"Whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile."
ACT III.
Scene 2. Page 310.
L. Grey. But, mighty lord, this merry inclination
Accords not with the sadness of my suit.
The following is offered as a very select instance of the use of sadness for seriousness. It is from Tom Coriat's speech that he made to a Mahometan who had called him an infidel. "But I pray thee tell me thou Mahometan, dost thou in sadness call me Giaur? That I doe, quoth he. Then quoth I, in very sober sadness I retort that shameful word in thy throate."
Scene 2. Page 314.
Glo. Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp.
The common opinion which Dr. Johnson mentions of the bear bringing forth unformed lumps of animated flesh, and afterwards licking them into proper shape, has been very properly exposed and confuted by Sir Thomas Brown in his Enquiries into vulgar errors, book iii. ch. 6. His adversary Ross, in his Arcana microcosmi, p. 115, has attempted a solution of this matter, by stating it as a fact that bears bring forth their young deformed and mis-shapen, by reason of the thick membrane in which they are wrapped, that is, covered over with a mucous and phlegmatick matter. This, he says, the dam contracts in the winter time, by lying in hollow caves without motion, so that to the eye the cub appears like an unformed lump. The above mucilage is afterwards licked away by the dam, and the membrane broken, whereby that which before seemed to be unformed appears now in its right shape. And this, he contends, against Dr. Brown, is all that the ancients meant. See more on the subject of the old opinion in Bartholomæus De proprietat. rerum, lib. xviii. c. 112.
ACT IV.
Scene 7. Page 359.