ever to be commanded,
John Taylor.
FINIS.
[1] Provant.—Provender; provision.
[2] Fegary.—A vagary.
[3] Trundle.—i.e., John Trundle of the sign of No-body (see note page 6).
[4] It is reasonable to conjecture that at this date the custom of "Swearing-in at Highgate was not in vogue—or, No-body would have taken the oath.
[5] Named Lean and Fen.—Some jest is intended here on the Host's name.—Qy., Leanfen, or, the anagram of A. Fennel.
[6] No-Body was the singular sign of John Trundle, a ballad-printer in Barbican in the seventeenth century [and who seems to have accompanied our author as far as Whetstone on his "Penniless Pilgrimage"—and, certainly up to this point a very "wet" one!] In one of Ben Jonson's plays Nobody is introduced, "attyred in a payre of Breeches, which were made to come up to his neck, with his armes out at his pockets and cap drowning his face." This comedy was "printed for John Trundle and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican at the sygne of No-Body." A unique ballad, preserved in the Miller Collection at Britwell House, entitled "The Well-spoken No-body," is accompanied by a woodcut representing a ragged barefooted fool on pattens, with a torn money-bag under his arm, walking through a chaos of broken pots, pans, bellows, candlesticks, tongs, tools, windows, &c. Above him is a scroll in black-letter:—