“I’ll pour my soul into my daughter’s belly, [body,]
And with my soldier’s tears embalm her wounds.”
We suggest that the change of an a to an r would make sense of the following: “Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors, to this unlawful painting-house,” [printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note on the word compositors,—“i. e. (conjecturally), making up the composition of the picture “! Our readers can decide for themselves;—the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214.
We think Mr. Hazlitt’s notes are, in the main, good; but we should like to know his authority for saying that pench means “the hole in a bench by which it was taken up,”—that “descant” means “look askant on,”—and that “I wis” is equivalent to “I surmise, imagine,” which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is appended. On page 9, Vol. I., we read in the text,
“To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,”
and in the note, “i. e. submission. The original has aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here.” Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the Annunciation with ave written on the scroll proceeding from the bending angel’s mouth? We find the same word in Vol. III. p. 217:—
“Whose station’s built on avees and applause.”
“And then rest, gentle bones; yet pray
That when by the precise you are view’d,
A supersedeas be not sued
To remove you to a place more airy,
That in your stead they may keep chary
Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses
Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses.”
To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, “Than that of burning men’s bones for fuel.” There is no allusion here to burning men’s bones, but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon them, in digging the foundations for which the bones would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the “Churchyard of the Holy Trinity”;—see Stow’s Survey, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere, in the same play, Webster alludes bitterly to “begging church-land.”
Vol. I. p. 73, “And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient that dares not nourish at the oathtaking of the prætor for fear of the signposts.” Mr. Hazlitt’s note is, “Ancient was a standard or flag; also an ensign, of which Skinner says it is a corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the present editor cannot suggest.” We confess we find no difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord Mayor’s day dares not flourish his standard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest the query, whether ancient, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian word anziano.