Ventoſum caput, haud habens cerebrum.
Both writers make the proverb the groundwork of reflexions on a human skull. According to Anulus, “the relics of the charnel house were once the living images of God,”—“that ruin of a dome was formerly the citadel of reason.” Whitney thus moralizes,—
“Where liuely once, Gods image was expreste,
Wherin, sometime was sacred reason plac’de,
The head, I meane, that is so ritchly bleste,
With sighte, with smell, with hearinge, and with taste.
Lo, nowe a skull, both rotten, bare, and drye,
A relike meete in charnell house to lye.”
The device and explanatory lines may well have given suggestion to the half-serious, half-cynical remarks by Hamlet in the celebrated grave-yard scene (Hamlet, act v. sc. 1, l. 73, vol. viii. p. 153). A skull is noticed which one of the callous grave-diggers had just thrown up upon the sod, and Hamlet says (l. 86),—
“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder!”