head and tail of a horse manufactured in paste-board [or basket-work], and attached to a person whose business it was, whilst he seemed to ride gracefully on its back, to imitate the prancings and curvettings of that noble animal, whose supposed feet were concealed by a foot-cloth reaching to the ground; and the latter, constructed of the same materials, was made to hiss and shake his wings, and was frequently attacked by the man on the hobby-horse, who thus personated the character of St George. consequence of the opposition, however, of the Puritans, during the close of Elizabeth's reign, who considered the rites of May-day as relics of paganism, much havoc was made among the dramatis persona of this festivity. Sometimes, instead of Robin and Marian, only a lord or lady of the day was adopted, frequently the Friar [Tuck] was not suffered to appear, and still more frequently the hobby-horse was interdicted. This zealous interference of the sectarists was ridiculed by the poets of the day, and among the rest by Shakespeare, who [here] quotes a line from a satirical ballad on this subject, and represents Hamlet as terming it an epitaph. He has the same allusion in Love's Labour's Lost [III, i, 29, 30]; and Ben Jonson has still more explicitly noticed the neglect into which this character in the Maygames had fallen in his days:

In

"But see, the hobby-horse is forgot:
Foole, it must be your lot

To supply his want with faces,

And some other buffoon graces"

-Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althorpe, 1603.' -N. Drake's Shakespeare and his Times, vol. i, pp. 166-172. In a quarto, A True Relation of the Faction begun at Wisbich, by Fa. Edmonds, alias Weston, a Jesuite, 1595, we find that others besides the Puritans opposed the hobby-horse, for therein we read, 'He lifted up his countenance as if a new spirit had been put into him, and tooke upon him to controll, and finde fault with this and that (as the coming into the hall of a hobby-horse in Christmas), affirming that he would no longer tolerate these and those so grosse abuses, but would have them reformed '-p. 7. In Greene's Tu Quoque (which must have been performed in Queen Elizabeth's time), we have this line spoken by Will Rash:

'T'other hobby-horse, I perceive, is not forgotten.'

While in Drue's Countess of Suffolk, 1631, we read:

'Clunie.

Answer me, hobbi-horse,

Which way crossed he you saw now?

Jenkins. Who do you speak to, sir?

We have forgot the hobby-horse'-Sig. C, 4.

One of the songs in Weelke's Madrigals, 1608, contains
something like the phrase:

Since Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Little John are gone-a home-a,
The hobby-horse was quite forgot when Kempe did dance a,

He did labour, after the tabor, for to dance thein into France.

For he took pains

To skip it, to skip it;

In hope of gains, of gains,

He will trip it, trip it, trip it on the toe.
Diddle, diddle, diddle, do'-No. xx.

133. Miching mallecho 'has caused many notes.'

'What

Shakespeare meant was doubtless mucho malhecho, much mischief.'-G. H. LEWES.

178. Validity-worth, value. King Lear, I, i, 72; All's Well that Ends Well, V, iii, 193.

193. The great man down, you mark his favourite flies. Compare 'A poor man being down is thrust away also by his friends'Ecclus. xiii, 21.

226. The Mouse-trap ̧· tropically. 'Hamlet calls the play The Mouse-trap, with reference to the design with which it was performed. Tropically is trapically in the earliest quarto, an idle, unmeaning word, except that we may see a faint shade of meaning in the play being a figurative representation of an actual deed, and this, combined with the opportunity of playing on the word trap, is the true reason why we

meet with this word thus oddly introduced '-Joseph Hunter's New Illustrations of Shakespeare, vol. ii, p. 252.

227. Gonsago. The story of the play is certainly taken from the murder of the Duke of Urbano by Luigi Gonzago, in 1538, who was poisoned by means of a lotion poured into his ears. This new way of poisoning caused great horror throughout Europe, and we often meet with allusions to it. It is worth noting also that the wife of the duke was a Gonzago. Some of the commentators have absurdly objected to Battista as a female Christian name. It was not only a common female name at this period, but especially connected with Mantua and the Gonzagos'-C. Elliot Browne, Athenæum, 29th July 1876.

230. Let the galled jade wince. F. J. Furnivall has pointed out that in Lydgate's Fall of Princes these lines occur:

'A galled horse, the soothe if ye list see

Who toucheth him, boweth his back for dred'—fol. xxxvii, b.

In Damon and Pythias, 1582, we have:

'I know the galled horse will soonest wince.'

239. The croaking raven doth, etc. The late Mr Richard Simpson thought this was a Shakespearian allusion to the line:

'The screeking raven sits croaking for revenge,'

which occurs in the True Tragedie of Richard III, Hazlitt's Dodsley's Old Plays, vol. v, p. 117. Mr W. T. Malleson notes that the raven is the Danish typical bird, and therefore no unfit emblem of "the majesty of buried Denmark "' -New Shakespeare Society's Transactions, 1874, p. 473. 243. Hecate's a dissyllable. Compare Macbeth, II, i, 52, III, ii, 41, V, i, and notes.

260. A forest of feathers-refers to those large plumes which the old actors always wore when personating heroic or dignified characters.

