[102] Vide cut at the head of this chapter.
[103] Loadstone.
[104] Op. Maj. edit. Jebb. 232.
[105] Halliwell’s Sir John Maundevile, p. 319.
[106] Succinct Account of Religions and Sects, sect. 4, No. 42.
[107] Some of the Greek coins of Sicily bear an impress of three legs conjoined, exactly similar to this fanciful charge, except that they are naked, and have at the point of conjunction a Mercury’s head.
[108] Dallaway.
[109] The flower of the ‘sword-grass, a kind of sedge.’ Dict.
[110] A work on the Fleur-de-Lis, in 2 vols. 8vo (!), was published in France in 1837.
[111] The following jest on the fleur-de-lis may amuse some readers. Sir William Wise “having lente to the King (Henry VIII) his signet to seale a letter, who having powdred eremites engrayl’d in the seale, [qy. ermine?—Several families of Wise bear this fur:] ‘Why, how now, Wise,’ quoth the King, ‘What? hast thou lice here?’ ‘And if it like your Majestie,’ quoth Sir William, ‘a louse is a rich coate, for, by giving the louse, I part armes with the French King, in that he giveth the floure de lice.’ Whereat the king heartily laugh’d, to heare how pretily so byting a taunt (namely, proceeding from a Prince,) was so sodaynely turned to so pleasaunte a conceyte.” (Stanihurst’s Hist. of Ireland in Holinshed’s Chron.) Nares thinks that Shakspeare, who is known to have been a reader of Holinshed, took his conceit of the ‘white lowses,’ which ‘do become an old coat well,’ in the Merry Wives of Windsor, from this anecdote. (Heraldic Anom. vol. i, p. 204.)