ll. 204-5. As he that sees, &c. 'I have sometimes wondered in the reading what was become of those glaring colours which amazed me in Bussy D'Ambois upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly; nothing but a cold, dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was a-shooting.' Dryden, The Spanish Friar. In another place Dryden uses the figure in a more poetic or at least ambitious fashion:
The tapers of the gods,
The sun and moon, run down like waxen globes;
The shooting stars end all in purple jellies,
And chaos is at hand.
Oedipus, II. i.
The idea was a common one, but I have no doubt that Dryden owed his use of it as an image to Donne. There is no poet from whom he pilfers 'wit' more freely.
Page 140, ll. 215-16. Now, as in Tullias tombe, i.e. Cicero's daughter. 'According to a ridiculous story, which some of the moderns report, in the age of Pope Paul III a monument was discovered on the Appian road with the superscription Tulliolae filiae meae; the body of a woman was found in it, which was reduced to ashes as soon as touched; there was also a lamp burning, which was extinguished as soon as the air gained admission there, and which was supposed to have been lighted above 1500 years.' Lemprière. See Browne, Vulgar Errors, iii. 21.
Page 141, l. 17. Help with your presence and devise to praise. I have dropped the comma after 'presence' because it suggests to us, though it did not necessarily do so to seventeenth-century readers, that 'devise' here is a verb—both Dr. Grosart and Mr. Chambers have taken it as such—whereas it is the noun 'device' = fancy, invention. Their fancy and invention is to be shown in the attiring of the bride:
Conceitedly dresse her, and be assign'd