261. Turn Turk with me- become totally reversed. Robert Daborne wrote a play The Christian turned Turk, printed 1612.

Ib. Provençal roses. Either 'Provençal,' the rose de Provence, the double damask rose; or 'provincial,' the rose de provins, the ordinary double red rose; or perhaps artificial imitations of them. Compare:

When roses in the gardens grew,
And not in ribbons on a shoe;

Now ribbon roses take such place,
That garden roses want their grace'

-Friar Bakon's Prophesie, 1604.

262. A cry of players-company of actors.

264. Half a share. 'The actors in Shakespeare's time had not

annual salaries. The whole receipts of each theatre were divided into shares, of which the proprietors of the theatre, or housekeepers, as they were called, had some; and each actor had one or more shares, or part of a share, according to his merit'-EDMUND Malone.

255. Damon dear. The allusion is to the oft-celebrated friendship of Damon and Pythias, which had been celebrated in Tow Lamentable Songes, printed 1565, and in A Boke entituled the Tragical Comedye of Damonde and Pithyas, 1566, by Richard Edwardes, author of the song When griping grief, etc., quoted in Romeo and Juliet, IV, v.

267. Jove. He does not say of Jove's bird, but heightening the compliment to his father of Jove himself'-UPTON.

268. Pajock-'mere show but no worth and substance'-Upton. Pope supposed that the substitution of this word for the rhyming ass is suggestive of the 'fable of the birds who preferred that vain, gaudy, foolish bird, the peacock, to the eagle, in the choice of their king.'

277. Perdy-corrupted from par Dieu.

310. Closet-private room. Matt. vi, 6.

324. Recorders. Sir Joshua Hawkins thinks that the recorder was the same instrument as we now call a flageolet (History of Music, iv, 479); but others are of opinion that it was a kind of flute, of soft tone, with nine holes, called by Marsennus, in his Harmonie Universelle, i, 237, 'fluste de Angleterre.' 372. Nero, the Roman Emperor, A.D. 54-68, by whose orders his mother Agrippina was slain.

376. Shent-ill-treated, brought to grief or shame.

SCENE III.

32. Nature makes them partial. So Terence said long ago:

Matres omnes filiis

In peccato adjutrices, auxilio in paterna injuria,
Solent esse-Heauton timorumenos, V, ii, 38-40.
'All mothers are wont

To be advocates for their children when in fault,
As aids against paternal severity.

37. The primal eldest curse. Gen. iv, 3-13.
46. White as snow. Psalm li, 7; Isa. i, 18.

62. Ourselves compell'd.... to give in evidence. Rom. ii, 14-16; 2 Cor. v, IO.

76-86. A villain

No. 'Mr Harris, in his Philological Enquiries, gives an instance (from William of Malmesbury, Piz 96, edit. London, fol., 1596), of a similar sentiment in William, Count of Poictou, who being about to despatch the Bishop of Poictou, who had offended him, suddenly stopped, saying, Nec cœlum unquam intrabis meæ manus ministerio (Never shalt thou enter heaven by the aid of my hand)'—

John Lord Chedworth's Notes on Shakespeare's Piays, p. 354. 80. Full of bread. Ezek. xvi, 49.

87. Hent-grasp, grip, seizure. Warburton suggested hest; Theobald hint; the fourth folio gave bent.

SCENE IV.

14. By the rood-by the cross, as in Holyrood, holy-cross. See by the holy rood '-Richard III, III, ii. The term rood is specially applied in architecture to the large cross erected in Roman Catholic churches over the entrance of the chancel or choir. So we have rood-tower, rood-steeple, roodloft. Rood Lane in London was so called because a crucifix once stood there. Hearne says, "though the cross and the rood are commonly taken for the same, yet the rood properly signified the image of Christ on the cross, so as to represent both the cross and the figure of our blessed Saviour as He suffered on it'-Peter Langtoft's Chronicle, Glossary, p. 544. 38. Braz'd-hardened it like brass, made it shameless. King Lear, I, i, 9.

49. Rhapsody-from the Greek rhapsodia, the title of each of the books of the Homeric poems, and perhaps meaning here parts without mutual dependence or coherency. Florio, in his translation of Montaigne, 1603, has mingle-mangles of many kinds of stuffe, or, as the Greeks call them, rhapsodies' -p. 68. 59. A station

Eneid:

heaven-kissing hill. See Phaer's Virgil's

'And now approaching neere, the top he seeth and mightty lim[b]s
Of Atlas, mountain tough, that heaven on boystrous shoulders beares.
Their first on ground with wings of might doth Mercury arrive.'

62. Set his seal. John, iii, 33. 65. A mildew'd ear blasting, etc. Gen. xli, 22-24, 27.

....

-Book iv, 446-450 (1558).

An allusion to Pharaoh's dream,

68. Batten-indulge yourself. Batten, to feed, become fat, thrive. 72. Sense, sure, you have, motion. According to Aristotle's Physics, All motion has its origin in the soul, and therefore motion is a sign of intelligence or sense.'

72-77, 79-82. Sense. difference. Eyes

in folio 1623.

...

78. Hoodman blind-blind-man's-buff.

91. Grained-engraved, fast-coloured, fixed.

торе.

Omitted

99. A vice of kings—a mere mock king, a ridiculous representation

of royalty:

'Like to the old vice;

Who with dagger of lath, in his rage and his wrath,

Cries, Ah! ha!' etc.-Twelfth Night, IV.

The vice was a droll character in our old plays, clad in a long

M