Shee followeth straight, and grones to him for grace.”
This Emblem is very closely followed in the Merry Wives of Windsor (act ii. sc. 2, l. 187, vol. i. p. 196), when Ford, in disguise as “Master Brook,” protests to Falstaff that he had followed Mrs. Ford “with a doting observance;” “briefly,” he says, “I have pursued her as love hath pursued me; which hath been on the wing of all occasions,”—
“Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues;
Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.”
Death in most of its aspects is described and spoken of by the great Dramatist, and possibly we might hunt out some expressions of his which coincide with those of the Emblem writers on the same subject, but generally his mention of death is peculiarly his own,—as when Mortimer says (1 Henry VI., act ii. sc. 5, l. 28, vol. v. p. 40),—
“The arbitrator of despairs,
Just death, kind umpire of men’s miseries,
With sweet enlargement doth dismiss me hence.”
Holbein’s Simulachres, 1538.