Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripp’d. Macbeth, Act V., Sc. VIII.
Some griefs are med’cinable; that is, one of them, For it doth physic love. Cymbeline, Act III., Sc. II.
This bastard graff shall never come to growth: He shall not boast who did thy stock pollute That thou art doting father of his fruit. Lucrece.
Grant, that our hopes, (yet likely of fair birth) Should be still-born. * * * * Henry IV—2d, Act I., Sc. III.
The barren, touched in this holy chase, Shake off their sterile curse. Julius Cæsar, Act I., Sc. II.
This supposed charm against sterility, says Dyer, “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 blows were commonly believed to have the wonderful effect attributed to them by Cæsar.”
I had then laid wormwood to my dug, * * * it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug, and felt it bitter. Romeo and Juliet, Act I., Sc. III.
I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me; I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. Macbeth, Act I., Sc. VII.
Eggs, oysters too, are amatory food. Byron—Don Juan, Canto II., Verse CLXX.
Surely Byron knew of the stimulating qualities of eggs and oysters, and no doubt took them with as much faith as the worn-out debauchee of to-day does, as he sits down to his “plate of raw” and his “sherry and egg.”