“L’estroit est de vertu le sentier espineux,
Qui couronne de vie en fin le vertueux:
C’est ce que considere en ce lieu Pythagore.”
[149]. In the Emblems of Lebens-Batillius (4to, Francfort, 1596), human life is compared to a game with dice. The engraving by which it is illustrated represents three men at play with a backgammon-board before them.
[150]. The skeleton head on the shield in Death’s escutcheon by Holbein, may supply another pictorial illustration, but it is not sufficiently distinctive to be dwelt on at any length. The fac-simile reprints by Pickering, Bohn, Quaritch, or Brothers, render direct reference to the plate very easy.
[151]. A note of inquiry, from Mr. W. Aldis Wright, of Trinity College, Cambridge, asking me if Shakespeare’s thought may not have been derived from an emblematical picture, informs me that he has an impression of having “somewhere seen an allegorical picture of a child looking through the eyeholes of a skull.”
[152]. In Johnson’s and Steeven’s Shakespeare (edition 1785, vol. x. p. 434) the passage is thus explained, “Sir John Suckling, in one of his letters, may possibly allude to this same story. ‘It is the story of the jackanapes and the partridges; thou starest after a beauty till it is lost to thee, and then let’st out another, and starest after that till it is gone too.’”
[153]. See a most touching account of a she-hear and her whelps in the Voyage of Discovery to the North Seas in 1772, under Captain C. J. Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave.
[154]. “Zodiacvs Christianvs, seu signa 12, diuinæ Prædestinationis, &c., à Raphaele Sadelero, 12mo, p. 126, Monaci CD. DCXVIII.”
[155]. See also the Emblems of Camerarius (pt. iii. edition 1596, Emb. 47), where the turkey is figured to illustrate “Rabie svccensa tvmescit,”—Being angered it swells with rage.