And then find faith within a womans minde.
John Dunne.
l. 2. Get with child a mandrake root. 'Many Mola's and false conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from great Antiquity, conceiveth the Root thereof resembleth the shape of Man.... Now whatever encourageth the first invention, there have not been wanting many ways of its promotion. The first a Catachrestical and far derived similitude it holds with Man; that is, in a bifurcation or division of the Root into two parts, which some are content to call Thighs.' Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors (1686), ii. 6, p. 72. Compare also The Progresse of the Soule, st. xv, p. 300.
Page 10. The Undertaking.
l. 2. the Worthies. The nine worthies usually named are Joshua, David, Judas Maccabaeus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, but they varied. Guy of Warwick is mentioned by Gerard Legh, Accedens of Armorye. Nash mentions Solomon and Gideon; and Shakespeare introduces Hercules and Pompey in Love's Labour's Lost. All the Worthies therefore covers a wide field. The Worthies figured largely in decorative designs and pageants. On a target taken at the siege of Ostend 'was enammeled in gold the seven [sic] Worthies, worth seven or eight hundred guilders'. Vere's Commentaries (1657), p. 174.
l. 6. The skill of specular stone. Compare To the Countesse of Bedford, p. [219], ll. 28-30:
You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone,
Through which all things within without were shown.
Grosart (ii. 48-9) and Professor Norton (Grolier, i. 217) take 'specular' as meaning simply 'translucent', and the latter quotes Holinshed's Chronicle, ii. ch. 10: 'I find obscure mention of the specular stone also to have been found and applied to this use' (i.e. glazing windows) 'in England, but in such doubtful sort as I dare not affirm for certain.' This is the 'pierre spéculaire' or 'pierre à miroir' which Cotgrave describes as 'A light, white, and transparent stone, easily cleft into thinne flakes, and used by th' Arabians (among whom it growes) instead of glasse; anight it represents the Moon, and even increases or decreases, as the Moon doth'. But surely Donne refers to crystal-gazing. Paracelsus has a paragraph in the Coelum Philosophorum: