Here evidently free is intended to rhyme with die.”
“Evidently!” An instance of the unsafeness of rhyme as a guide to pronunciation. It was die that had the sound of dee, as everybody (but Mr. Hazlitt) knows. Lovelace himself rhymes die and she on p. 269. But what shall we say to our editor’s not knowing that fry was used formerly where we should say burn? Lovers used to fry with love, whereas now they have got out of the frying-pan into the fire. In this case a martyr is represented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried (i. e. burned).
“Her beams ne’er shed or change like th’ hair of day.” (p. 224.)
Mr. Hazlitt’s note is,—
“Hair is here used in what has become quite an obsolete sense. The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. The word used to be by no means uncommon; but it is now, as was before remarked, out of fashion; and indeed I do not think that it is found even in any old writer used exactly in the way in which Lovelace has employed it.”
We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it! Did he never hear of the golden hair of Apollo,—of the intonsum Cynthium? Don Quixote was a better scholar where he speaks of las doradas hebras de sus hermosos cabellos. But hair never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even when used as he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do with “outward form, nature, or character,” but had a meaning much nearer what we express by temperament, which its color was and is thought to indicate.
On p. 232 “wild ink” is explained to mean “unrefined.” It is a mere misprint for “vild.”
Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an illusion of Lovelace to the “east and west” in speaking of George Sandys, mentions Sandys’s Oriental travels, but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia.
Pages 251, 252:—
“And as that soldier conquest doubted not,
Who but one splinter had of Castriot,
But would assault ev’n death, so strongly charmed,
And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed.”