Silver Pocket Dial (in the collection of the Honble Company of Clockmakers, London).
'Good morrow, fool, quoth I. "No sir," quoth he, "Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune; And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says, very wisely, "It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags: 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot. And thereby hangs a tale." When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time, My lungs began to crow like Chanticleer, That fools should be so deep contemplative; And I did laugh, sans intermission, An hour by his dial.'
What the fool's dial was, has given rise to many conjectures, but there is no better authority perhaps on the subject than Mr Halliwell, from whose magnificent and elaborate folio we will make the following very interesting extract.
'The term dial appears to have been applied in Shakspeare's time to anything for measuring time in which the hours were marked, so that the allusion here may be either to a watch, or to a portable journey ring, or small dial. The expression "it is ten o'clock" is not decisive, as it may be considered to be used merely in the sense of the hour thus named. * * * A watch even is sometimes called a clock, * * * and it seems by no means unlikely that the common ring dial which has been in use for several centuries up to a comparatively recent period, should be the dial referred to in the text.'
Whatever may have been the shape of the dial which Jaques saw drawn from the fool's 'poke,' it is an undoubted fact that portable dials did serve the part of time-keepers, and were in their way valuable as such to those who had learnt how to use them. But the dial would not do the work of the watch in an age when people no longer travel by the waggon-load or with pack-horse, but are whirled fifty or sixty miles in that time and have to reckon their engagements not by the day, but by the minute. The world no longer 'wags' in jog-trot style, but speeds at steam-pressure and sends its messages by lightning-conductor; it consequently values its time more highly and measures it more carefully.
The Horologe which possibly next succeeded in date the invention of the Dial, was the Clepsydra or Water-Clock, the precise antiquity of which is however unknown.
The Clepsydra, or Water-Clock of the Greeks.