"I will relate; action may
Conveniently the rest convey."
Longs should be printed 'longs, as we have 'lated for belated in Macbeth, Act. III. Scene 3.
Scene 1. Page 450.
Per. ... I yet am unprovided
Of a pair of bases.
These were a sort of petticoat that hung down to the knees, and were suggested by the Roman military dress, in which they seem to have been separate and parallel slips of cloth or leather. Gayton in his Festivous notes on Don Quixote, p. 218, says, that "all heroick persons are pictured in bases and buskins." In the celebrated story of Friar John and Friar Richard, as related in Heywood's History of women, p. 253, the skirts of the armed friar's gown are made to serve as bases. At the justs that were held in honour of Queen Catherine in the second year of Henry VIII., some of the knights had "their basses and trappers of cloth of golde, every of them his name embroudered on his basse and trapper."—Halle's Chronicle. But here the term seems applied to the furniture of the horses. The bases appear to have been made of various materials. If in tilting they fell to the ground, the heralds claimed them as a fee, unless redeemed by money; this indeed was the case with respect to any piece of armour that happened to be detached from the owner. Sometimes bases denoted the hose merely; as in the comedy of Lingua, 1607, where Auditus, one of the characters, is dressed in "a cloth of silver mantle upon a pair of sattin bases." In Rider's Latin Dictionary, 1659, bases are rendered palliolum curtum. The term seems to have been borrowed from the French, who at a very early period used bache for a woman's petticoat.—See Carpentier Glossar. medii ævi.
Scene 2. Page 454.
Thaisa. And his device, a wreath of chivalry
The word, Me pompæ provexit apex.
Pompæ, and not Pompei, is undoubtedly the true word; and the whole of Mr. Steevens's reasoning in favour of the latter is at once disposed of by referring to the work which appears to have furnished the author of the play with this and the two subsequent devices of the knights. It is a scarce little volume entitled, The heroicall devises of M. Claudius Paradin canon of Beaujeu, whereunto are added the lord Gabriel Symeon's and others. Translated out of Latin into English, by P. S. 1591, 24mo. The sixth device, from its peculiar reference to the situation of Pericles, may perhaps have been altered from one in the same collection used by Diana of Poictiers. It is a green branch issuing from a tomb with the motto SOLA VIVIT IN ILLO. The following are what have been immediately borrowed from Paradin; but it is also proper to state that the torch and the hand issuing from a cloud are to be found in Whitney's Emblems, 1586, 4to. As they are all more elegantly engraved in the original editions of Paradin and Symeon than in the English book above mentioned, the copies here given have been made from the former.
