Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love. First Folio, "Tragedies", p. 326, col. B, lines 34-39.
There is, however, no trace of any familiarity on Shakespeare's part with the precious stone lore of the Roman encyclopædist, either from the Latin text of his great "Historia Naturalis", or from the translation published by Holland in 1601. This translator, who Englished many of the chief Latin and Greek authors, Suetonius, Livy, Ammianus Marcellinus, Plutarch's "Morals" and other works, was pronounced by Fuller, in his "Worthies", to be "translator general in his age", adding that "these books alone of his turning into English will make a country gentleman a competent library". For his Ammianus Marcellinus the Council of Coventry, his place of residence, paid him £4, and £5 for a translation of Camden's "Britannia"—small sums, indeed, for so much labor, but not so unreasonable when we think that a half-century later the immortal Milton got but £5 for his "Paradise Lost". He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had studied and graduated; later he studied medicine, receiving a degree of M.D., not from Oxford or Cambridge, however, but either from a Scottish or foreign university.
Although Solinus, writing in the third century A.D., relies mainly upon Pliny for his information on precious stones, still he here and there gives evidence of a more critical spirit, as when he says of the rock-crystal that the theory according to which it was frozen and hardened water was necessarily incorrect, for it was to be found in such mild climates as "Alabanda in Asia and the island of Cyprus". [16] This is the more notable that the wholly incorrect view persisted into the sixteenth century, so learned a writer as Lord Bacon (d. 1626) restating it in his last work, "Sylva Sylvarum".
[16] Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Cap. 15.
One of the most curious gem-treatises, especially as a source of early sixteenth-century beliefs in the magic properties of precious stones, the "Speculum Lapidum" of Camillo Leonardo, published in Venice, 1502, probably never came under Shakespeare's eye. Indeed, even in Italy it seems to have been so neglected that Ludovico Dolci ventured to publish a literal Italian version of the Latin original as his own work in 1565. The English "Mirror of Stones", issued in 1750, is frankly stated to be a translation of the Latin original bearing the same name. [17]
[17] Noted in the present writer's "The Curious Lore of Precious Stones", Philadelphia and London, 1913, p. 18.
In Marlowe's (1564-1593) "Hero and Leander", almost certainly written before Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" (1593), although not published until 1598, five years after Marlowe's death, "pearl tears" and the "sparkling diamond" are used much in the same way as by Shakespeare, as appears in the following verses:
Forth from those two translucent cisterns brake A stream of liquid pearl, which down her face Made milk-white paths. Lines 296-298.
Why should you worship her! her you surpass As much as sparkling diamonds flaring glass. Lines 213,214.
There is a curious parallelism between a passage in Troilus and Cressida, 1609, and one in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, 1588. Marlowe wrote (sc. 14, l. 83):