16. Meinie: servants, or menials, &c., dwelling together in a house; from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning a crowd. Compare German, “Menge,” multitude.
17. The pure fetters: the very fetters. The Greeks used “katharos”, the Romans “purus,” in the same sense.
18. In the medieval courts of Love, to which allusion is probably made forty lines before, in the word “parlement,” or “parliament,” questions like that here proposed were seriously discussed.
19. Gear: behaviour, fashion, dress; but, by another reading, the word is “gyre,” and means fit, trance — from the Latin, “gyro,” I turn round.
20. Before his head in his cell fantastic: in front of his head in his cell of fantasy. “The division of the brain into cells, according to the different sensitive faculties,” says Mr Wright, “is very ancient, and is found depicted in mediaeval manuscripts.” In a manuscript in the Harleian Library, it is stated, “Certum est in prora cerebri esse fantasiam, in medio rationem discretionis, in puppi memoriam” (it is certain that in the front of the brain is imagination, in the middle reason, in the back memory) — a classification not materially differing from that of modern phrenologists.
21. Dan: Lord; Latin, “Dominus;” Spanish, “Don.”
22. The “caduceus.”
23. Argus was employed by Juno to watch Io with his hundred eyes but he was sent to sleep by the flute of Mercury, who then cut off his head.
24. Next: nearest; German, “naechste”.
25. Clary: hippocras, wine made with spices.