Pleas. Your hand, sweet moiety.
Wood. And heart too, my comfortable importance.
Mistress and wife, by turns, I have possessed:
He, who enjoys them both in one, is blessed.
Footnotes:
- The Mahommedan doctrine of predestination is well known. They reconcile themselves to all dispensations, by saying, "They are written on the forehead" of him, to whose lot they have fallen.
- The custom of drinking supernaculum, consisted in turning
down the cup upon the thumb-nail of the drinker after his pledge,
when, if duly quaffed off, no drop of liquor ought to appear upon
his nail.
- With that she set it to her nose,
- And off at once the rumkin goes;
- No drops beside her muzzle falling,
- Until that she had supped it all in:
- Then turning't topsey on her thumb,
- Says—look, here's supernaculum.
- Cotton's Virgil travestie.
- This custom seems to have been derived from the Germans, who held, that if a drop appeared on the thumb, it presaged grief and misfortune to the person whose health was drunk.
- This piece of dirty gallantry seems to have been fashionable:
- Come, Phyllis, thy finger, to begin the go round;
- How the glass in thy hand with charms does abound!
- You and the wine to each other lend arms,
- And I find that my love
- Does for either improve,
- For that does redouble, as you double your charms.
- Dapper, a silly character in Jonson's Alchemist, tricked by an astrologer, who persuades him the queen of fairies is his aunt.
- The mask, introduced in the first act of the Maid's Tragedy,
ends with the following dialogue betwixt Cinthia and Night:
- Cinthia Whip up thy team,
The day breaks here, and yon sun-flaring beam
Shot from the south. Say, which way wilt thou go? - Night. I'll vanish into mists.
- Cinthia. I into day.
- In spring 1677, whilst the treaty of Nimeguen was under discussion, the French took the three important frontier towns, Valenciennes, St Omer, and Cambray. The Spaniards seemed, with the most passive infatuation, to have left the defence of Flanders to the Prince of Orange and the Dutch.
- Alluding to the imaginary history of Pine, a merchant's clerk, who, being wrecked on a desert island in the South Seas, bestowed on it his own name, and peopled it by the assistance of his master's daughter and her two maid servants, who had escaped from the wreck by his aid.
- Sulli, the famous composer.
- It would seem that about this time the French were adopting their present mode of pronunciation, so capriciously distinct from the orthography.
- "Queen Dido, or the wandering Prince of Troy," an old ballad, printed in the "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," in which the ghost of queen Dido thus addresses the perfidious Æneas:
- Therefore prepare thy flitting soul,
- To wander with me in the air;
- When deadly grief shall make it howl,
- Because of me thou took'st no care.
- Delay not time, thy glass is run,
- Thy date is past, thy life is done.
- Pricking, in hare-hunting, is tracking the foot of the game by the eye, when the scent is lost.
- The facetious Tom Brown, in his 2d dialogue on Mr Bayes' changing his religion, introduces our poet saying,
- "Likewise he (Cleveland) having the misfortune to call that domestic animal a cock,
- The Baron Tell-clock of the night,
- I could never, igad, as I came home from the tavern, meet a watchman or so, but I presently asked him, 'Baron Tell-clock of the night, pr'ythee how goes the time?"
- Artemidorus, the sophist of Cnidos, was the soothsayer who prophesied the death of Cæsar. Shakespeare has introduced him in his tragedy of "Julius Cæsar."
- A common rendezvous of the rakes and bullies of the time; "For when they expected the most polished hero in Nemours, I gave them a ruffian reeking from Whetstone's Park." Dedication to Lee's "Princess of Cleves." In his translation of Ovid's "Love Elegies," Lib. II, Eleg. XIX. Dryden mentions, "an easy Whetstone whore."
EPILOGUE.
SPOKEN BY LIMBERHAM.
I beg a boon, that, ere you all disband,
Some one would take my bargain off my hand:
To keep a punk is but a common evil;
To find her false, and marry,—that's the devil.