p. 400 Plumeys. Gallants; beaus. So termed, of course, from their feathered hats. cf. Dryden’s An Evening’s Love (1668), Act i, I, where Jacinta, referring to the two gallants, says: ‘I guess ‘em to be Feathers of the English Ambassador’s train.’ cf. Pope’s Sir Plume in The Rape of the Lock. In one of the French scenes of La Precaution inutile, produced 5 March, 1692, by the Italian comedians, Gaufichon (Act i, I) cries to Leandre: ‘Je destine ma soeur a Monsieur le Docteur Balouard, et trente Plumets comme vous ne la détourneroient pas d’un aussi bon rencontre.’ The French word = a fop is, however, extremely rare. Plumet more often = un jeune militaire. cf. Panard (1694-1765); Oeuvres (1803), Tome III, p. 355:—
Que les plumets seraient aimables
Si leurs feux etaient plus constants!
p. 401 Cannons. Canons were the immense and exaggerated breeches, adorned with ribbons and richest lace, which were worn by the fops of the court of Louis XIV. There is more than one reference to them in Molière. Ozell, in his translation of Molière (1714), writes ‘cannions’. cf. School for Husbands, Vol. II, p. 32: ‘those great cannions wherein the legs look as tho’ they were in the stocks.’
Ces grands cannons où, comme en des entraves,
On met tous les matins ses deux jambes esclaves.
—Ecole des Maris, i, I.
cf. Pepys, 24 May, 1660: ‘Up, and made myself as fine as I could, with the linen stockings on and wide canons that I bought the other day at Hague.’
p. 403 The Count of Gabalis. The Abbé Montfaucon de Villars (1635-73) had wittily satirized the philosophy of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians and their belief in sylphs and elemental spirits in his Le Comte de Gabalis ou Entretiens sur les sciences secrètes (Paris, 1670), which was ‘done into English by P.A. Gent.’ (P. Ayres), as Count Gabalis, or the Extravagant Mysteries of the Cabalists, exposed in five pleasant discourses (1680), and thus included in Vol. II of Bentley and Magnes, Modern Novels (1681-93), twelve volumes. It will be remembered that Pope was indebted to a hint from Gabalis for his aerial machinery in The Rape of the Lock.
p. 406 Iredonozar. This name is from Gonsales’ (Bishop Godwin) The Man in the Moone: ‘The first ancestor of this great monarch [the Emperor of the Moon] came out of the earth … and his name being Irdonozur, his heirs, unto this day, do all assume unto themselves that name.’
p. 407 Harlequin comes out on the Stage. This comic scene, Du Desespoir, which affords such opportunity for the mime, although not given in the first edition of Le Théâtre Italien, finds a place in the best edition (1721). The editor has appended the following note: ‘Ceux qui ont vù cette Scène, conviendront que c’est une des plus plaisantes qu’on ait jamais jouée sur le Théâtre Italien.’
p. 408 a Man that laugh’d to death. This is the traditional end of l’unico Aretino. On hearing some ribald jest he is said to have flung himself back in a chair and expired of sheer merriment. Later days elucidate his fate by declaring that overbalancing himself he broke his neck on the marble pavement. Sir Thomas Urquhart, the glorious translator of Rabelais, is reported to have died of laughter on hearing of the Restoration of Charles II.
p. 410 Boremes. A corrupt form (perhaps only in these passages) of bouts-rimés. ‘They were a List of Words that rhyme to one another drawn up by another Hand and given to a Poet, who was to make a Poem to the Rhymes in the same Order that they were placed on the List.’ —Addison, Spectator, No. 60 (1711).