If I but knew what drink the time now loved.
and Staple of News, Wks. 5. 162:
—Now sleep, and rest; Would thou couldst make the time to do so too.
5. 6. 18 confute. ‘A pure Latinism. Confutare is properly to pour cold water in a pot, to prevent it from boiling over; and hence metaphorically, the signification of confuting, reproving, or controuling.’—W.
For the present use cf. T. Adams in Spurgeon, Treas. Dav., 1614, Ps. lxxx. 20: ‘Goliath ... shall be confuted with a pebble.’ R. Coke, Justice Vind. (1660) 15: ‘to be confuted with clubs and hissing.’
5. 6. 21 the Session. The general or quarter sessions were held regularly four times a year on certain days prescribed by the statutes. The length of time for holding the sessions was fixed at three days, if necessity required it, but the rule was not strictly adhered to. See Beard, The Office of the Justice of the Peace in England, pp. 158 f.
5. 6. 23 In a cart, to be hang’d. ‘Theft and robbery in their coarsest form were for many centuries capital crimes.... The question when theft was first made a capital crime is obscure, but it is certain that at every period some thefts were punished with death, and that by Edward I.’s time, at least, the distinction between grand and petty larceny, which lasted till 1827, was fully established.’—Stephen, Hist. Crim. Law 3. 128 f.
5. 6. 24 The charriot of Triumph, which most of them are. The procession from Newgate by Holbom and Tyburn road was in truth often a ‘triumphall egression,’ and a popular criminal like Jack Sheppard or Jonathan Wild frequently had a large attendance. Cf. Shirley, Wedding 4. 3, Wks., ed. Gifford, 1. 425: ‘Now I’m in the cart, riding up Holborn in a two-wheeled chariot, with a guard of Halberdiers. There goes a proper fellow, says one; good people pray for me: now I am at the three wooden stilts,’ etc.
5. 6. 48 a body intire. Jonson uses the word in its strict etymological sense.
5. 6. 54 cheated on. Dyce (Remarks) points out that this phrase is used in Mrs. Centlivre’s Wonder, Act 2. Sc. 1. Jonson uses it again in Mercury vindicated: ‘and cheat upon your under-officers;’ and Marston in What You Will, Wks. 2. 387.